Bhubaneswar: “This is quite a game, politics. There are no permanent enemies, and no permanent friends, only permanent interests,” said William Clay. As if testifying to the truth of this statement, the Naveen Patnaik-led Biju Janata Dal (BJD) and the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), currently the main opposition party in Odisha, seem set to revive their alliance that had collapsed ahead of the 2009 general elections.
Alliance talks gained momentum in the wake of Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s one-day visit to the state on March 5, during which he was seen holding chief minister Naveen Patnaik’s hand and exchanging pleasantries with him. Things started moving at a fast pace the very next day when senior state BJP leaders were called to Delhi and BJD leaders went into a huddle at Naveen Niwas, the official residence of the chief minister who has been the president of the regional party since its birth in 1997.
Reliable sources said that a formal announcement with regard to the alliance could be made in the next few days, most probably on March 12 when Union home minister and Modi’s right-hand man Amit Shah is likely to visit the state. “Only the seat-sharing arrangement has to be finalised. The BJP wants 13 out of Odisha’s 21 Lok Sabha seats and at least 54 assembly seats. This may not be acceptable to the BJD. Then there is the issue of seat selection, which could turn out to be trickier than it seems. Once these things are sorted out, a formal announcement will be made,” said a senior BJP leader who did not wish to be identified.
The BJD presently has 12 Lok Sabha members and accounts for 112 of the 147 seats in the state assembly. The BJP, on the other hand, holds eight Lok Sabha seats including all five in western Odisha, its traditional stronghold. With 22 seats in the state assembly, it also enjoys the honour of being the main opposition party, a title earlier held by the Congress which has now been reduced to just nine seats in the state assembly. The Congress holds just one Lok Sabha seat – Koraput – in southern Odisha.
With alliance and seat-sharing issues being discussed at the highest level, state leaders of both parties are being extremely cautious in their reactions. Speaking to local TV channels, senior BJD leader and former minister Debi Prasad Mishra tried to side-step the issue of an alliance. However, asked repeatedly about it after the meeting at Naveen Niwas, he vaguely remarked that “everything was discussed”.
Mixed emotions in the BJP
State BJP leaders have been more forthright while commenting on the issue. Former party MLA Pradeep Purohit not only admitted that the chances of a revival of the alliance between the two parties appeared bright, but also exuded confidence about the BJP gaining much more than the BJD from this. “If it happens, which seems almost certain, there will be a coalition government again and we will be back in power. Besides, it is almost certain that the BJP will win more assembly seats than it did in 2019. What is most important from our point of view is that all the 21 Lok Sabha MPs from the state will support the BJP-led government at the Centre,” said Purohit.
However, not all leaders of the party share his optimism and enthusiasm. Mohan Majhi, the party’s tribal face and its deputy leader in the state assembly, is apprehensive that the hard work the party cadre did in several constituencies for the last five years to strengthen the BJP’s base may go waste. “We cannot be sure if we will get those seats. The truth is we have been working over time to strengthen our position across the state. The BJD was our main enemy but now the whole equation is going to change. Though the central leadership’s decision has to be respected, there is no denying the anger among our workers as we are going to join hands with the party which had ditched us in 2009,” said Majhi.
Majhi, however, admitted that the BJP’s central leadership has its own compulsions. “Our slogan this time is abki baar, char sau paar (let’s cross the 400-seat mark this time). For this goal to be realised, we may have to make some compromises. We may need to revive old alliances and also win new allies. But it will be extremely difficult to convince the ordinary workers who have been working round the year for the growth of the party in the state,” said the leader. Most BJP leaders in the state, though unwilling to go on record at this juncture, share Majhi’s concerns about the possibility of a cadre rebellion in the state in the event of the BJD-BJP alliance being revived.
An alliance and a break up
There is no denying that the BJD-BJP alliance that came into existence in 1998, just a year after the formation of the regional party, was a marriage of convenience, as there was no ideological match between the two parties. The BJD, being a fledgling party, found it politically wise to join hands with the BJP, which was on the upswing at the time. The fact that Atal Bihari Vajpayee, whose liberal views made him acceptable across the political spectrum, was the top leader of the BJP made the decision of an alliance easier for the regional party which was named after Biju Patnaik, the father of Naveen and two-time chief minister of the state whose secular credentials were never in doubt.
The other important factor that dictated BJD’s choice of its ally was that it treated the Congress as its prime enemy right from the beginning. The BJD-BJP alliance also swept to power in Odisha in 2000 on an anti-Congress plank. The coalition had then sought to expose the corruption and inefficiency of the incumbent Congress government, which had completely mismanaged the relief and rehabilitation work in the wake of the 1999 super-cyclone which had devastated the entire coastal belt of Odisha, leaving more than 10,000 people dead and lakhs homeless.
