Biju Janata Dal MP Baijayant ‘Jay’ Panda fanned the flames of political speculation higher on Tuesday with a strong article in an Odia paper, asking that his party “introspect” about its below-par performance in the recent local body elections in Odisha.
This comes a day after Tathagata Satpathy, BJD chief whip in the Lok Sabha, revealed, through a series of tweets, his apprehensions that the BJP, through an MP in his own party, might engineer a split in the BJD.
Patnaik govt.
Mr. Panda put out an English translation of the article that appeared in Tuesday’s edition of the Odia language daily Samaja .
In it, he recalled the early struggles to establish the BJD as a strong regional party, the issues on which it fought the J.B. Patnaik-led Congress government in the late 1990s and what he termed the “transformative leadership of Naveen Patnaik”.
He also recalled fondly the contributions of the late BJD leader Pyari Mohan Mohapatra, who had a very public falling out with Mr. Patnaik in later years.
BJD’s vote share
“Through these 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 to 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, saying that it had not been so during Mr. Mohanty’s period of ascendancy.
“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,” he said.
Saffron surge
In a reference to the surge of the BJP in the local polls, he said that other parties were gaining ground because of their “dynamic new leadership” and that unless Mr. Patnaik urgently dealt with the situation, the BJD would “struggle to face these challenges”.
Mr. Panda also wrote an article in the new, “reflections” portion of Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s personal App, the NaMo App,highlighting Mr. Modi’s successes.
