SP NANDA*

“Taahele kahari uprare kahari bharasha rahiba nahin” (Then, it will be loss of each other’s dependability)

Janaki Ballabh Parnaik, the Chief Minister, had told me this when the Anjana Mishra-Indrajit Roy scandal had begun making headlines in early 1999.

Janakibabu had sought my personal view, more as a political observer than as a reporting journalist, on how to handle the situation arising out of Anjana’s allegation that she was called by Indrajit to his Advocate General’s quarters in Cuttack and was forced to sexual abuse.

I suggested Janakibabu, “You please ask Bultu (Indrajit’s nickname) to step down, and if and when the charge against him is proved false he may be reinstated.”

But Janakibabu spoke about the question of inter-dependability. I then warned him, “The issue is very sensitive and it is going to snowball into a big scandal to threaten your present regime which has so far been free from any major blemish.”

Janakibabu, who felt convinced that the allegation against Indrajit was cooked up, ended up this round of our telephonic talks, saying, “Let law take its own course.”

And what was expected kept happening. Anjana Mishra’s charge ultimately emerged true and cost Janakibabu his third term as the CM in an inglorious manner. Janakibabu paid the heavy price of his undue indulgence in his relations with Indrajit.

The day Janakibabu returned from Delhi after talks with the Congress high command and straight headed for the Raj Bhavan and submitted his resignation, he called me over phone when I was in my office. Before I wanted to say I was sad over the event, he said, “Saradababu, you were right. Ok, what has happened has happened.”

So, Janakibabu had to lose his precious throne for the sake of his younger “dependable” friend Indrajit, who is alas also no more.

When he told me that I was right, he also hinted at another factor that I had warned him about. In the beginning of his last tenure as the CM, he had asked my observation about the composition of his Cabinet with two Deputy Chief Ministers, Basant Kumar Biswal and Hemanand Biswal. I had told him that he was understandably compelled to take in two Deputy CMs, but he should keep the overambitious Basant Biswal under leash so as not to pose a threat to his leadership in future. He agreed with me but was not serious as was borne out by subsequent developments. It was Basant Biswal who, obviously to succeed Janakibabu as the CM, played a key role in aggravating the Anjana-Indrajit issue. It was another matter that Biswal could not be the CM as the party high command decided Giridhar Gamang as the replacement.

It perhaps needs mention as to why Janakibabu was holding me in confidence. Without any intention to blow my own trumpet, I was the sole scribe who had predicted in the newspaper I was working for at that time that the Congress, then led by JB Patnaik, would achieve a majority in the Assembly in the 1995 elections toppling the Biju Patnaik-headed Janata Dal Government. Pranab Mukherjee and Santosh Mohan Dev, who were supervising the party campaign in Odisha, were talking to me about my prediction but were not agreeing to it. Janakibabu kept telling me that he alone agreed to the forecast.

I may write next about the other reasons for which Janakibabu trusted me this time when I had been a bitter critic of his administration during the earlier two terms.

Janakibabu suffered mostly for his overindulgence for his supporters. Similar was the case of the sensational rape and murder of Chhabirani soon after he became the CM for the first time in 1980. Those who raped and killed Chhabirani, wife of a newspaper reporter at Biridi in Jagatsinghpur district, were local Congress leaders. But Janakibabu, from the beginning, continued to protect them. The charge against the Congress men came out to be true and Janakibabu stood condemned with the issue remaining to haunt him all along.

Though Janakibabu did not do much for his immediate family members, his indulgence towards other ambitious relatives in dispensing favours from Government also had its negative effects on his rule, as is widely known to people.

*(Mr S P Nanda is a veteran journalist and now is the editor of The Pioneer, Odisha Edition)