It is perhaps a little premature to say that Mr. Biju Patnaik has pulled off a victory for the Orissa chief minister, Mr. Nilamani Routray. For, in the kind of politics that is becoming common all over the country it is difficult to be sure that all the 75 Janata legislators, who have signed up for Mr. Routray, will stand by him when the legislature party meets on April 20 to reaffirm its confidence in him or to withdraw it. They will be offered all manner of blandishments and some of them may well succumb to these. But it is apparent that Mr. Patnaik has won over about a dozen of the dissidents to Mr. Routray’s side and it is quite likely that he will be able to match the efforts of the other side in the next three days. He is a master at this game and he is seldom short of resources. As it happens, he remains the tallest and the cleverest figure in Oriya politics. Certainly no one in the state Janata party can match his stature and skill. He may have come under a cloud in New Delhi for reasons which have perhaps more to do with his performance as the Union steel minister and the charges against him than with his opposition to the RSS and its political offshoot, the former Jana Sangh. But it does not seem to have damaged him in Orissa. As such it is on the cards that he will be able to ensure a vote of confidence for Mr. Routray. Whether that will ensure his own survival in New Delhi is a different matter.
If both Mr. Karpoori Thakur in Patna and Mr. Routray in Bhubaneswar secure a vote of confidence from their respective legislature parties on April 20, as appears likely, the Janata parliamentary board will have reason to be embarrassed. For that will establish it conclusively that it acted in undue haste in asking them to get a fresh mandate from the state JLPs. It would have been a different matter either if the dissidents were in a majority in the two party units or if the parliamentary board was in a position to ensure that they would abide by the party discipline once they have had an opportunity to throw out the two chief ministers and have failed. But this was not so. The dissidents were not in a majority in either JLP and the parliamentary board does not even attempt to enforce any kind of discipline on anyone. The members of the board may have been unhappy over the performance of the two chief ministers and they may have been concerned over the charges against Mr. Routray. In that case they should have acted on their own initiative and not left the matter to be decided by the JLPs. They cannot go on abdicating responsibility and expect to be respected. They must also realise that chief ministers should not be made to feel unnecessarily insecure all the time if the latter are to produce results. Chief ministers who have to seek a fresh mandate again and again cannot possibly resist pressure from the legislators and check the rot that has set in.
The Times of India, 14 April 1979