Cong, BJD-BJP field 10 greenhorns for 21 seats

The Congress and the BJD-BJP alliance have fielded as many as ten greenhorns in the state's 21 constituencies.

The Congress and the BJD-BJP alliance in Orissa, the main combatants in the simultaneous elections being held this month, have fielded as many as ten greenhorns in the state's 21 Lok Sabha constituencies.

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The Congress has set up five new faces in the 20 seats the party is contesting having left the Mayurbhanj (ST) seat to the JMM in a seat sharing arrangement.

The new party candidates are Niranjan Panda (Balasore), Amiyakanta Mallick (Jajpur-SC), Abhimanyu Behera (Phulbani- SC), Sanjay Bhoi (Sambalpur) and Nilakantha Naik (Keonjhar-ST).

The BJP's national secretary Dharmendra Pradhan and Bhagirathi Majhi, a former bank employee, are the new faces fielded by the party from the Deogarh and Mayurbhanj (ST) seats respectively.

Eminent lawyer Brahmananda Panda, Sugrib Singh and former Congress minister Harihar Swain are the debutants set up by BJD who will contest from the Jagatsinghpur, Phulbani (SC) and Aska parliamentary constituencies respectively.

Of the 21 members of the dissolved Lok Sabha from Orissa, 13 are seeking re-election. Seven of them are from the BJP, five from the BJD and one from the Congress.

The BJD and BJP are contesting 12 and nine Lok Sabha seats respectively, keeping intact their earlier seat sharing arrangement. The BJD had won ten of the 12 seats it contested last time while the BJP had made a clean sweep of all its nine constituencies.

The BJD nominees seeking re-election are Union Minister for Water Resources Arjun Charan Sethi (Bhadrak-SC), Union Minister for Steel Braja Kishore Tripathy (Puri), Prasanna Acharya (Sambalpur), Bhartruhari Mahtab (Cuttack) and Prasanna Patsani (Bhubaneswar).

Union Minister for Tribal Affairs Jual Oram (Sundargarh- ST), Anadi Charan Sahu (Berhampur), Parsuram Majhi (Nabarangpur), Bikram Keshari Deo (Kalahandi), Sangeeta Singh Deo (Balangir), Kharavela Swain (Balasore) and Ananta Nayak (Keonjhar-ST) are the BJP aspirants seeking re-election.

Former union minister KP Singh Deo, who is trying to enter the Lok Sabha for the seventh time, is seeking re-election from Dhenkanal. The Congress had two members from Orissa in the dissolved House.

The eight members of the dissolved House who are not in the fray included Trilochan Kanungo (Jagatsinghpur), Jagannath Mallick (Jajpur-SC), Prabhat Samantaray (Kendrapara), Kumudini Patnaik (Aska) and Padmanav Behera (Phulbani-SC). All of them were BJD members.

Two BJP members, former union minister Debendra Pradhan (Deogarh) and Salkhan Murmu (Mayurbhanj-ST) are also not contesting the polls as also Hema Gamang (Koraput-ST) of the Congress.

While Debendra Pradhan has chosen to contest from the Pallahara assembly seat this time, his son Dharmendra Pradhan would replace him in the Deogarh constituency for the first time.

Dharmendra was a member of the dissolved Assembly from Pallahara, the seat his father is contesting this time.

Salkhan Murmu, however, had put the BJP in a quandary when he floated the Jharkhand Disham Party while remaining the BJP MP from Mayurbhanj.

His activities were also confined mostly to Jharkhand. The BJP, which initially toyed with the idea to set up Minister of State for Fisheries and Animal Resources Development Droupadi Murmu from Mayurbhanj, later decided upon Bhagirathi Majhi.

Hema Gamang, who was the Congress MP from the Koraput (ST) seat in the dissolved Lok Sabha and was initially renominated from the constituency, was later made the party candidate from the Gunupur (ST) assembly constituency.

The Koraput seat was given to former Chief Minister and Hema's husband Giridhar Gamang after he strongly resented the party decision to ask his wife to seek re-election from there. Gamang had won the seat eight times in-a-row between 1972 and 1998.

Hema had won the seat after her husband became Chief Minister in 1999.

BJD's Padmanav Behera, party sources said, had expressed the desire to contest the assembly elections from the Phulbani (SC) seat which was represented by his wife Bishnupriya Behera in the dissolved House. Bishnupriya also worked as the Minister of State for Women and Child Development in the Naveen Patnaik government.

Three of the BJD MPs, Prabhat Samantaray, Kumudini Patnaik and Jagannath Mallick had been expelled from the party for "anti-party activities", but the expulsion order on the last named was later withdrawn.

Samantaray has not entered the fray so far while Kumudini Patnaik has vacated her Aska Lok Sabha seat for her husband Ramkrushna Patnaik, a former state finance minister. The couple have since joined the Congress.

Kumudini Patnaik is presently contesting from the Kodala assembly seat, won by her husband several times, on the Congress ticket.