The structuring of newspaper ownership along political lines has deep historical roots in Odisha. It began organically in the 1920s with Gandhi’s encouragement of newspaper publication as sataygraha (literally “truth-force) during a period in which politics and nationalist activism were often indistinguishable. Odisha’s oldest living newspapers, the Samaja and Prajatantra were both established under the influence of Gandhi’s publication-as-activism (described in the next chapter). The early 1930s saw the growth of strong political differences with regard to how much emphasis to place on the amalgamation of the Odia-speaking tracts in a single administrative unit (also described in the next chapter). Activist-politicians turned to newspapers and pamphlets to enunciate and circulate their platform and establish their influence. With Independence, a
newspaper’s influence became an explicitly political tool, and nearly all of the leading politicians had their own Odia-language newspapers in the two decades after Independence.
Given the centrality of politics, a brief introduction to local political structure is helpful. The Odishan state government has a unicameral legislative assembly. The state Governor, appointed by the center’s President, is the head of the executive branch in the state, and he or she ceremonially invites the elected party or coalition to form the state government under its selected Chief Minister. Chief Ministers serve five-year terms, the length of a legislative assembly term, with no term limits. Thanks to the state-center relationship, the central government (and its ruling party) has the ability to dissolve or remove from office legislative assemblies and Chief
Ministers. This has been a significant feature of political life in post-Independence Odisha, as in many other Indian states, and low confidence, party in-fighting, and conflicts between the
regional and central party control have resulted in the central government’s institution of “President’s Rule” in 1961, 1971, 1973-4, 1976, 1977, and 1980. Additionally, the national Congress Party organization removed Odishan Chief Ministers from office in 1989 and 1999.
Harekrushna Mahatab, publisher of Prajatantra, was the first Chief Minister after Independence. The 1950s were dominated by conflicts between the coastal region’s Congress leadership and the recently incorporated “princely states” from western Odisha, who joined together to form the Ganatantra (“Populist”) party, associated with the newspaper Ganatantra. Together they formed a coalition government in the late 1950s that was dissolved in 1961. The 1950s and 1960s also saw conflicts within the state Congress party leadership, especially between Mahatab and pilot and industrialist Biju Patnaik (founder of the short-lived daily newspaper Kalinga). In 1962 the Ganatantra party merged with the free-market and socially conservative Swatantra Party, a growing national party associated with the prominent politician from south India, C. Rajagopalachari. In the late 1960s, Mahatab split from the INC forming the Orissa Jana Congress, which was largely distinguished by alliances rather than ideological differences, and formed a coalition government with the Swatantra party in 1967. Biju Patnaik split from the INC forming the Utkal Congress. After a series of reorganizations under different parties, both the Jana Congress and Utkal Congress eventually joined the Janata Party, a national party that sought to consolidate opposition in the mid-1970s against the Emergency.
The 1970s in Odisha are hard to understand without the broader national context. Indira Gandhi became Prime Minister in 1966 and her leadership was marked by dramatic
of Emergency rule in 1975. During this time, Gandhi’s administration arrested political
opposition leaders, imposed strict censorship on the press, and undertook wide variety of other restrictive measures. In Odisha, Biju Patnaik’s 1972 split with the INC produced a leadership vacuum in the Congress party, and one of Indira Gandhi’s ministers at the national level, Nandini Satpathy, returned home to Odisha to run the party. Shortly after her return to Odisha, Satpathy established the daily newspaper Dharitri. Nandini Satpathy was closely aligned with Gandhi initially but grew critical of the Emergency, resigning as Chief Minister in 1976 in protest. Satpathy split with the INC to form the national-level Congress for Democracy party, which merged with the Janata Party later the same year. The Janata Party successfully ousted Gandhi’s Congress Party in the national elections, and after President’s rule, Biju Patnaik’s close associate Nilamani Routray became Chief Minister of Odisha. Nandini Satpathy eventually returned to the Congress Party in the late 1980s at the request of Prime Minister Rajiv Gandhi, serving in the state legislature. Her son, who had by then taken over the newspaper Dharitri, remained in the Janata Party and developed a close alliance with Biju Patnaik.
The 1980s returned Congress to control both nationally and in Odisha. Along with Indira Gandhi’s return to power in 1981, another of her former cabinet ministers, Janaki Bhallav
Patnaik, became Chief Minister. Though prior politicians had owned and edited newspapers, J.B. Patnaik was the first to have developed journalism as a profession prior to politics. He began working as a sub-editor as a young man and by 1950 he was joint editor for both the Odia language daily Prajatantra (Mahatab’s newspaper) and for its sister English daily, Eastern Times. In the 1950s he served on the All-India Newspaper Editors’ Conference and became
involved with literary societies. In 1981, Patnaik’s chief ministership was initially supported by the dominant newspapers, Prajatantra and Samaja, but the relationship soured around Patnaik’s alleged abuses of journalists following critical publications. In 1984, Patnaik’s son-in-law, Soumya Ranjan Patnaik, established Sambad, the newspaper that most attribute the
“modernization” and “professionalization” of journalism in Odisha. Though J.B. Patnaik was not technically involved in the management or editing of Sambad, he is closely associated with the publication locally and during my research many journalists presumed that Sambad was able to launch thanks to the patronage of J.B.’s government. Many non-Odishan accounts of Odisha’s media misreport Soumya Ranjan as J.B. Patnaik’s son or even as the founder of Sambad.
