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After BJD alliance talks fail, BJP fields 18 Odisha candidates
Assembly and Lok Sabha polls are scheduled simultaneously in the eastern state, which votes in four phases beginning on May 13 and ending on June 1.
The Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) on Sunday named candidates for 18 Lok Sabha seats in Odisha, formalising its decision announced earlier this week that it will not have a pre-poll alliance with the ruling Biju Janata Dal (BJD), as speculation earlier suggested.
Discussions between the two parties had started in the first week of March, raising hopes of them coming together for the first time in 15 years after the BJD exited the National Democratic Alliance in 2009. The two parties have largely cooperated in Parliament in the last decade.
However, on March 22, after days of protracted negotiations, BJP’s Odisha chief Manmohan Samal announced that the national party would fight alone across every seat “to create a developed India and a developed Odisha under the visionary leadership of Prime Minister Narendra Modi”. Hours later, BJD organisational secretary Pranab Prakash Das said that the regional party will contest all the seats and win more than “three-fourths” majority under the leadership of chief minister Naveen Patnaik.
On Sunday, the BJP announced candidates for 18 of the state’s 21 Lok Sabha seats,nominating Union education minister Dharmendra Pradhan from the prestigious Sambalpur seat and renominating party’s national vice-president Baijayant ‘Jay’ Panda from Kendrapara. Pradhan contested the Lok Sabha poll for the first time after he won from Deogarh (now abolished following delimitation) Lok Sabha seats in 2004. Panda, who won from Kendrapara in 2009 and 2014 on the Biju Janata Dal ticket, and quit it in 2019 to join BJP, has been renominated from the same seat.
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The party also named candidates for crucial Bhubaneswar and Puri Lok Sabha seats that had become a sticking point during alliance discussions with the BJD, people aware of the matter said. While MP Aparajita Sarangi has been fielded from Bhubaneswar, party’s national spokesperson Sambit Patra has been named as a candidate for the prestigious Puri seat.
Reacting to the list, BJD’s organisational secretary Pranab Das said his party will soon announce its list of candidates for all the 21 Lok Sabha constituencies and 147 assembly constituencies. “We will win more than three-fourth seats under the leadership of Naveen Patnaik. BJD will continue to take decisions keeping people of Odisha at the forefront always and their welfare in true sprit of cooperative federalism and statesmanship required for nation building,” he added.
The party is yet to announce the candidates for Kandhamal, Cuttack and Jajpur Lok sabha seats that would go to polls in 5th, 6th and 7th phases of the general elections, respectively.
According to people familiar with the matter, the two parties had almost finalised a seat pact in the first week beginning March 6, with the BJP initially set to get 47 seats and the BJD 100 in the assembly elections. Similarly, for the Lok Sabha polls, both the parties had reached a deal that the BJP would contest 14 seats and the BJD seven.
However, a leader aware of the development said, the two biggest deal-breakers in the negotiations were over the number of assembly seats the BJP should contest and BJP’s refusal to give some sort of “insurance” to let chief minister Naveen Patnaik’s key aide VK Pandian rule the state in a post-Patnaik scenario.
“The BJP state unit’s persistent demand for a larger share of seats threw a spanner in the negotiations,” a BJD functionary said, adding that the BJP had demanded 65-70 seats in the assembly, citing four internal surveys that the Naveen Patnaik government’s popularity “continued to wane’’.
A senior BJP leader, who was part of the discussion, said: “The first survey done by the party in December last year showed that the BJP is likely to win anything between 32 and 60 assembly seats... while the BJD was likely to win between 80 and 95 seats... The same survey showed that BJP was likely to win 15 Lok Sabha seats...”
“Thereafter there were 3 more surveys which showed that BJP would win around 60 assembly seats...Besides, surveys by few credible pollsters also showed that our party was gaining at the expense of BJD while the popularity of Patnaik continued to wane.”
Assembly and Lok Sabha polls are scheduled simultaneously in the eastern state, which votes in four phases beginning on May 13 and ending on June 1.
