Orissa chief minister riding high on MOUs

Do you know of an elected chief minister who does not speak the language of the state?

No, this is not a quiz. It is a fact that chief minister Navin Patnaik cannot talk in Oriya. And the gullible people of Orissa have elected him for the second five-year term. If there were elections today — he might go for the mid-term polls within a year — he would sail through comfortably.

Does it mean that he is indispensable or does it mean that people have made themselves dispensable?

The latter is true. A short visit to Bhubaneswar, the state's capital, has not given me the full answer.

But I have got an explanation of sorts. Belonging to a state, tucked on the eastern coast of India, Orissa longs for attention.

The late Biju Patnaik, Navin's father, was a dynamic chief minister who built a big steel plant, a modern port and a few other projects.

People still remember him not because he in anyway improved their lot but because they came to be noticed in the rest of India and even foreign countries.

Exploiting his father's name, Navin founded a party: Biju Janata Dal. With no other legacy except the sentiment, Navin's venture worked. He won a majority in the state assembly.

Navin's political career is short. But he continues to catch the imagination of the Oriyas by announcing the entry of multinationals.

He is signing an MOU (memorandum of understanding) with one company or the other practically every week. Therefore, he has been nicknamed as Mr. MOU.

He has very little to show on the ground in terms of achievements. But he is selling dreams which people are lapping up.

Biju's undoing was his dishonesty. A special commission, headed by Supreme Court judge H.R. Khanna, found him guilty of corruption and misuse of power.

Navin has been careful. His reputation is that of a clean person. He has had dealings with several firms, foreign and Indian. But there is no charge of accepting any pecuniary gain against him.

The allegation that all deals are being finalised at Delhi, where his brother lives, is persistent. But it is only an allegation, which has not hurt Navin very much. He may one day meet his father's fate whose travel to fame was so fast that it took public men some time to catch up with his misdeeds.

Some well-meaning persons are accumulating material against Navin. The Congress, his main opponent, is trying to use the Right to Information Act for this purpose.

He is fortunate that he has no tall person to challenge him in Orissa. State Congress president Jayadev Jena is pigmy. The party has a formidable person in former chief minister Janaki Ballabh Patnaik. But he is too tainted to be taken seriously for the allegations he makes. The party itself is so hopelessly divided that one leader is busy pulling down the other.

In contrast, Biju had men of repute to oppose him. Among them were Hari Krishan Mehtab, who had been a central minister, governor and state chief minister and the legendary editor Radha Nath Rath, also once a minister. They cut him down to size. He fell from the grace of even Jawaharlal Nehru who had lionised him.

Navin is not a popular figure. Nor does he address public meetings. The Oriyas are irritated over the lack of direct contact with the chief minister. But they have a temperament which does not get upset easily.

The Oriyas either rise in revolt in lakhs or they let their anger simmer. Emperor Ashok had to kill 10 lakhs of them before he could subdue them. But the butchery also made him bid farewell to arms. This is the reason why the protest against foreign companies which propose to appropriate Orissa's mineral resources is limited.

Occasionally, a few NGOs go on hunger strike in protest. But they fail to get attention. Even otherwise, the South Korean company which is setting up a steel plan is yet to get the lease of any iron ore mine. As many as 45 steel plants are in the queue. They have made a common cause: iron ore should not be exported, something which the South Korean company is said to be doing.

One estimate is that half of the known iron ore reserves, 9,300 million tons, are already exhausted. Besides iron ore, the agricultural land, forests and water resources in the region are doomed and thousands of people are being uprooted.

People are also raising their voice against the low royalty the state gets. It is Rs. 24 per ton against the market price of Rs. 2,800. (Incidentally, the Tatas, reported to be most liberal in the corporate sector, pay only Rs 11 per ton for its Jamshedpur steel plant.)

The Oriyas are currently talking about yet another multinational which has announced to set up the Vedanta University over an area of 10,000 acres. Must be a city!

The multinational's real purpose is to establish an aluminium plant at Kalahandi where Orissa's other mineral wealth, bauxite, is concentrated.

The university has been thrown in to make the project attractive. There are many projects based on either iron ore or the bauxite in the offing.

Foreign exchange of thousands of crores of rupees has already been pumped in, enough to make Orissa the highest earner of foreign exchange. Still, the plight of the people has remained the same. Nor has the state shown any sign of prosperity. Patient as the people of Orissa are, they are waiting the much-needed improvement in their living conditions. From the perennial deficit Kalahandi to the Vedanta University or other projects is quite a change.

But what does it mean in real terms? True, Navin does not speak Oriya but he is conscious of the Oriyas' miserable conditions.
It looks the bureaucrats are having the best of both worlds. They know the state language, Oriya, and they also know that the chief minister is too dependent on them. One thing good about Orissa is that caste and communalism do not count in the state.