On June 4, as India eagerly followed the 2024 General Elections results to make sense of the mandate, a silent but significant political upset in Odisha left many stunned. Naveen Patnaik’s Biju Janata Dal (BJD) was defeated by the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) in the Assembly elections, drawing curtains to an illustrious near-quarter-century-old reign.

This also put a question mark on the path ahead for the vulnerable state. It took the saffron party a week to come up with a chief ministerial candidate. Defence Minister and former BJP president Rajnath Singh had to fly down from Delhi to shepherd 78 newly elected legislators to draw up a name.

They chose Mohan Charan Majhi, a 52-year-old Santhal leader from Keonjhar, to replace Patnaik. Majhi is hardly known outside the state — in line with the trend of BJP picking relatively non-heavyweight chief ministers in Madhya Pradesh, Rajasthan and Chhattisgarh last winter.

Earlier CMs like Shivraj Singh Chouhan, Vasundhara Raje and Raman Singh had grown in stature to a point where they were perceived to be potential challengers to Prime Minister Narendra Modi.

The new chief minister is a four-time MLA and has roots in the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS), BJP’s ideological fountainhead. Along with him, two deputy CMs are also scheduled to be sworn in on June 12: Senior leader Kanak Vardhan Singh Deo and first-time MLA Pravati Parida.

Odisha, along with Andhra Pradesh, Arunachal and Sikkim, elect their legislators along with parliamentarians. It was Patnaik who had started the practice when he dissolved the state Assembly in 2004, a year ahead of completing his first term. It was supposed to be to make holding elections cheaper.

A section of political observers had also thought that this could have been to ride the ‘India Shining’ wave. The BJD was part of the wider National Democratic Alliance (NDA), led by Atal Bihari Vajpayee. The results, of course, were famously against expectations and opinion polls. But while most of the NDA had it rough, Patnaik sailed into his second term smoothly.

He has been a strong supporter of the ‘One Nation One Election’ agenda of the Narendra Modi regime. In that too, many found a tactical reasoning: Simultaneous polls would mean national parties like the BJP and the Congress would be too preoccupied with the parliamentary elections to focus on ousting him.

Now, though, it seems he ended up queering the pitch for the BJD, the party he founded and named after his father.

Odisha, along with West Bengal, was among those states in which the BJP has been looking to increase its presence. The saffron party knew that it had reached points of saturation (or near to that) in several states in the 2019 Lok Sabha elections.

Case in point: In 2019, it had won all seats in Gujarat, Haryana, Uttarakhand and Himachal Pradesh. In Rajasthan, the only other party to win a seat was its partner Rashtriya Loktantrik Party.

In Uttar Pradesh, Team Modi won 62 of the 80 available seats, with Apna Dal (S) adding two more. The BJP bagged all but one of Madhya Pradesh’s 29 seats; 25 of Karnataka’s 28; and nine each in Assam (of 14) and Chhattisgarh (of 11).

The NDA won all but one seat in Bihar (40 seats) while among Maharashtra’s 58, only seven remained outside its fold as did two in Jharkhand (of 14).

Room for growth thus existed only in the two eastern states apart from those in the south, which have mostly held out against saffronisation.

In Odisha, it had won a substantial eight seats (of 21) in 2019 and the Congress managed the lone Koraput seat, which it has retained this time too. The BJD had the remaining 12 — a substantial chunk, but way below the 20 it won in 2014, in the face of Modi’s ascent to power.

The BJP’s focus paid off and it will now represent 20 Odisha constituencies in Parliament. Also, perhaps as a corollary to this runaway success, it now has 78 members in the 147-seat state legislature.

Naveen’s BJD has been reduced to 51 — along with being washed away from Lok Sabha — while the Congress has 14, five more than in the outgoing Vidhan Sabha. For the first time, the BJP has the numbers to form the government in Bhubaneswar. And going by the signs, it is as shocked as anybody else.

“Even finding 147 candidates was not easy for the BJP,” a veteran journalist from the state said. In 2022, the BJD had swept the Panchayat polls, winning all 30 district boards and 766 of 852 Zilla Parishad seats, adding to its aura of invincibility.

“Even BJP workers here can’t believe that they have won the state,” a civil society member from Sambalpur said.

For many people who follow the state closely, the BJD (read Patnaik) lost the election more than the BJP won it. And almost all have a name to blame: V. K. Pandian.

This 50-year-old former bureaucrat was once quite popular with the civil society of Odisha and commanded a go-getter image. Of late, however, he has been seen as an alternate power centre who was monopolising access to CM Patnaik.

“Forget the civil society, even BJD leaders found it difficult to reach the CM without his authorization,” a source said. Other bureaucrats would typically not want to act upon petitions or requests without an approval by “Pandian sir”.

This was not always the case. For more than a decade, Pandian collected kudos from both political workers of varying hues, as well as activists and common citizens during his stints at several districts across Odisha as well as in Bhubaneswar.

He has been credited with making government more accessible at the ground level and his push for ‘5T governance’ (transparency, technology, teamwork and time leading to transformation) has been much talked about.

All through, he kept gaining Patnaik’s trust, becoming his personal secretary and eventually resigning from the civil services (at only 50) to join the BJD and started being talked about as the CM’s potential heir.

Naveen Patnaik has never married nor has he ever projected anybody from his extended family as his political successor, unlike several regional satraps — especially those who formed or controlled splinters of the erstwhile ‘Janata parivaar’.

