A Meteor In Utkal

This excerpt from a political biography of Naveen Patnaik details Odisha’s discredited political class after the super cyclone, retelling how rapturous Odias accepted Biju Babu’s heir as a messiah

- Ruben Banerjee

THE twin-engine helicopter flew low, skirting over swathes of hills, valleys and fields. Having taken off from Bhubaneswar, the chopper was headed towards Thakurmunda, a speck of a town in the state’s interiors. From that height, the ground below looked picturesque. Plantations stretched mile upon mile, punctuated occasionally by rivers that cut across the terrain before vanishing into the horizon in a serpentine maze. Rolling hills gave way to small valleys, which in turn made space for another range of hills. Hamlets peeped out intermittently, the tin and thatched roofs of ordinary huts belonging to dirt-poor families glinting charmingly under the bright sun. Narrow pathways etched magical designs on the landscape, and brimming village ponds encircled by trees and the cattle wandering about gave the impression of uninterrupted bliss.

Nothing from the top betrayed the turmoil that the peo­ple of Odisha—which accounted for 4.8 per cent of the country’s land mass and 3.47 per cent of its population— had endured in recent months. A killer cyclone had ploughed through the state in October 1999, leaving 10,000 people dead and destroying everything in its wake. From the time it was carved out as a province in 1936, Odisha has been among the poorest Indian states. Though the state is culturally rich—home to temples, textiles, breathtaking tourist spots such as the mangroves of Bhitarkanika and the classical dance form Odissi—it barely caught the atten­tion of the rest of the country except fleetingly, when the media reported on the chronic hunger and starvation there or on a natural disaster as big as the super cyclone.