Bhubaneswar: Reports in a section of the media about a ‘secret meeting’ of several senior politicians—including some former Biju Janata Dal leaders—has triggered speculation about a possible division in the BJD that ruled Odisha uninterruptedly for 24 years before being trounced by the BJP in the 2024 Assembly polls.
The reports said that these leaders assembled at a posh city hotel on October 16, 2024 to discuss ways to split the party on the lines of Shiv Sena and Nationalist Congress Party (NCP) in Maharashtra. These reports said that some founding members such as Dillip Ray and Bijay Mohapatra attended the meeting with the tacit support of Prasanna Acharya—the Deputy Leader of Opposition in the State Assembly.
Former MP Rajashree Mallick, former MLA Pravat Tripathy, sitting MLA Prashant Behera were among those who attended the meeting.
A strategy was mulled to split the BJD on the lines of the Shiv Sena or the NCP in Maharashtra. Credence is lent to these reports as the BJD has not come up with any statement. These leaders, the reports said, are peeved the way bureaucrat-turned politician VK Pandian and former Organisation Secretary Pranab Prakash aka Bobby Das handled the party affairs and was also key to some of these leaders dissociating from the party.
The debacle of the BJD is attributed by analysts and party insiders to the growing influence of Bobby Das and Pandian—the closest aide of former Chief Minister Naveen Patnaik who is also the supremo of the party. Several leaders in the party have openly spoken about the influence of Pandian and Bobby during distribution of tickets to candidates at a time when the popularity graph of the BJD government and that of Naveen Patnaik was on the downslide.
Senior leaders of the party—some of now disassociated from the party—have squarely blamed ‘mismanagement’ of polls by these two leaders. A senior leader of the party—Amar Satapathy—went a step ahead demanding acknowledgement of responsibility for the defeat by party supremo. His argument was solid as he said Patnaik took credit of victories in all polls prior to the 2024 elections, he also should take responsibility for the defeat. Veteran politician Prasanna Patsani minced no words while saying that the Conch party’s future is dark as long as Pandian is involved in its affairs.
As the party struggled to find the causes of the defeat, Bobby expressed a desire to contest a by-election from Jajpur and the social media was agog that the incumbent MLA Sujata Sahoo may be asked to resign from the seat. However, Sahoo later clarified that she is unlikely to quit as she has not got any instruction from her ‘leader’—apparently a reference to Bobby. Every passing day some story or the other on the role of these two aides of Patnaik in the party emerges even after nearly four months of the poll debacle.
