let’s be friends henceforth. I would not react if you write anything against me. I have realised that you write whatever you feel right. At least, unlike many journalists, you don’t write for consideration (payment or reward).” Janaki Ballav Patnaik endeared me with these words sometime in 1989 towards the last part of his term as the second-time Chief Minister. He had invited me to his official residence after three long years of his fiat of ‘no talks with you’. He had told me over phone, “I won’t talk to you on anything because you write against me whether we talk or don’t talk.” This I had quoted for record in the newspaper I was working for at that time.
JB changed his attitude towards me after I wrote a cover story on his record as Odisha’s longest-serving Chief Minister in the Sunday magazine of The Telegraph. The main part of the feature was not complimentary to him as it chronicled all that was against him. But as a part item, a page was full of his profile. The profile was faithful to what JB was as a brilliant scholar, a man of letters, an editor; and above all, a political leader by dint of his determination despite all odds, including his erstwhile mentor Dr Harekrushna Mahtab’s antipathy, resulting in his defeat as a Jana Congress candidate from the Dharmasala Assembly constituency in the 1967 polls even though Mahtab was an architect of this regional party which won hands down in other seats riding the anti-Congress wave.
A session of the State Assembly was on. I was at the Press Gallery. CM JB’s soft-spoken Public Relations Officer Samar Bilas Patnaik, now retired from Government service, came to me and whispered that the CM wanted to meet me. He confided that JB was particularly happy about my write-up that profiled him from his student days. I was surprised with a sense of pleasure. I said I was happy that Janakibabu wanted to meet and talk to me.
As Samar Bilas Patnaik had proposed, a car came next morning and picked me up to the CM’s residence. JB greeted me and made his usual query, “How are youIJ” I deliberately avoided telling my grievance that he had banned my talking to him. It would have been redundant under the changed circumstance and an embarrassment to him, I felt.
JB said he would be in touch with me for my personal suggestions on any issue he wanted to discuss. The 1990 elections came and I had told him that the Congress would suffer a serious debacle not only in Odisha but at the national level for several reasons. I told him that in Odisha, the Congress would be routed even assuming that Biju Patnaik was not the opposition Janata Dal leader due to the overwhelming anti-Congress public mood. And this happened.
When the 1995 elections came, I told JB that the Congress stood a good chance for its revival. And this happened in a much better way for the party as I have written about in this column earlier. After JB became CM in 1995, he was in regular contact with me. An interesting occasion came soon later. One evening, he telephoned and invited me for talks followed by lunch next day at his residence along with the owner of the Ananda Bazar Patrika (ABP) group Aveek Sarkar. “Your ex-boss is coming to meet me. I want you to be present,” JB said.
The Telegraph was, and still is, part of the ABP group stable, and I had resigned from the paper by then to join recently-launched The Asian Age of MJ Akbar. I told JB that Sarkar would not be happy for my presence as I had not responded to his desire to continue in The Telegraph. Sarkar had earlier called for me to be in Kolkata so that I would reconsider my decision to quit the paper. Moreover, I told JB that Aveekbabu might talk to him something about his organisation at a personal level. JB did not see any logic in what I said and insisted that a “senior journalist” of the State should be part of the occasion while he would be having discussions with the head of the most powerful media house of the country’s eastern region.
Sarkar reached the CM’s house a few minutes before I had. I felt he was not happy by my presence. There was a brief discussion on some aspects of Odisha’s development. Then the talks continued at the lunch. JB had arranged several dishes of fish, thinking, what he told me later, that Sarkar being a Bengali would relish them. But to his disappointment, Aveekbabu said he did not eat fish. After Aveekbabu left, I told JB that many modernised Bengalis were not eating fish, one reason being fear of bones in it.
What I had guessed about Aveekbabu’s discomfort for my presence was corroborated by a journalist then working for the ABP group when we met a few days later. Sarkar had invited a section of people connected with media for a meeting over dinner at a hotel in Bhubaneswar. Sarkar asked this journalist how come Nanda was present on the occasion of his meeting with JB. The journalist, as he told me, replied, “JB Patnaik perhaps thinks SP Nanda more important in the context of the Odisha media.”
This was another instance of JB’s indulgence towards someone like me whom he chose to trust. JB will go down the history as a leader with an admirable degree of patience. This was evident from so many episodes. I later wrote against him on the Anjana Mishra case as he continued to back Indrajit Roy despite seeking my suggestion to remove Roy from the post of Advocate General.