By Nageshwar Patnaik in Bhubaneswar, June 1, 2025: A story doing the rounds of Bhubaneswar is that the Biju Janata Dal (BJD) will survive as long as Pappu is alive and after that the regional party will collapse like a house of cards. Some BJD leaders would jump to Congress and some to BJP. That just about sums up the assessment of the people about the longest surviving regional party of the state launched by 78-year old Naveen Patnaik (fondly referred to as ’Pappu’ by his close friends).

He blamed the party’s failure to effectively counter the saffron party’s false narrative. He underscored the need to be aggressive in exposing the BJP’s false narrative especially on social media.

Will Pappu quit or fight back? Perhaps not.

Pappu, however, knows that being aggressive could land him in trouble. The BJD chief would not risk a consequence like in Jharkhand or Delhi where two Chief Ministers were put in jail. When the party was in power two swords were hanging on Naveen Patnaik’s head — a Ponzi scam and mining scam — and the Enforcement Directorate or ED on one occasion even reached near the gates of Navin Niwas to apprehend a trusted lieutenant of Patnaik, Saroj Sahoo, for his alleged role in the Ponzi scam.

The mining scam has been hushed up for now thanks to the rapprochement between former chief minister and prime minister Narendra Modi on conditions of ‘give and take’. Naveen even to-day has this compulsion and hence is not allowing the BJD to be aggressive. It is crystal clear that unlike his dare devil father late Biju Patnaik; he does not want to take any risk and is playing on safer ground. That suits the ruling BJP which ended an uninterrupted reign of 24-plus years—missing Pawan Chamling’s record of being India’s longest-serving chief minister (of Sikkim) by a whisker.

The BJP routed the BJD by winning 20 of the state’s 21 seats and, in the latter, Mr Patnaik – who lost the Kantabanji seat to the BJP’s Laxman Bag – won only 51 of 147, down from 112 five years ago. The BJP secured 78 – four over majority – to form its first Odisha government. The twin defeats left Mr Patnaik firmly on the back foot in a state he has dominated since 2000; his BJD had won every Assembly poll and over 50 per cent of Lok Sabha seats in each general election.

Nonetheless, the BJD, with 51 members, and the Congress with 14, could have proved to be a formidable Opposition force in Odisha for Mohan Charan Majhi’s BJP team. It has not happened so far. In fact, the BJD has failed, for the first time, to win even one Lok Sabha seat. As he bowed out of office festering resentment within the party has surfaced like never before.

The latest example is the open complaint by Rajya Sabha MP Muzibulla Khan to Naveen Patnaik against the floor leader Sasmit Patra over what is being seen as an ambiguous and last-minute shift in stance on the contentious Waqf (Amendment) Bill, 2024, recently cleared by both houses of Parliament. Khan, popularly known as ‘Munna’ among peers, has expressed deep dissatisfaction over what he describes as lack of clarity and coordination within the party on the Waqf bill.

In fact, the BJD had opposed the bill, aligning itself with Opposition and minority voices that feared that the proposed legislation would infringe on the autonomy and functioning of Waqf boards. But shortly before the bill was tabled in the Rajya Sabha, the party abruptly changed its position, refraining from issuing an official whip and allowing its MPs to vote according to their personal discretion.

The U-turn sparked off huge confusion among BJD parliamentarians. Added to it, Patra, a Christian, had shown a clear inclination towards supporting the bill due to a call by the Kerala Catholic Bishops’ Council (KCBC). Critics argue that the KCBC’s position was determined by several churches in Kerala allegedly being located on Waqf land. Patra seems to have received the green light to not issue a whip from V.K. Pandian, Patnaik’s long-time bureaucrat-turned-political aide. Weather Naveen was consulted or not is a million rupee question.

People strongly believe that despite having retreated after the BJD’s Odisha assembly election debacle last year, Pandian continues to exert control from behind the scenes has deeply unsettled many in the party. While Pandian has withdrawn from public life, wife Sujata Karthikeyan, another senior bureaucrat, recently opted for voluntary retirement. Yet, allegations of his continued influence persist, feeding into the narrative of backroom politics in the BJD. Karma comes full circle for Naveen & Pandian as Waqf controversy signals beginning of BJD’s decline.

The timing of the internal discord couldn’t be worse as the BJD attempts to pick up the pieces after the humiliating election defeat at the hands of the BJP in 2024 and rebuild its image. Despite age catching up, Naveen continues to be the state’s most revered and popular leader. However, his perceived overreliance on Pandian, a Tamil-born former bureaucrat, has been widely blamed for the BJD’s decline.

It is by now crystal clear that the confusion and mixed signals over the Waqf bill are not an isolated parliamentary misstep. It only smacks of deeper structural crevice in the BJD. Some also believe that Naveen prefers to lie low and not antagonize PM Modi to face the fate of likes of Arvind Kejriwal and Hemant Soren .