No award, not even the Nobel Prize, is free of controversies these days. So, there was no surprise when the conferment of the ‘Ideal Chief Minister’ award on Naveen Patnaik at MIT World Peace University, Pune on Sunday created the customary round of furore with naysayers raking up the ‘award fixing’ charge once again.
The problem with such charges is they can never be proved, especially when the award is conferred by an agency/institution based outside Odisha. It is one man’s word against another’s and thus pure conjecture. Whether one believes in such an allegation or not depends entirely on one’s political and personal predilections. [And one is not speaking about politicians belonging to various parties here.] Those who believe Naveen’s 18-year rule has been the best thing that has happened to Odisha since independence would naturally believe the award is just reward for the ‘hard work’ Naveen had done over the years to transform Odisha from a land of poverty to a frontline state in India. Those who think his reign has been an unmitigated disaster with Odisha, which still remains among the two or three poorest states on the country, if not the poorest, would tend to believe in the 'award fixing' theory. And no amount of argument can change the views of either side.
The more relevant question should be what material difference does the award, ‘fixed’ or otherwise, make to the life of the average citizen in the state? On this score, I am afraid the answer has to be an emphatic ‘None’. For sure, there would be a deluge of ecstatic fans, followers and party members, bouquets in hand, falling over one another to congratulate the longest-serving Chief Minister on his return from Pune, to be followed by officers and staff doing an encore at the state secretariat and king-size advertisements with the smiling visage of Naveen splashed all across the front pages of newspapers (making Odisha poorer by a crore or two in the process because they are all going to be funded out of the public exchequer!). Some over-enthusiastic party members may even demand the inclusion of Naveen Patnaik’s ‘golden rule’ in school text books from the next session (Remember the question asking school children to write an essay on the Chief Minister winning the ‘Best Administrator’ award by Outlook during an all-Odisha competition organized by the School and Mass Education department last Children’s Day?). But none of it would make a difference to the average man - because it is not going to make his ministers ‘ideal’ ministers concerned only with the development of Odisha, transform party members into ‘ideal’ politicians working for the people or galvanise the grossly apathetic officers into ‘ideal’ babus. In fact, nothing is going to change; it is going to be back to business as usual once the din subsides.
The other important question thrown up by the MIT award is this: is Naveen really the ‘ideal’ Chief Minister? The answer to this question too would be influenced more by one’s perception rather than logic and reasoning. There would be those who would point to his ‘humble’ lifestyle, his exemplary restraint and his ‘pro-people’ policies to prove that he indeed is the ‘ideal’ Chief Minister. Conversely, there would also be those who would rake up his stubborn refusal to learn Odia, his reluctance – bordering on arrogance – to listen to the people (no-show at the grievance cell for 10 years!) and his soft-pedalling of major corruption cases to make a case that he is anything but an ‘ideal’ Chief Minister. For whatever little it is due, this columnist is of the view that his refusal (not inability, as I have been repeating for a decade now) to learn Odia alone disqualifies him to be even considered – forget being conferred with – the ‘Ideal Chief Minister’ award.
May be it is time for some organization to think out of box and conceive an altogether new category of award: the ‘Chief Minister with the Best Election Winning Strategy’ someday. I have absolutely no doubt that not only would our ‘most popular’ Chief Minister win the award hands down – and deservingly so – he would have virtually no competition from anyone, not even Manik Sarkar of Tripura. Such an award would come with the added advantage of shutting up the naysayers and giving them no opportunity whatsoever to challenge or rubbish the award or cry ‘fixing’ because his electoral record is there for everyone to see.