Narrative series

The Political Landscape

Internal politics — the Naveen machine, the players, the welfare state, the federal dance.

10 chapters · 65,125 words

Read the series introduction →

Chapters

  1. 01 Chapter 1: The Arc --- Odisha's Political History from 1947 to 2000 On August 15, 1947, Odisha became free. It also became a problem. 6,444 words
  2. 02 Chapter 2: The Naveen Machine --- 24 Years of BJD Rule In the year 2000, a man who could not give a fluent speech in Odia became Chief Minister of Odisha. Twenty-four years later, he still could not give a fluent speech in Odia, and he had won five consecutive elections, never once facing a serious challenge to his authority. 7,012 words
  3. 03 Chapter 3: The Earthquake --- How BJP Won Odisha in 2024 On the evening of June 4, 2024, something happened in Odisha that no probabilistic model of Indian politics would have confidently predicted even eighteen months earlier. The Biju Janata Dal --- a party so dominant that it had won five consecutive state elections under a single l 5,663 words
  4. 04 Chapter 4: The New Order --- BJP's Odisha Under Mohan Majhi On June 12, 2024, eight days after the election results ended twenty-four years of BJD governance, a man whom most of Odisha had never heard of walked up to the podium at the Janata Maidan in Bhubaneswar and took the oath as the state's fifteenth Chief Minister. Mohan Charan Majh 6,631 words
  5. 05 The Players — Who Holds Power in Odisha In June 2024, when the Bharatiya Janata Party announced Mohan Charan Majhi as Odisha's fifteenth Chief Minister, the cameras caught something instructive. The new CM — a four-time MLA from a mining district, a Santal tribal leader with decades of RSS groundwork behind him — stood 6,472 words
  6. 06 The Welfare State — Schemes, Impact, and the Politics of Delivery On September 17, 2024 — three months after taking power — the new BJP government in Odisha transferred Rs 1,250 crore into the bank accounts of 25 lakh women as the first instalment of the Subhadra Yojana. By March 8, 2026, the scheme had reached over one crore women, with Rs 5,1 5,666 words
  7. 07 Chapter 7: The Mineral Trap -- Mining, Money, and Power in Odisha Here is a fact that should disturb anyone who thinks about how wealth translates into well-being: Odisha sits on approximately 28 percent of India's iron ore reserves, 98 percent of its chromite, 51 percent of its bauxite, 24 percent of its coal, 92 percent of its nickel, and 67 6,810 words
  8. 08 Chapter 8: The Machine Room -- Institutions That Run Odisha Every state in India has a government. Not every government has the same relationship with power. In Uttar Pradesh, the politician is king -- the MLA, the party boss, the caste leader who can deliver a vote bank. In Gujarat, business and government operate in a symbiosis so tight 6,966 words
  9. 09 Chapter 9: Blood and Soil — Tribal Politics, Caste, and Identity in Odisha On January 2, 2006, roughly a thousand tribal villagers gathered at Kalinganagar in Jajpur district to stop Tata Steel from building a boundary wall on land they said had been taken without proper compensation. By the end of the day, thirteen tribals and one policeman were dead. 6,157 words
  10. 10 Chapter 10: The Federal Dance --- Odisha and Delhi In January 1948, Jawaharlal Nehru visited the villages near Sambalpur that would be swallowed by the Hirakud Dam --- India's first major post-independence river valley project, the young republic's statement of intent that it would industrialize its way out of poverty. The villag 7,304 words

Source Research

The raw research that informs this series.