Without making much noise, V.K. Pandian has refused to let threats and rumours stop him from serving Odisha tirelessly under chief minister Naveen Patnaik
By Siddhartha Tripathy
In all likelihood February 9 had started out as a regular day at the residential government quarter of the Pandian family in the Odisha state capital of Bhubaneswar. But it most certainly did not end that way.
V. Karthikeyan Pandian, a 2000-batch IAS officer and long-time private secretary to Chief Minister Naveen Patnaik, was not home, but his IAS batchmate-cum-wife Sujata R. Karthikeyan and their two young children were – when something dreadfully deplorable happened.
A bunch of some 30 raucous hooligans, who also happened to be members of the Bharatiya Janata Yuva Morcha, the youth wing of the Bharatiya Janata Party, suddenly appeared outside the power couple’s Unit VI residence, raising party flags and shouting slogans against the man of the house as they accused Pandian of working beyond his remit as a central government bureaucrat in the interests of the ruling Biju Janata Dal.
UNDER ATTACK
They did not stop there.
Within moments, they flung open the main gate, overwhelmed the security guards and barged into the compound. The heavily outnumbered home guards at the quarter tried in vain to resist as the vandals went about destroying flower pots, damaging vehicles, and hurling cow dung at the walls of the quarter.
Fortunately, the police arrived soon, some arrests were made, and the chaos was under control. An anonymously shot video footage that soon went viral showed one of the arrested people repeatedly ranting against the Naveen Patnaik administration as he was taken to the police vehicle.
That these vandals had the support and sanction of higher-ups in their party became irrefutably apparent when State BJP Vice President Sameer Mohanty reacted to the unfortunate event with these words: “Pandian is acting like a super Chief Minister. His favouritism towards the BJD is not acceptable … We will continue to protest against the bureaucrat, who is working against the interest of the state.”
Whatever the objective of the action and admission of the opposition party might have been in this whole shebang, it was certainly not achieved. If anything, it backfired.
The event soon became national news because it was perhaps unprecedented in living memory for workers of a political party to attack the residence of a government official this way.
Many political observers noted that the event only served to fuel the notion that the BJP was making desperate attempts to unsettle the Naveen Patnaik government by targeting the chief minister’s close aides.
While Naveen himself understandably expressed shock at the fact that members of a national party should openly orchestrate and condone such criminal and undemocratic acts, Pandian received support from almost all quarters – starting from the state bodies of the Indian Administrative Service, the Indian Police Service, and the Odisha Administrative Service to many leaders from the ruling BJD and even the Congress party.
Asserting that all IAS officers belong to the central government, IAS Association Secretary Vishal Dev warned that such attacks will never be tolerated. “IAS officers should not be targeted personally. They belong to the central government. It is sad and unfortunate to see that an IAS officer is being targeted here. Time has come to initiate strong action,” Dev said.
The Police condemned the incident in no uncertain terms.
Speaking on behalf of the IPS Association, Additional Director General Sudhansu Sarangi decried the incident as “totally unjustified and unacceptable”. Meanwhile, Y.B. Khurania, the then Police Commissioner, assured the media and public that strong action would be taken against the persons involved in the incident.
Apart from the BJP, no other party seemed to support the incident.
BJD spokesperson Pratap Deb condemned the incident as unfortunate and one that “depicts the mentality of top BJP leaders”.
“Such kind of protests is unacceptable in a democracy,” Deb thundered.
Senior Congress leader Niranjan Patnaik also denounced the attack as “terror politics” and a “cowardly act”.
According to many political analysts and social observers in Odisha, the widespread and fervent reaction to the event was not only due to the nature of the perpetrations of those so-called BJP activists, but also in large part owing to who it was against.
Pandian is not a run-of-the-mill bureaucrat or, as they say, a typical babu.
That’s not just because of his impeccable official record as a bureaucrat, which has been second to none in the state of late. Two years ago Kanak News, an Odia news channel, broadcasted what seemed to be a leaked report where Pandian’s CCR – the traditional Confidential Character Roll in which the performance of Indian civil servants are evaluated by their superiors – from the year 2012 was revealed to be ten out of ten, literally.
FLYING COLOURS
To receive such an impossibly high rating, an officer needs to be outstanding on many fronts, including work ethics, dutifulness, integrity of character, punctuality, decision-making skills, people skills, meeting project deadlines, and honesty.
In that report, Chief Minister Naveen Patnaik himself had written glowingly of Pandian as an outstanding officer.