A section within the party initially played this down, recalling how in the past other politicians favoured by the party supremo tried to fly too high only to have their wings clipped eventually by him. But the picture changed when the CM was perceived to be bestowing him with more importance than elected representatives or party functionaries.

At the same time, there were concerns about Patnaik’s dwindling health and limited public appearances. “In the last five years, we could hardly see him at any event,” said one civil society member.

The change in Patnaik’s style of governance was clear. For many, it was too much, even considering factors like his age and health as well as the challenges that arose from the COVID pandemic.

“The feedback loop within the party was broken due to Pandian; outside it, the civil society was gradually pushed away,” the aforementioned source said. The same civil society had worked closely with the government on many fronts, even while locking horns with it over Patnaik’s policies related to mining and environment, until 2016-17.

The BJP identified this shift correctly and was quick to move in as the elections were announced. “Initially, Pandian tried to facilitate talks between the two parties for an alliance. But when those broke down, he himself came into the BJP’s crosshairs,” a journalist based in western Odisha said.

“As it is, Patnaik was being perceived as soft towards the Modi government in the Centre. In the minds of many voters, it was better to vote directly for the BJP in Lok Sabha than eventually helping it via BJD,” he added.

On its part, the saffron party made a big deal of Pandian’s proximity to Patnaik, alleging that he was “controlling” the CM from behind the scenes. PM Modi went to the extent of promising a “probe” into this after the elections. Attacking Pandian’s non-Odia identity, Modi promised to install “a person belonging to Odisha” if given a chance.

“The BJP’s promises, like increasing paddy support prices, also clicked with the voters. The BJD strangely failed to bring in counter proposals,” said senior journalist Priya Ranjan Sahu.

Triangular contests also helped the BJP. In 32 Assembly seats, the winning margin was below 5,000 votes. In another 31, it was within 10,000.

“Some level of fatigue had set in among the voters after five terms of Naveen rule. They also wanted to deliver a message over Pandian,” said an observer with a Delhi-based think tank.

“But even the voters had not imagined that the mandate would go to this extent. After the reality sank in, there was an outpour of sympathy for Naveenbabu on social media,” he added.

“Except in the last few years, the BJD government set a benchmark on how to connect government policy to the ground level. Naveen Patnaik’s intelligence and passion has been exemplary,” Preeti Prada, a public policy expert in the urban space said.

The BJP indeed has a tough act to follow. “It will be under pressure to deliver. Identifying the correct leadership will not be easy. The party has to understand local sentiments,” Prada said, drawing attention to the state’s wide mix of population over diverse geographies.

Already, there have been murmurs over the long wait for a CM. A controversy broke out when Odisha BJP chief Manmohan Samal said last week that the state’s Biju Swasthya Kalyan Yojana would be discontinued to bring in the Centre’s Ayushman Bharat. Chief Secretary P. K. Jena had to intervene and assure that was not the case.

Dharmendra Pradhan, seen as close to Modi, was widely talked about as a frontrunner. But Pradhan and Jual Oram — India’s first minister for tribal affairs (under Vajpayee) — were inducted into the Union Cabinet on Sunday.

“It hardly expected to win in the Assemblies. That’s why it fielded all the big names like Jay Panda, Sambit Patra, Bhartruhari Mahtab and Aparajita Sarangi for Lok Sabha,” noted one observer.

To make any of them resign now would mean to face a risky byelection, given the new wave of sympathy for Patnaik. As it is, the BJP has fallen short of majority in the lower house and it may not like to jeopardise its position further. A defeat would also be bad optics.

Another name that has been in circulation is that of Comptroller and Auditor General of India Girish Chandra Murmu, who is from Mayurbhanj. But a non-political appointee at the top may work against a new government. “Nobody wants one gomastha-raj to be replaced by another,” a senior journalist said, referring to Pandian’s control still being fresh in people’s memory.

Indian agents of the East India Company were called ‘gomasthas’, a term now pejoratively connected to overreaching babus.

That would narrow the choice down to the BJP’s newly elected legislators or Samal. Some think, former MP Suresh Pujari may be an acceptable choice. He has won from Brajrajnagar in Jharsuguda district. This is, however, his maiden Vidhan Sabha stint.

The BJD, meanwhile, is in a state of flux over its future. Pandian has announced retirement from politics even though his photos remained proudly featured on BJD’s official website.

Last week, the arrival of Arun Patnaik, son of Naveen elder brother Prem, and him being received at the airport by BJD organisational secretary Pranab Prakash Das, set off speculations over succession.

Das himself will be among several frontrunners to lead the party despite losing to Dharmendra Pradhan from Sambalpur. Many have faulted Pandian for restricting Das to one seat rather than utilising him to campaign widely.

Then there is Bijoy Mahapatra, once considered bête noire of Naveen Patnaik within BJD, who was recently expelled by the BJP before for campaigning for his son Arvind who contested and won from Patkura on a BJD ticket.

Bijoy had represented the seat for two decades, taking it over from Biju Patnaik in 1980 when the stalwart had to vacate the seat to represent Kendrapara in Parliament.

Meanwhile, political circles are abuzz with a meeting at the house of senior Congress leader Srikant Jena, who recently returned to the Grand Old Party after running a “non-political” social justice platform Samajika Nyay Abhijan for five years.

He is seen as close to a section of the BJD, which has given rise to a possibility of closer coordination between the two in a post-Naveen scenario.

“There is room for Congress to grow now,” said a Delhi-based observer adding, “It still has currency among a section of the tribals and this time it even drew support from many scheduled caste voters.”

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