Naveen Patnaik, the leader of the BJD and the chief minister of Odisha, met Prime Minister Narendra Modi in New Delhi on Thursday, just 48 hours after his meeting with Nitish Kumar, the chief minister of Bihar and leader of the JD(U).
At least before the general and assembly elections of 2024, the BJD is also unlikely to budge from its position of maintaining an equal distance from the BJP and the Congress. The chief minister of Odisha reiterated his party’s position on Thursday, saying it would contest elections on its own without fostering any grand ambitions. When asked if his party would run unopposed in the upcoming elections, Patnaik responded that this has always been his party’s guiding concept.
Prominent Opposition figures are approaching CM Naveen Patnaik, 76, for an alliance to oppose the Narendra Modi administration. Patnaik has been in charge of Odisha since March 2000 and enjoys enormous popularity with the state’s citizens. The party currently has eight members in the Rajya Sabha and twelve in the Lok Sabha.
On March 23, Mamata Banerjee, the leader of the TMC and the chief minister of West Bengal, visited Naveen at his home before Nitish did. Following his meetings with Mamata and Nitish, Naveen dispelled rumours of a potential political union.
Regarding his meeting with the PM, Naveen said he discussed issues related to Odisha’s demands. “I spoke to him about Shri Jagannath International Airport, which is being set up in Puri. The boundary for the airport is already earmarked. We want an expansion as Bhubaneswar is getting too much traffic now. The PM said he will definitely help in every way possible,” said CM Naveen Patnaik.
The Doon School alumnus entered politics after the passing of his father, former chief minister Biju Patnaik, on April 17, 1997. On December 26, that same year, he founded his party, the BJD, and made an alliance with the BJP. In March 2000, the BJD-BJP coalition swept to power in Odisha. Nine years later, Naveen severed connections with the BJP and declared a policy of keeping an equal distance between the BJP and the Congress ahead of the 2009 general and assembly elections. It keeps cordial ties with any party in the Center that is in power.
The CM, who gets along well with the PM, offered assistance to the Narendra Modi administration when it passed contentious laws and conducted presidential elections. In addition, it supported the NDA administration when it came to issues like demonetisation, the “surgical” strike, and the repeal of Article 370.
A bureaucrat-turned-politician named Ashwini Vaishnaw ran for the Rajya Sabha in June 2019 with the backing of the BJD, despite the BJP’s lack of sufficient candidates. The meeting between the CM and the PM has enormous political significance at a time when the BJP, which has supplanted the Congress as the principal opposition party in Odisha, has ripped off its gloves to engage in an intense fight with the state’s ruling BJD.
A month prior to the New Delhi presidential elections, on May 30, 2022, Naveen had his last meeting with PM Modi, which he described as a courtesy call.
Despite their meeting on Thursday, Patnaik and Modi will still be fighting to unseat the BJD government in Odisha, according to a senior BJP leader in the state who spoke on the record under the condition of anonymity.