Naveen started off by saying that Pandian was an industrious officer with unquestionable integrity who could be depended upon in matters involving high responsibility. Then Naveen noted that Pandian took keen initiative to complete any job assigned to him and made for a very effective leader who could “motivate and inspire his colleagues and subordinates”. While highlighting that Pandian’s major strength was in ensuring all the development initiatives of the state were effectively and timely implemented, the chief minister also seemed to be particularly impressed with Pandian’s “valuable inputs in the formulation of many major policies of the State Government” and his sensitivity towards the weaker sections of the society.
After noticing some of these very qualities, Naveen clearly mentioned in that report, he had chosen Pandian as his private secretary since the previous year.
Pandian’s appointment as the CM’s PS, therefore, came as no surprise to all those who had any knowledge about his exemplary achievements during the early years of his administrative career at the district level in Odisha.
In Dharmagarh town, Kalahandi district, unscrupulous millers had for long exploited poor farmers by never giving them even the minimum support price for their produce. Soon after Pandian arrived as a sub-collector, he promptly took steps to ensure that no longer happened. Since then the people there have considered him one of their own, so much so that they reportedly celebrated his son’s birth with fireworks.
Never to rest on his laurels, Pandian made sure that his accomplishments got bigger with time.
BIG AWARDS
During his tenure as the Collector of Mayurbhanj district, Pandian received a national award for making it the “Best District in Rehabilitation of the Disabled”. He is one of the rare bureaucrats to have earned the Hellen Kellar Award for services to the disabled.
However, it was during his stint as the collector of Ganjam, the constituency and home district of Naveen, when Pandian was well and truly noticed by the chief minister.
In this period, Pandian earned a national award for his rehabilitation efforts towards HIV-positive people in Ganjam. A publicly funded shelter home for AIDS orphans, which was set up on a priority basis within an incredibly short period of time in the district, was his brainchild. It was primarily through Pandian’s unrelenting efforts that the archaic ‘Gramkantahapormbook’ land law from the Raj days, when Ganjam was under the Madras Presidency, was finally amended – thus allowing some 800,000 families in southern Odisha to finally regain their land rights after centuries.
By this time, Pandian had already bagged two national awards for best implementation of National Rural Employment Guarantee Scheme (NREGS). He was reportedly the first officer to effect the disbursement of Rs 100 crore worth of wages through the banking system, which happened much before the process became compulsory, as his prime objective was to ensure that corruption did not eat away at the poor’s earnings.
So when Naveen had a first-hand experience of Pandian during one of his political meetings in Ganjam, he discovered just the kind of officer he had desperately been looking for after his fallout with former bureaucrat and long-time advisor Pyarimohan Mohapatra.
In 2011, Pandian left Ganjam for Bhubaneswar with his appointment as the Private Secretary to Chief Minister, which marked the beginning of an enduringly successful collaboration.
Just as the Chief Minister might have expected, Pandian began delivering the goods right from the word go. From the third floor of the Odisha secretariat, the seemingly indefatigable Pandian has ever since been ensuring the timely implementation of all the major policies and schemes of the Naveen Patnaik government.
It was a win-win arrangement for most parties concerned: Naveen got a trusted adviser once again who could perfectly execute his plans and help realise the legendary Biju Patnaik’s vision for Odisha; Pandian enjoyed the well-earned privilege of reporting directly to the chief minister while serving the state being Naveen’s right-hand man from so early on in his career; and, most importantly, the people of Odisha reaped the rewards of good governance with the timely implementation of many a beneficial scheme promised by the BJD government.
DESPITE ODDS
However, there was a flip side to this arrangement.
Working in close association with his boss, Pandian became the subject of envy and aversion for some politicians and bureaucrats, especially those who were not quite the well wishers of Naveen Patnaik or his government.
Over time such people managed to spread, with some success, a few notions: that Pandian is the new Chanakya of the BJD who unconstitutionally interferes in the party’s affairs much to the discomfiture and indignation of other leaders; that the third floor of the state secretariat is an alternative power centre not dissimilar to the way the Sahidnagar residence of the late Pyarimohan Mohapatra was back in the day; and that Pandian is a Tamilian who cannot be trusted to have the best interests of Odisha at heart (despite his wife – whose maiden name is Sujata Rout – being very much an Odia girl).
Many political observers pointed out that the February attack on his residence this year was one of the consequences of such notions. They deemed that the all-powerful BJP was intending to unnerve the BJD government by attacking one of Naveen’s key people just a year before the 2019 elections.
However, the incident perhaps only served to highlight the kind of support and goodwill that Pandian enjoyed within the bureaucratic community as well as the BJD and other political parties. But it most certainly – and miserably – failed to rein in the quietly determined Pandian from continuing to do his job as the ever-dependable workhorse of not only the Naveen Patnaik administration but also the Government of India.
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