Across towns and villages of western Odisha, people have been trying to make sense of the BJD and the BJP’s electoral campaigns, locked in an apparently no-holds-barred fight for regional power. This has happened less than two months after they seemed to be on the verge of a pre-election agreement that would have virtually sealed the fate of the state for the next five years even before a single vote was cast.

Now, it has rapidly become one of the most high-pitched battles of the remaining phases of the electoral contest, not the least because the assembly elections for the mineral-rich state are also being held simultaneously. Five-time chief minister Naveen Patnaik may be in for the most serious challenge to his leadership in decades.

As his car trails the narrow, zig-zag streets of old Sambalpur on the way to a roadshow and a campaign meeting, Union Education Minister Dharmendra Pradhan feigns ignorance about the alliance plans. “We (the BJP and the BJD) have been fighting with each other at the political level for the last three elections. Due to a lack of governance and a lack of vision, people are unhappy with the incumbent government and its leadership. People want a change,” he claims.

Pradhan, the most high-profile face of the BJP in Odisha, has returned to the state after a gap of more than two decades, having served as a Rajya Sabha member from Bihar and Madhya Pradesh from 2012 to 2024, and holding important portfolios in Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s cabinet.

When Modi began his Odisha campaign on May 6 from Berhampur by saying the state “needs a chief minister who understands Odia language and culture”—an unmistakable jibe at Patnaik’s long-documented struggles with the language—all eyes turned to Pradhan, who has been tasked with mobilising the party from its traditional stronghold of western Odisha. Soon, the Odia identity question, and the apparent real or perceived “outsourcing” of governance to bureaucrat-turned-politician VK Pandian had become the main poll pitch in the state.

“The chief minister failed to nominate a single Odia person, out of 4.5 crore Odias, as his successor. He has chosen an outsider, a bureaucrat. Some compulsion may have been there. People are not accepting this model. A proxy cannot run the system,” Pradhan says, hours before attacking Pandian again during the public meeting, responding to the latter’s allegations of neglect by the central government.

“The chief secretary of the state has not met the CM in the last six months. The director general of police has not met him after his appointment. No secretaries are permitted to take orders and instructions from the chief minister. Not a single cabinet minister is permitted to get into his room,” Pradhan alleges in his chat with Outlook. The “outsider” and “proxy” tags seem to have resonated with the people, at least in the urban pockets of western Odisha, which accounted for five of the BJP’s total eight MPs in the last elections.

Even in rural parts of the Bargarh constituency, about 100 km away from the district headquarters, a group of farmers seem to have caught on to the argument, despite asserting that farmers’ issues have been left aside by all the parties. “This issue—of an Odia-speaking CM—has come up from among the common people. It is not just the BJP’s issue. If the chief minister of the state does not understand the issues of the common people and their language, how can that work?” asks Ramesh Mahapatra, a leader of Samyukta Kisan Krishak Sangathan, a farmers’ body, at a village in Bargarh.

Pandian has increasingly become the face of the BJD’s campaign. Rumours of 77-year-old Patnaik’s ill health have only intensified after he released a video in response to Modi’s speech claiming that the CM would be unable to even recite the “capitals” of the districts in the state. As Patnaik reminded Modi of his duties and promises towards Odisha, speaking in halting Odia, his voice appeared feeble and husky.

The poll fever reaches its highest pitch on the morning of May 17, as Patnaik is set to appear in one of his first rallies in the region. Anticipation mounts over the veteran leader’s response to the near-personal assault on his and Pandian’s leadership.

A massive cut-out of Pandian and Patnaik standing side-by-side overlooks around 7,000-8,000 people gathered in the stifling heat. After hours of loud music and performances hailing the government, the CM arrives to a roar. An anchor shouts himself hoarse, cheering the leader on, and Patnaik moves slowly to the dais. Pandian is right by his side as he speaks, holding the microphone in a gesture symbolic of their relationship. The BJD supremo utters half-sentences in Odia—Did you receive the benefits of the so-and-so scheme? And the crowd is orchestrated to answer “yes.”

After around five minutes of this “speech,” the CM moves back to his chair and leans back. He soon disappears from the stage for a five-minute break as Pandian holds forth in Odia, not fluent but well-versed. The former bureaucrat limits himself to attacking Pradhan, without taking his name, addressing him as “the minister” and accusing him of crying crocodile tears.

The crowd’s response to his questions—on what the central government had done for the Sambalpuri language, the region’s weavers and its historical figures—is much more tepid. After rattling off the government’s contributions to the region, including a multi-million-dollar tourism project for the Samaleswari Temple, Pandian asserts that it would not be him who would answer the slights levelled by the BJP against the “dear chief minister” but rather the people of Sambalpur (through their votes).

