Samikhsya Bureau
What a shift for the Bharatiya Janata Party national spokesman Sambit Patra! From the air-conditioned enclosure to blistering through to the lanes and by-lanes in Puri district. From dominating monologues to soothsayer, standing before each household begging votes.
In his subsequent campaigning, Patra must be facing an uphill task to inlay his image as a political leader to start with. Real politics had never been his forte and his fresh bout must require a lot of hard work to build up the grounding in all the assembly segments of Puri Lok Sabha seat.
Not only that Sambit Patra is an alien entity in this region but all the assembly segments in this parliamentary constituency have Biju Janata Dal MLAs in place and that is the most crucial area for Patra to cruise in and create the footprints. Which requires a strong organisational stronghold to match the blitzkrieg of the BJD.
Patra has been making few flamboyant attempts to get closer to people through acts like taking food in a poor man’s house or similar such tricks. Given the fact that Puri had mainly remained a BJD bastion for last two decades except few segments like Brahmagiri, which once used to be a Congress fort represented by the swashbuckler face of the party, late Lalatendu Bidyadhar Mohapatra.
Whereas, the BJD has retained almost all the old faces in the assembly segments to ensure that the party’s sitting Lok Sabha MP, Pinakhi Mishra does not face any headwind at this juncture when anti-incumbency can raise some hurdles for the latter .
When the BJP has fielded Patra and it is explicit that the Prime Minister Narendra Modi may make Puri included in his itinerary for campaign, it can be viewed as a steroid for Patra but not a lasting panacea.
Some eyebrows have been raised over it. A Lok Sabha constituency that few days back rumoured to be a choice for Modi to contest suddenly pitchforked Sambit Patra to contest against a battery of enemies is something difficult to comprehend.
