My Orissa diary: why the state needs to get out of the margins and come on to the national page
You have to give them full marks for punctuality and feather-touch landings. Yet, it is difficult to cast away your prejudices against very old aircraft, particularly when flown by very young pilots. But that is how it is with Alliance Air, and when the plane to Bhubaneswar begins to shake and rattle a bit in a cloud you can’t hide a tinge of panic. At least not from a face-reader as good as Laloo Yadav.
Seated next to me, he puts a reassuring hand on mine: “Dariye mat (don’t be scared), bhery (very) safe plane,” he says. Then moving both hands in a motion you could, at a pinch, confuse for milking a cow, or manoeuvring a gear shift or a joystick, he explains why the old plane is so very safe. ”Fully manual hai na…” So no fears of some wretched fuse blowing and short-circuiting the engines, or whatever such perils the more modern fly-by-wire airplanes may bring.
My purpose of flying to Bhubaneswar is as mundane as lecturing. For Laloo, it is business as usual, true to his most repeated line in a television promo, “bahut politics hai”. Orissa, he says, has a huge population of backward and poor (read Yadavs, called Gouds in Orissa) who need an awakening. Which is his responsibility. So there will be a backward connection in Puri, some grandstanding before the press here and there. Laloo’s politics is also practical and pragmatic. Of all the third front leaders of the socialist gene pool, he is the only one with no doubts on Sonia’s credentials to be prime minister. “In the past I was kingmaker. Now I will be queen-maker.” As always, his lines come pre-rehearsed. And you will hear these ones a lot in the run-up to the 2004 national elections.
Orissa, he thinks, is ripe for change — like Bihar. He is a good boy, he says of Naveen Patnaik, a fine, ineffective, powerless, clueless babalog. “You have to be kind to him, after all he is Biju Babu’s son. He was a good man. Almost a socialist,” he says and goes on to explain how he wants to yank the state away from him.
My father, a socialist? What else could offend Naveen Patnaik more. Father Biju, after all, was one of India’s first capitalists. He built our first private airline, steel factory, and so on. But Naveen (Pappu to friends in Delhi’s sizeable upper crust circuit) is far too genteel to ever raise his voice or show much indignation.
Nor is the setting particularly conducive to talking about dirty, underbelly politics. The hors d’oeuvres are anchovies on toast and blue cheese on baby potatoes and the chef, cordon bleu. This is at the very elegant residence of his party MP, Jay Panda, and his wife Jagi, who must be among the most elegant and charming young couples to hit the Delhi social scene in many years. What makes Naveen angry, instead, is the rapaciousness with which the Congress is supposed to have governed the state, even making money on cyclone and drought relief operations.
Even his enemies wouldn’t fault him on two things: personal integrity and a feeling for his people. He has fired his own ministers for corruption and has apparently refused to visit so far the five-star monstrosity built by his estranged partyman, Dilip Ray. The Mayfair Lagoon is Bhubaneswar’s foremost hotel and its builder has literally hammered money and marble into its floor and walls. It boasts an artificial lagoon, fully loaded with fibre glass ducks, a crocodile with its mouth open, and a tiger (obviously fibre glass) drinking water under a plastic tree. Then there is the fancy swimming pool and its crown jewel is obviously an array of bronze mermaids, all topless, all size 36 and above. Other fibre glass delights include birds in the aviary (there are also some real ones hiding in the branches of the fibre glass tree). Outside the Indian restaurant, there is even a fibre glass dog with its leg raised, doing you know what. How that speaks for somebody’s taste or how appetising you may find this while entering a restaurant, even if it is called ‘The Dhaba’, is better not discussed.
There are lots of stories in Bhubaneswar’s political circles on this fancy landmark. But what gets Naveen’s goat is something more real than the fibreglass or porcelain absurdities. It is a twin-engine D-18 Beechcraft of 1950s vintage parked by the lagoon. A real trophy, children love it, so they have put a sizeable padlock on its only door. “You know what?” Naveen speaks in rare indignation, “they even claim this is the plane my father flew to Indonesia to rescue Sukarno. That wretched thing won’t reach even Chilka Lake.”