So there could be no question of aligning with the Congress, and BJP became the ally of the regional party almost by default. The two-party coalition ran the state for nearly nine years, but the going was never completely smooth given their differences over a number of issues. Senior BJP leaders like former Union minister Jual Oram openly criticised the chief minister when the state government signed a memorandum of understanding with South Korean steel behemoth Pohang Steel Company (POSCO) for setting up a 12 million tonne capacity steel plant in Jagatsinghpur district and the company started eyeing iron ore reserves in Khandadhar which is part of Sundergarh, Oram’s Lok Sabha constituency.
State BJP leaders also detested Patnaik’s indifference towards them as he preferred to deal with their central party leaders. Things came to a head in the wake of the 2008 Kandhamal communal riots, which took a heavy toll on Patnaik’s secular image. Soon the chief minister realised that his alliance partner had become a liability and the coalition was becoming increasingly unsustainable. Though it is said that the 11-year-old BJD-BJP alliance collapsed ahead of the 2009 elections on the issue of seat sharing, it is an open secret that Patnaik had made up his mind to get rid of the BJP.
They contested the 2009 elections separately and the results made it more than obvious that all this time, the BJP had been piggyback-riding on the BJD in Odisha. While the BJD came to power with a comfortable majority, the BJP could win just six seats in the state’s 147-strong assembly. It drew a blank in the Lok Sabha. The 2014 elections saw the saffron party bagging 10 assembly seats and the lone Lok Sabha seat of Sundergarh.
Patnaik’s changing face in the Modi years
But 2014 marked a turning point in the relations between the BJD and BJP. With the BJP-led NDA coming to power at the Centre with a full majority, Patnaik’s relations with the central BJP leadership, especially Prime Minister Narendra Modi, improved substantially. The chief minister realised the importance of having a friendly Centre to ensure the development of the state. Even though he followed an avowed policy of maintaining equidistance from the BJP and Congress, he supported the NDA government on several crucial issues inside the parliament.
For instance, the BJD backed the controversial Mines and Minerals (Development and Regulation) Amendment Bill, 2015 and helped the NDA get it passed in the Rajya Sabha where the BJP lacked the numbers. Patnaik was also among the first chief ministers of the country to welcome demonetisation, a move which faced criticism across the country. He also extended support to the controversial Goods and Services Tax (GST) when it was facing flak from several quarters.
The trend continued and by the time the next elections arrived, it was more or less clear that the policy of “equidistance” was nothing but a façade which was becoming increasingly hard to defend. During NDA’s second term under Modi, the BJD’s support for the government at the Centre was even more obvious, with the party backing it on controversial issues like the scrapping of Article 370 and passage of the triple talaq and Citizenship Amendment Bills. All this was done on the excuse of protecting either national interest or state interest.
It was a mutually convenient arrangement, with Patnaik getting generous financial assistance from the Centre in the wake of disastrous cyclones such as Fani which devastated a large part of the state’s coastal belt. The prime minister, too, found it convenient to cultivate regional satraps like Patnaik whose support he needed in the parliament, especially in the Rajya Sabha.
The need being mutual, the bond between the two leaders soon became stronger and they refrained from criticising each other even at election rallies, though their parties happened to be rivals in state politics. This embarrassed the state BJP leaders no end, but the central party leadership couldn’t care less. The occasional attacks made on the Patnaik government by leaders like Amit Shah during their visits to the state appeared to be more for public consumption. Now even that has stopped.
With elections around the corner, political expediency has once again taken precedence over principles and both the parties look almost set to join hands. While the BJP needs BJD’s support mainly to ensure that its Lok Sabha tally in the state goes up, which is crucial for the party to better its 2019 record if not to actually realise the goal of 400 seats, the BJD is keen to retain its hold on the state so that Patnaik actualises the dream of becoming the chief minister of the state for the sixth time in a row, a record in itself. If sources are to be believed, a tacit understanding between the top leadership of the two parties has been reached and seat sharing arrangement will be worked out accordingly.
With both the parties out to defend their mutual interests, a marriage of convenience is once again on the cards. As political analyst Shashi Kant Mishra put it, “This could be embarrassing for the ordinary cadres of the two parties but their top leaders will be quite brazen about it. Jettisoning principles is a small sacrifice to make when bigger interests are involved.”
Ashutosh Mishra is an Odisha-based journalist.
