How the BJP shot itself in the foot in Odisha

Five years ago, the Modi ‘wave’ which swept large parts of the country was stopped in its tracks by a Naveen ‘gale’ in Odisha. The BJP managed to win just one out of the 21 Lok Sabha seats in the state. Union Minister Jual Oram in Sundargarh scraped through the victory post by a margin of over 5, 000 votes.

But this time, the party is expecting a much better performance. For one thing, there is some anti-incumbency to be harvested after 19 years of uninterrupted Naveen Patnaik rule. For another, the BJP has extended its footprints in the state considerably since 2014 with Odisha figuring prominently in the BJP’s ‘Look East’ policy.

If it looks like another BJD sweep, the BJP has only itself to blame. The list of its candidates for the general elections threatens to undo all the hard work put in by the party in the last five years. While some in the list picked themselves, several others have raised eyebrows and suspicion that there is more to it than just electoral miscalculation.

Sample this. Subash Chauhan, the BJP candidates in the Bargarh Lok Sabha seat, polled over 3, 72, 000 votes, the highest polled by any BJP candidate in the state, and lost to Pravas Singh of the BJD by just 11, 178 votes, narrowest margin among all losing BJP candidates.

More recently, the BJP won 25 of the 34 zila parishads in Bargarh district in the three-tier panchayat elections in February, 2017. Understandably, state BJP leaders were counting this western Odisha seat bordering Chhattisgarh as one of the 5-6 in the state where a win was a near-certainty. But all those calculations have gone haywire after Chauhan was denied a ticket this time much to the chagrin of BJP workers in the area and surprise of everyone else. He has since quit the BJP.

The choice of the man who replaced Chauhan appears even more bizarre. BJP national general secretary Suresh Pujari, who lost the last election to Nagendra Pradhan of the BJD by only 30, 000 votes, has been shunted out of the constituency he has groomed assiduously and fielded from Bargarh instead for reasons that one cannot put a finger on.

The ticket for the Sambalpur Lok Sabha seat has gone to Nitesh Gangdev, the scion of the Deogarh royal family who won the Assembly election from his family borough with a whopping margin of over 89, 000 votes in 2014. While he was almost certain to get re-elected if fielded from the Deogarh Assembly seats, there is nothing to suggest his influence extends beyond his family’s erstwhile kingdom. As a wag put it; “It is called killing three birds with a single stone”!

The choice of BJP national spokesperson Dr. Sambit Patra from Puri has baffled many people. Patra may be a household name for TV viewers across the country, but is a virtual stranger in his home state since he has lived outside for the better part of his life. To make matters worse for him, he never had anything to do with Puri and is a poor substitute for Prime Minister Narendra Modi, who apparently had briefly toyed with the idea of contesting from there before deciding against it. No wonder Patra has little to bank on apart from the blessings of Lord Jagannath, the presiding deity of the state, and ‘Modiji’.

State BJP President Basanta Panda’s nomination from Kalahandi is another decision that has ‘disaster’ written all over it. Under his watch, the BJP drew a blank in his home turf of Nuapada even as it made spectacular gains in the rest of the state in the February, 2017 panchayat elections to end up with an impressive 297 zilla parishad seats out of a total of 849, up from a measly 36 in 2012. In the process, the hopes of former minister Pradeep Nayak, who had put up a spirited fight against the BJD in 2014, for a re-nomination were rudely dashed.

Kharavela Swain, the three-time MP from Balasore, joined the BJP on Monday morning and was nominated as the party candidate in Kandhamal Lok Sabha constituency a hour later. BJP does have pockets of influence in this communally sensitive constituency, but it is unfamiliar territory for Swain. He thus has a tough battle on his hands in a constituency that BJD candidate Achyuta Samanta has been cultivating with meticulous planning for years.

Of course, there is no guarantee that the BJP would have won all these seats if it had not messed up with the selection and picked the right candidates. But it would have given the party the best possible chance of winning more than the lone seat it won last time.

The saffron party has clearly shot itself in the foot.