Chinmaya Dehury

The book is a balanced telling of Chief Minister Patnaik’s journey from nowhere to occupy the top, where he has comfortably created the place of an undisputed leader, discusses

it is Patnaik, not someone else, who calls the shots in the government and the party as well. It, however, does mention the over-dependency of the chief minister on bureaucrats rather than on ministers to run the administration.

Patnaik, the book charts, entered into politics in 1997, founded the Biju Janata Dal (BJD) and became the party president, a post that he still holds. He became the Chief Minister of Odisha for the first time in 2000 with the help of alliance partner Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), riding on the sympathy following the demise of his legendary father and former Chief Minister Biju Patnaik and the public's anger over the Congress government's complete mismanagement in providing relief measures post the 1999 Super Cyclone that had devastated the state.

The author has articulated at his best how Naveen Patnaik, once a political novice, ruthlessly eliminated every possibility of an opposition and consolidated his position as the undisputed leader. A case in point is the ouster of Bijoy Mohapatra, once a powerful minister in the Biju Patnaik cabinet and chairman of Political Affairs Committee (PAC) of BJD.

Mohapatra had chosen most of the candidates, who were all his men in the 2000 elections. But when he was chairing the PAC meeting in Bhubaneswar, Patnaik, being the president of the party, cancelled Mohapatra's nomination as the candidate from Patkura and chose another as the party candidate, barely few hours before the completion of the nomination process leaving no room for Mohapatra to enter the Assembly.

After he became Chief Minister in 2000, he continued to eliminate his possible challenges within the party starting from Dilip Ray, a businessman-politician to Nalinikanta Mohanty, then BJD'S working president and second only to Naveen in the party hierarchy. The book