How did the BJD lose? Was it Odia Asmita hitting back against the outsider? No. Asmita became a full-blown talking point quite late in Odisha’s electoral discourse. It was more of a force-multiplier, amplifying the general mood of resentment against the party.
There was resentment but not many really gauged the range and depth of it. That is one reason why hardly any exit poll or expert opinion – discount that of the loyalists and sympathisers of the opposition – predicted a straightforward defeat for the party.
How did the resentment come about? For a trickle to become a wave there has to be something more than what meets the eye. If one goes by the yardstick of performance, there was apparently not much to fault the government with. It had done well in the areas of disaster management, sports, rural and urban infrastructure and livelihood. This assessment of performance is always subjective, but the fact is money was flowing to a wide range of target groups through several schemes and projects. Naveen Patnaik was popular. Macro issues such as the state of the economy, industrialisation etc, as we have discussed in another article, are largely irrelevant for the ordinary voter. So what went wrong?
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The sign of the mood turning against the BJD was visible when school and college students were forced to attend the rallies of VK Pandian, the bureaucrat-turned-politician who ran the state as the proxy chief minister. It was many months before the elections and Pandian was on a whirlwind tour of the state, distributing funds to educational institutions. Mothers in villages were appalled when school and college authorities packed young boys and girls in buses to the venue, making them wait for hours for Pandian to arrive. Food packets were distributed to them but it didn’t make parents happy.
“Why must our children be treated this way?” said one mother in Dhenkanal. “Is Pandian distributing his father’s money?” she added, obviously angry.
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Teachers in colleges and schools were not happy either. They were ordered to make arrangements for good attendance at such rallies. Also, they were displeased how the money granted was designed to reach pockets of the party faithful. They had accountability but actual decision-making rested with the bureaucracy.
No political party, howsoever powerful, can hurt mothers and teachers and get away with it. Bureaucratic arrogance had touched wrong people. There had to be repercussion. It shows in the results.
At another level it was the Kafkasque scenario at the level of government and governance. Just check this out:
Chief minister: inaccessible; proxy chief minister: inaccessible; coterie assisting the proxy chief minister: inaccessible; people’s representatives: inconsequential; normal bureaucratic channel: inconsequential.
The relationship between power and people had gone impersonal and distant. And it was piling up anti-incumbency points.
There is only one person who must shoulder the blame. No it’s not the usual suspect VK Pandian. For the most part he was a bureaucrat carrying out orders. When he assumed a full-fledged political role, he neither had the experience nor the capability for it. He sought to take a bureaucratic approach to politics. It was destined to not work. If someone has to take responsibility for the defeat, it has to be party chief Naveen Patnaik. He cannot now shift the blame to someone who carried out his orders. The leader in him must stand up and accept!