There are no other speakers, before or after the CM and the “5T chairman”, (head of a NITI Aayog-like body based on Transparency, Teamwork, Technology, Timeliness leading to Transformation) as Pandian is known, except a few words of welcome by the Sambalpur Lok Sabha candidate Pranab Prakash Das. A woman leader, a district council member, is cut short by loud music as Patnaik and Pandian move off the stage towards their cars. The entire thing lasts barely 20 minutes, and local journalists are left disappointed. As chairs empty out quickly, the journalists surround a local BJD leader and say: “Sir, this was hardly a campaign meeting, nobody spoke.” He responds defensively that he had been slated to speak, and an entire list of speakers had been prepared, but “it was ruled out.”

“Pandian functions as a one-man show. Local politicians never speak on the stage, and generally do not even sit on the stage when he is there,” says Saroj Mohanty, an activist based in Sambalpur, and the convener of the Pashchim Odisha Kisan Samanvay Samiti (Western Odisha Farmers’ Coordination Committee).

Patnaik has always been a CM who has trusted bureaucrats to run the day-to-day governance, based on populist welfare schemes and attracting investment through mining and industry. The trend started with former principal secretary Pyarimohan Mohapatra, who helped Patnaik ascend the party and state leadership in the year 2000 and is seen as the architect of some key welfare schemes that cemented “Naveen Babu’s” popularity in a rural state that suffered from widespread poverty.

Mohapatra, who was instrumental in the BJD formally parting ways with the BJP ahead of the 2009 Assembly polls, having become confident of winning on its own, was expelled in 2012 after trying to stage a coup against Patnaik and eventually rece-ded into political oblivion. Pandian, appointed as the private secretary to the CM in 2011, gained prominence in 2019 when he was appointed as secretary of 5T (the transformational initiative), a body that seems to have a say in most official work.

The BJD chief’s popularity and longevity stems from schemes such as the one to provide rice to the poor for Rs 2/kg, launched before the 2009 elections, which was later reduced to Re 1/kg in 2013. Similarly, Mission Shakti, a project launched in 2013 to offer affordable credit to women self-help groups (SHGs), not only cemented the CM’s popularity among women, it established a state-wide machinery that doubled up as BJD grass root mobilisers.

“Mission Shakti created a network of 1-1.5 crore women. It empowered them economically and gave them incentives. More importantly, it exposed them to the world and established a market for them. Earlier, there was no market. So, when the BJD built a supply chain and a market for these women producers, they became Naveen’s silent vote bank,” explains Bhubaneswar-based writer and political analyst Kedar Mishra.

He is the only chief minister whose vote share goes up every election, and went past 50 per cent in the last panchayat and municipality elections, Mishra emphasises. Defeating him seems difficult, if not impossible, he adds, listing disaster management as another key to the leader’s success in a state routinely hit by cyclones and floods.

As Mishra describes the economic turnaround under Patnaik, with the state economy growing more than ten-fold in two decades, the question of where the money is coming from looms over the conversation. The short answer can be summed up in one word—mining. The chief secretary of Odisha disclosed last year that revenue from the mining sector had gone up to nearly Rs 50,000 crore in 2021-22, up from Rs 4,900 crore in 2016-17. It has fuelled the contribution of the industrial sector to the Gross State Domestic Product (GSDP) to one-third, with 7-10 per cent being contributed by mining alone.

Unsurprisingly, nine out of the top 10 donors in the BJD’s impressive electoral bond kitty of around Rs 770 crore were revealed to be from the mining sector. In Sambalpur, the battle between Pradhan and his main opponent Pranab Prakash Das, the organising secretary of the BJD and seen as the party’s third most prominent leader after Patnaik and Pandian, is not just over control over the seat of western Odisha’s culture and psyche, but also on the lucrative mining business in the area, claims Mohanty.

Last year in January, the region was rocked by the high-profile murder of Odisha’s health minister Naba Kishore Das, the MLA from the Jharsuguda assembly constituency, an area that accounts for a large chunk of the region’s coal and bauxite reserves. Even though the murder, carried out by a former police officer, was attributed to a personal grudge by the investigative agencies, allegations of a wider conspiracy and links to the mining industry have refused to die down.

Even as mining dominates both the overt and covert politics of the state, farmers, once the backbone of the state economy and considered the strongest political bloc in western Odisha, have been feeling increasingly marginalised. “There is no profit anymore in farming. We keep doing it because there is no alternative,” says Tejraj Barik, a farmer from Bargarh’s Sarkanda village. He lists the lack of irrigation and rising electricity bills as problems that have thrown the region’s farmers—mostly dependent on paddy—into distress.