Naveen speaks with some emotion about his state, his exploited, emaciated, skeletal people, but has no real formula for a quick turnaround. He has given up the luxury and comforts of Delhi to move into the fairly simple, but sprawling, house his parents built in the ’50s and named after him. For someone brought up in the rarefied upper crust environs of New Delhi and France, he visits the capital less often than almost any other chief minister, spending all his time on files, with his civil servants and travelling to the districts. But his politics is mixed up. He is not focussed on industry or tourism, joined the opposition to the NALCO sale, has not displayed even a flash of a modern, reformist instinct, and his people do not seem much better than they were when he took over nearly four years ago. He says it will take time. He has endured two droughts, one super cyclone and one awful flood. Orissa is still the second poorest state in India despite having so much natural wealth, a talented people and India’s most globalised politician as chief minister.
To see just how messed up the state is, you only have to hit the tourist trail to Konark. The 13th century Sun Temple must be one of the finest specimens of Indian heritage but the 60 km road from Bhubaneswar is an orthopaedist’s delight. At Konark, there isn’t any modern facility where a tourist could rest, have a meal, buy a decent T-shirt. The most modern facility — actually the only one — is a sulabh sauchalaya, and it functions. Otherwise the same old story of touts, thugs, cheap souvenirs, heat and dust.
The 35 km road from Konark to Puri runs along the eastern coast and is named grandly, the Marine Drive. It is smoother, has spectacular views, both good and scary. The latter is an endless row of dead trees, neatly decapitated by the super cyclone. The dried, blackened trunks are still there, giving the place a war-zone look. But Naveen’s government has done a decent job of planting new ones which are growing nicely.
If you think Konark is a mess, come to the holy city of Puri. The Jagannath temple, one of the four holiest dhams of Hinduism, is also the least reformed in terms of its management. The temple is dirty, the panda menace is all there, and while the ASI is doing a great job of cleaning up the massive temple dome, the exteriors are a shame on Orissa, and Hinduism. The walls and parapets of the temple complex are printed over with advertisements — mostly for underwear. And so strong is the control of the hereditary pandas that nobody dares to even speak of reform.
Puri is a holy city frozen in time. All along the western coast, for example, the new environmental regulations have ensured some discipline in the way new beach resorts are constructed. Here you see a monstrous row of new glass-and-concrete, Mehrauli mall-like “resorts” coming up within less than a couple of hundred yards of the shoreline; and if this violates the coastal regulation zone (CRZ) restrictions, who is to notice? Then you look closely, and find sewage manholes right on the beach. If anybody has complained, or taken notice of any of this, it has made no difference to those building this infrastructure for the tourists who mostly come from Kolkata.
But it is not as if the whole state is frozen in this non-changing past or chaotic present. Just 15 km on National Highway 203 from Puri to Bhubaneswar, you take a short detour on a kutcha road towards the village of Raghurajpur, the birthplace of Odissi maestro Kelucharan Mahapatra. What is recommended, though, is a car with ground clearance higher than a Lancer. You cross the very lyrical Bhargabi river, hop over the railway crossing at the Jagatdeipur “station” — which is no more than a thatched roof (no walls) and a ticket office — and reach the village which the state and a whole bunch of NGOs (including Intach) and the Union culture ministry are developing into a heritage village. A genuine article, where real craftsman—mostly making the Oriya pata-chitra on tussar-line in real homes. All craftsmen have calculators, television sets, have tiny plates on their workshops saying “hypothecated to” one bank or the other, and they can drive a mean bargain. Jagmohan has been here recently and committed Rs 3 crore to build a new post office. Hopefully some of that money would go into that one-km steeplechase of a road-link from the highway and, thus, the rest of the country would discover this real marvel.
But before that, the rest of the country will have to discover Orissa, the out-of-sight-out-of-mind state that only figures on our front pages when a cyclone strikes and which hides some of our richest heritage, wildlife, holy places and quite a few of our hockey stars, men and women. And, indeed, the village of Raghurajpur, which must pack more creativity in a three-square kilometre patch of land than probably any in the world.