BJD overcomes factionalism to wrest Balasore from BJP

BHUBANESWAR: The BJD overcame factionalism within the party to put up a winning show in the Balasore assembly segment, where byelections were held on November 3.
The BJD won the seat by 13,351 votes.

There were murmurs of discontent within the party when it fielded Swarup Kumar Das, a little-known candidate, from the Balasore seat that it hoped to wrest from BJP. Several BJD functionaries had expressed fear that the choice of candidate would lead to the party facing a tough time at the hustings.The BJD, however, paid little heed to the dissenters.
Senior BJD leaders attributed the party’s victory to the good governance and the popularity of party president and chief minister Naveen Patnaik, the major force behind the regional party’s successive electoral victories over the past two decades.
“A day after the bypoll, I had claimed that our winning margin would be similar to the margin by which we lost the seat in the 2019 assembly elections (13,406). The results are there for us to see. There was some dissent initially among the workers over the candidature of Swarup Kumar Das but everything was settled cohesively,” said BJD vice-president Debi Prasad Mishra, who was the party’s coordinator in Balasore.
Mishra said the appeal of the chief minister during a virtual rally, in which he said he would personally monitor development in Balasore, had had a great impact on voters. “Development has always been our key agenda. The state government has undertaken a number of development works in Balasore, including the establishment of a medial college. But there is scope for more work and Naveen babu will now be in the driver’s seat in the constituency,” said Mishra.
The BJD had also launched an aggressive campaign in Balasore ahead of the byelection. More than a dozen ministers of the state cabinet and around 30 MLAs and senior leaders had camped in the constituency for nearly three weeks to oversee the party’s campaign there.
“Tirtol is known as a BJD stronghold. A win in Balasore means a lot for our party although it won’t have any impact on the numbers in the state assembly. The party had pulled out all the stops to win the seat as Balasore is known to be the bastion of Union minister Pratap Sarangi. The victory sends the signal that the popularity of Naveen Patnaik is still intact,” said a senior BJD functionary.
The party was so keen to win the seat that it waited for polling to end to suspend former Balasore MLA Jiban Pradip Dash, following the surfacing of an audio clip of a purported conversation between the ex-MLA and a party worker in which the former was heard asking his supporters to vote for BJP.