As BJP eyes Odisha, cracks appear in ruling party BJD

As part of its eastward thrust, the BJP’s upcoming national executive meeting in Odisha is literally getting a red carpet welcome in the form of implosions in the Biju Janata Dal (BJD), which has been ruling the State for about 17 years.

MP Baijyant Jay Panda, the BJD’s urbane face in the Capital — accused in not-so-subtle terms by his colleague Tathagat Satpaty of furthering the BJP’s agenda in the State — literally washed his party’s dirty linen in a strong editorial in a local newspaper.

Asking the BJD to introspect on its below-expectation performance in the just-concluded local body elections, Panda said key party posts are being occupied by opportunists. The editorial came a day after Satpaty said he feared the BJP is engineering a split in the BJD “through one MP”.

The editorial, originally published in Odia in local daily Samaj , reflected on the earlier struggles to establish the BJD as a strong regional force against the Congress. Although he referred to Chief Minister Naveen Patnaik’s leadership as “transformative”, Panda did not mince words as he laid bare the BJD’s structural weaknesses.

“Through two decades, until now, the BJD’s vote share and electoral performance only kept on improving. That is why, to the casual observer, the panchayat election results came as a shock. To those who have been analysing the party’s evolution in the past three-four years it should have been no surprise.

Many key positions are no longer held by people who struggled for the party, who might have given honest feedback, but rather by opportunists from various fields, including some who had worked against the party,” he said.

“The allegations in this period that not just the government but the party too has been run by bureaucrats have been growing louder,” he added. “There is now a large percentage of young voters who have no memory of the harassment and injustices that existed in the late 1990s. They are concerned about the harassment and injustices that exist today. If we honestly introspect, we must acknowledge that all the above listed allegations about the political environment in 1997, including widespread corruption and sheltering of powerful people who commit criminal acts, are again being alleged in Odisha in the last three years.”

In a reference to the surge of the BJP in the local body polls, he said that other parties are gaining ground because of their “dynamic new leadership” and that unless Patnaik urgently deals with the situation, the BJD will “struggle to face these challenges.”

Significantly, Panda also wrote an article in the new “reflections” portion of Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s NaMo app, entitled “The Modi Effect”, which dwelt at length on Modi’s ‘successes’.

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