J.B. Patnaik’s chief ministership was plagued by scandal, and he resigned from office in 1989. During the 1980s, his rival Biju Patnaik led the dominant opposition from the Janata Party, and in 1990 Biju Patnaik became Chief Minister. J.B. Patnaik and Congress regained the state government in 1995. Nationally, the political scene shifted dramatically in the 1990s with the rise of the Bharitya Janata Party [BJP]—a political party associated with the Rashtriya
Swayamsevak Sangh [RSS] and Hindu exclusionary politics that grew partly out of the Janata alliance of the Emergency era—that posed the first real challenge to Congress dominance. Though there were longstanding sympathies for the RSS in Odishan politics and Harekrushna Mahatab himself became a supporter in the last decades of his life (Kanungo 2003), the BJP was slow to grow in Odisha compared to other states.
After Biju Patnaik’s death in 1997, his son, Naveen Patnaik, joined with Biju supporters from the state Janata Party and formed the Biju Janata Dal [BJD]. The BJD grew in popularity in
Odisha during the period of the BJP’s national growth, joining the BJP-led central National Democratic Alliance in 1998 but without adopting the Hindu-exclusionary discourse. Raised largely outside of Odisha, Naveen Patnaik is a curious figure in Odishan politics: he is unmarried and he neither speaks nor reads Odia proficiently. He became Chief Minister of Odisha in 2000 and was re-elected in May 2014, becoming the longest running Chief Minister and leader of the most stable government in Odisha since independence. In 2009, following the RSS-spurred violence against Christians in Kandhamal, Odisha, Naveen Patnaik withdrew the BJD from an alliance with the BJP. Though party officials played coy about whether the withdrawal was related to the violence, it underlined his party’s secularism. Both Nandini Satpathy’s son and editor of Dharitri, Tathagatha Satpathy, and Harekrushna Mahatab’s son and editor of
Prajatantra, Bhartruhari Mahatab, represent the BJD in the national parliamentary body, the Lok Sabha.
Ideologically, at the state level, there is little distinction between the ruling BJD and its opposition Congress party. Each accuses the other of being corrupt and not sincerely serving the interests of Odisha’s poor. Perhaps the most uncomfortable feature of the relationship is that the state-level BJD looks a great deal like the national-level Congress party insofar as it seeks to balance pro-poor and distributive social welfare programs with pro-privatization and foreign direct investment [FDI] initiatives. This is perhaps most apparent in state-center relations regarding FDI in mining and industrialization, which Naveen Patnaik’s government began energetically pursuing in 2005. Upon Patnaik’s signing of a memorandum of understanding [MOU] with the South Korean steel producing giant Posco, the state opposition parties raised
protest at the terms of the agreement but found little support for their complaints at the national level. Both the BJP and the Congress parties at the national level had supported aggressive FDI- courting, and the national parties seemed to support the Posco agreement regardless of local politics. Indeed, Odishan journalist Prafulla Das reported that Patnaik met with L.K. Advani, chairman of the BJP (“Challenging a Deal,” Frontline, July 16, 2005), to complain about the lack of support from his party’s state leadership, and Congress Party Prime Minister Manmohan Singh was an active, public supporter of the project17.
During and since my research, beginning in 2007, the strongest line of opposition across parties in Odisha has been accusations of corruption in the form of “the mining scam” and “the chit fund scam,” but Naveen Patnaik has successfully weathered corruption accusations and scandal by aggressively reorganizing his cabinet and party several times. He has a reputation for honesty that is routinely a feature of media profiles, and the most damning statement about him is that, wrote one critical article, “he has superbly kept his image clean and simple,” (Sheela Bhatt, “Naveen’s Master Stroke,” Mar. 11, 2009, Rediff.com) with the implication that such cleanliness must belie deeper trickery.
This style of politics means that party-inspired views are not necessarily compelling to readers, but scandals and investigations of misdeeds are. When asking about the recent history of newspapers, I was routinely told that Odishan readers much prefer opposition newspapers
because they offer a harder look at corruption accusations. Sambad employees explained this to
17 This balance shifted a degree when Rahul Gandhi began to take over as the public leader of the national
Congress Party in 2009 and 2010. Gandhi sought to invigorate the state’s Congress opposition through support of popular adivasi resistance to Vedanta Aluminium’s mining of bauxite in Lanjigarh, Odisha.
me in their discussion of low circulations during the late 1990s (during the Congress years) and success since Naveen Patnaik’s election; Dharitri employees used this to explain the rise of Sambad. News itself has long been fueled more by personal rivalries than ideological
differences, and thanks to the flexibility of the party system in Odisha, personal rivalries have often resulted in political party divides. For instance, between 2012-2013, a personal animosity in each of Odisha’s dominant parties, both the BJD and the Congress, led to the creation of new political parties. Naveen Patnaik ousted his longtime advisor, Pyarimohan Mohapatra, after a failed party takeover. The Congress party ousted Soumya Ranjan Patnaik, editor of the Sambad, for leading anti-party activities following a conflict between the Party’s new leadership and Patnaik’s brother, Niranjan Patnaik, who had been replaced as the chief of the state Congress Committee. Both men have formed new political parties, the Odisha Jana Morcha and the Ama Odisha Party, respectively.
An implication of this political organization is that the newspapers, playing political roles, do not need to convert readers to a point of view on issues or platforms so much as to forge alliances and build the reputations of individual politicians (specifically reputations that they are “clean”—saphā). What I am calling the newspapers’ ethical faces is one method of building these alliances and reputations, both for the politicians directly associated with the political proprietor/editor as well as for their close allies.