Biju Patnaik: Slapping people, berating colleagues, the 'Bull of Kalinga' is still rampaging

It's difficult to pigeonhole a man like Biju Patnaik. Three days after thousands of irate striking employees went on a rampage inside the Orissa secretariat in Bhubaneswar, destroying property and roughing up senior officials, the Big Daddy of Indian politics was in Delhi trying to glue together the fractious Janata Dal. "I told these stupid chaps," the chief minister says of the mob that took potshots at him, "at least you should have learnt your cricket. You can't even bowl properly."

This is classic Bijuspeak. At 78, the controversial politician doesn't care a fig about anyone or anything. He speaks his mind and he does his own bidding. And no, he's not senile. Just his usual colourful self, letting off steam against a world that he thinks is collapsing around him. Between giving some valuable piece of advice to a recalcitrant Mulayam Singh Yadav and mollifying various political groupies, he's catching, up on Tom Clancy's Red Storm Rising.

In many ways Biju is a bit of a pulp book hero himself. At a towering six feet two inches and ramrod straight even after bypass surgery and persistent asthma, he is the Dirty Harry of Indian politics: a true maverick with a love for adventure and a bravado difficult to match in a country full of grovelling politicians.

In school he was "a terror, often caned for mischief." At 14, he set out with friends to cycle from Cuttack to Peshawar. When he was 18, he took to flying at the Delhi Flying Club and was grounded for a year after he crashed six planes doing low flying stunts on Tiger Moths to "show off to the girls".

In the Second World War, he performed some stirring feats, evacuating thousands from Rangoon and being shot down twice. Then he joined the freedom struggle and went to jail, labelled a "dangerous criminal". Later he flew a 25-seater Dakota for the legendary rescue mission to bail out Indonesian freedom fighters. And after Independence, the ace flier turned industrialist, with a private airline, and a steel and a textile plant.

He flourished, and then one day, chucked it all up and joined politics to become the chief minister of Orissa in 1961. His college mate Pranbandhu Kar, recalls: "I always remember him as a leader of our group, never a follower." That of course has made his career a chequered one, marked by willfulness and pride. Two years after becoming the chief minister, he resigned in response to the Kamraj plan.

His unconventional ways and disdain for red tape had already led to a spate of corruption allegations. This campaign against a man who had actually headed his own Rs 175-crore industrial empire - one of the largest in India then - and kick started work on the Rs 15-crore Paradip Port, actually resulted in his party getting wiped out in the 1967 elections. In the biggest setback of his career, Bijubabu lost all the four seats he contested.

But you can't keep Biju down. Six months later, he won the Rajnagar by-election. Trouble, however, continued to dog him. The Jana Congress-Swatantra Party coalition set up an inquiry commission against him. Biju was largely cleared, being indicted merely for some administrative improprieties. His honeymoon with the Congress ended in 1969 and was, inevitably, provoked by a controversy.

When Mrs Gandhi - whom Biju called 'Indu' - objected to his giving a Rajya Sabha ticket to his tribal minister T. Sangma, he typically ignored her and quit the party. He then formed the Utkal Congress which merged with the Janata Party in 1977 after enjoying a stint of power in Orissa jointly with the Swatantra Party. During the Emergency, he joined hands with the socialists and was jailed.

Later when the Janata Party came to power, he became the Union steel and mines minister. But the maverick in him remained alive: he openly supported Sanjay Gandhi's Maruti project. Apt for a man who admires entrepreneurship. Later, when the Janata Party split, he went along with Charan Singh, joined forces with Karpoori Thakur and finally with the Janata Dal, to return in 1990 as chief minister.

Through all this, the bad times and the good, he's remained himself. Of course, his detractors say he has changed for the worse, with all his whims and authoritarian ways. He slaps people when he's angry, talks of castrating rapists, publicly encourages people to beat up erring government officials and creates ripples in his party by demanding fiscal autonomy for his state and rejecting the Mandal Commission recommendations after his prime minister, V.P. Singh, tried to implement them.

He also betrays a strong feudal streak. He synchronised his 78th birthday with his government's third anniversary and celebrated it with a Rs 2-crore party through a statewide Panchayati Raj Day on March 5 this year at a time when Orissa couldn't pay its employees on time and reports of starvation deaths from drought hit districts were pouring in. As his close confidant turned bete noire, former chief minister of Orissa, Nilamoni Routray, says: "Biju behaves like a monarch, thinks the state exchequer is his personal property and the state is his estate."

But his flamboyance is what makes Bijubabu the Kalinga Sandh (The Bull of Kalinga) as he was portrayed in the 1990 elections. It's a cocksureness borne out of years of living dangerously ever since he piloted the National Airways' mail-service Foxsmoth planes all the way from Delhi to Karachi via Lahore, Multan and Jacobabad.

His bravura had prompted him to take up Jawaharlal Nehru's request to help the Indonesian freedom fighters in the '40s and rescue prominent leaders like Shahriyar and Mohammed Hata (Sukarno stayed behind) by flying defiantly into Jakarta. This inspired Sukarno to present him with an 100-acre estate in Palinbang, the seat of the Kalinga empire, which he returned, joking: "The King Of Kalinga doesn't accept gifts from his subjects."

But now his critics say the autumn of the patriarch has come. "He gets irritated very fast, has little patience and achieves very little in the end," says a Janata Dal leader in Orissa. For example, the famous slapping incidents, when an unemployed youth clapped Biju one when he was on his way to the secretariat.

"I took him by the hair and gave him three big slaps in turn. Later I gave him Rs 300. "In 1991 he gave a public call to beat up corrupt officials. "But send me a telegram for my permission before you beat them up," he announced. Soon the secretariat was flooded with telegrams. Some officials were manhandled, provoking an uproar.

But Bijubabu was not chastened. "We should not only beat up corrupt officials, we should guillotine them." Nor has the fact that a 60-year-old man was allegedly castrated by the police after Biju stated that castration was the apt punishment for rapists. "If I were the sole arbiter I would surely have castrated rapists."

That history hasn't made him the sole arbiter seems to hurt him a little, though he denies having any regrets. In his quaint Forest Park bungalow in Bhubaneswar, the Budda (old man), as he is fondly called by his people, sits alone during sundown watching the children play cricket down the road. Apart from his Man Friday Khairati, there's nobody else in this vast and neatly decorated bungalow.

His wife, Gyan, lives in Delhi, as do his sons Navin and Prem, Daughter Gita Mehta is a writer based in New York. Biju is perhaps unique among politicians in keeping his sons from leaping onto his political bandwagon. And his instructions to his sons are explicit: steer clear of Orissa. Visit it, but no business links, please. "He has never allowed us to take favours." says Navin, the youngest.

Living alone, reading voraciously and acting instinctively - "there's nothing wrong with being impulsive if it is born out of experience" - Bijubabu remains a uniquely mixed bag of impulses: peacemaker, stormy petrel, patriarch, pioneering entrepreneur, Nehruvian socialist. Through it all survives the passion for his state. "Orissa is a fascinating challenge for me with its unlimited natural wealth and poverty."

And though he is angry with the present, there is a deep down satisfaction with the life lived. "Tell me, who's led the kind of life I have? So no regrets. Period." In the twilight of his career, the Big Daddy might be flying in turbulent weather, as he has all his life, but his joie de vivre remains that of a man half his age.