“We do not have a single mandi where farmers are able to sell their paddy for a fair price. The middlemen end up dictating terms. The government does have a Minimum Support Price (MSP) purchase mechanism but it has been made so complex that farmers are unable to use it,” alleges Hara Bania, the district general secretary of the Jai Kisan Andolan, Bargarh.

In a rally in Bargarh on May 11, the prime minister announced that the BJP would offer Rs 3,100 per quintal as MSP for paddy, immediately drawing the attention of the farmers. In response, the BJD soon said it would waive personal electricity bills up to 100 units. However, Bania questioned the central government on not hiking the national paddy MSP beyond the current Rs 2,183 and putting the onus on the state governments.

On the other hand, Ramesh Mahapatra, and his comrades in the Padmapur block of the district, assert that the prime minister’s promise would help the BJP gain more support in the area which has historically witnessed massive farmers’ movements on the issues of irrigation through the Hirakud Dam and fair prices for crops.

Even as the narrative seems to shift over Pandian, Odia identity and paddy prices, analysts warn that it may be too soon to write off Patnaik, who successfully saw off a similarly aggressive campaign by the BJP in the last elections, where western Odisha saw many people voting for the BJP in Parliament while sticking to the BJD in the Assembly polls.

“In villages, people do not even know who Pandian is. This is an urban narrative. There is no fatigue, no anger towards Naveen even after 24 years in power. And the art of taking people to the booths is known only to the BJD. Even the last time, the so-called BJP wave was strong, especially after the Pulwama attack, but it did not result in much,” says Mishra.

He asserts that once the elections are over, any government at the Centre would probably need to come knocking at Patnaik’s door to secure a majority, and so, even the apparent BJP tirade against the BJD has strategic undercurrents. His argument appears to have some merit, as BJP President JP Nadda cancelled his campaign events in Kantabanji and Hinjili constituencies, from where Patnaik is in the fray.

The Congress, which has suffered from a lack of funds and inefficient candidate selection in the state, also appears to have toned down its rhetoric against Patnaik in the state as the campaign progresses. In his only second election rally in Odisha in Balangir, Rahul Gandhi limited himself to alleging that PM Modi worked for a handful of corporates while staying silent on Patnaik and Pandian. Locals said that the Congress campaign had failed to utilise Gandhi’s appeal in constituencies like Balasore and Koraput, where they had a chance, as the state leadership remained mired in internal scuffles. As we go to press, the state unit announced a possible visit by Gandhi to Balasore.

“In order to fight elections, the BJP has to say some things, rake up some issues. In my opinion, this is just for show. Reading between the lines, it is a case of ‘no matter who wins, we will have support’ (at the Centre),” says Mishra, who has been travelling across the state to monitor elections. He ends up describing the power play as “shadow boxing.”

Hundreds of kilometres away in the Niyamgiri mountains, spread across the Rayagada and Kalahandi districts, four villages of the Dangaria Kondh tribe have called for a boycott of the elections, citing the arrest of locals over alleged Maoist links and the government pursuing mining projects in the nearby mountains. This is happening despite the Supreme Court’s landmark judgment in 2013 that scrapped UK-based Vedanta Group’s mining project in Niyamgiri that threatened to displace thousands of villagers and allowed gram sabhas to decide the fate of the mine.

Nonetheless, as we come down the mountain, we see a queue of Adivasi villagers outside the local polling station on May 13. Agents of a local party are trying to explain symbols to members of the particularly vulnerable tribal group outside the booth. Voting here remained rooted in local factors and leaders, as villages closer to the main road, and thereby the mainstream, did not join the boycott. 

The cash flow from mining, which has helped fund populist schemes in the state, has largely suppressed questions of environment, sustainability and displacement of local communities, with the BJD government pursuing a development model similar to that of the Centre—focused on highways, urban infrastructure and even temple redevelopment projects in Puri, Bhubaneswar (Lingaraj Temple) and Sambalpur.

At the same time, poverty, rural distress and massive economic inequality have continued to haunt the people and led to migration. The state’s new-found prosperity is mainly reflected in its urban pockets, as in the rest of the country.

“The BJP-BJD’s political and economic policies are similar. The BJD has supported the central government in key moments of central politics. It never takes a stand (against the Centre). Odisha’s people are faced with just contradictions and travesties. No matter who wins, they have no solution for their woes,” rues Mohanty.

(This appeared in the print as 'Shell Company?')

Iqbal Abhimanyu in Sambalpur, Bargarh, Kalahandi