Constructing a house on the funeral ground of his native village Rameswar now in Khordha district during his first term as Chief Minister was one of a series of scandals against Janaki Ballav Patnaik.
JB was charged with first influencing the local revenue officials to record a few plots of land at the funeral ground in the names of some of his local supporters and then acquiring the lands himself and building his house and developing a garden there soon later.
After sources, including contracror Gobinda Chandra Sahu who was in charge of the house construction at the initial stage, informed me about all this, I along with my then colleague of the Samaja Deba Prasad Mishra and the newspaper’s photographer Uma Prasad Mishra went to the place to see the construction. Though I was at that point of time writing for The Telegraph daily and Sunday magazine of the Ananda Bazar Patrika group of Kolkata, I was still working for the Samaja, where began my career as a journalist.
Earlier, we had visited the concerned revenue office at Banpur several times and collected the documents showing the irregularities in acquisition of the funeral ground. The funeral grounds are officially described as “communal” land (belonging to the local community) and are not inalienable for other purposes.
On our trip to Rameswar, we spotted the house, but made a retreat without going to its vicinity as a lot of local people were present there in the afternoon. A few days later, we again went there, this time under the cover of evening darkness. The photographer took snaps of the house. Meanwhile, we saw some people menacingly running from the village towards the spot. We boarded the car and told the driver Gokhei to speed away for our return. We had feared that apart from attack on us the villagers might snatch away the camera. At that time, the villagers had no automobile, even motorcycles, to follow and catch up with us.
I wrote a story in the Sunday which was carried with the headline ‘The house that JB Patnaik built’ with pictures. And all hell let loose. There was a follow-up story in the magazine giving more details on the subject. Meanwhile, Samaja also ran similar stories on the scandal.
JB engineered a defamation suit against Sunday and Samaja through the concerned local Junior Engineer (JE) Balakrushna Swain, who had figured in the stories for allegedly helping in construction of the house with Government building materials.
I went to late Barrister Birendra Mohan Patnaik in Cuttack, who was close to me, wanted him to help me in fighting the case. But Birenbabu told me that he had already been approached by JB to handle the case for him. Birenbabu further told me that JB wanted the case to be filed in a bid to prevent publication of such scams against him in future. I and Samaja management had to find other lawyers.
The defamation case, after some years, was dismissed by court. We had irrefutable documentary evidence in our favour.
It is, however, another matter that JB towards the end of his CM stint for the second time, when he had been in regular touch with me, invited me to go with his to his Rameswar house to see his garden and library. He was always setting apart time from his busy schedule to spend evenings in his pet house. Though I wished to go, a trip could not materialise for some reason or other.