By D.N. Singh
Among all fights for the 147 Assembly seats in Odisha, what is being purportedly pitchforked as the venue for battle royal by the opposition is the home turf of Naveen Patnaik, Hinjili assembly constituency. It may be described as a triangular contest where Biju Janata Dal chief Naveen Patnaik shall be defending the seat for the fifth time against few odds.
Patnaik must be readying to face a headwind from the popularity of Prime Minister Narendra Modi and the candidate pitted against the taciturn BJD supremo is the most talkative BJP leader Pitamber Acharya, trying his luck as a debutant from Hinjili. The Congress candidate for this VIP segment is Sanbhunath Panda.
Before Acharya threw his hat into the ring, there had been a ramification of a notionally propelled impression that Patnaik has found Hinijli no more a safe ground for him in the light of slew of alleged failures in the implementation of welfare schemes. Some other rumours were also making round that Patnaik’s shifting focus to Bijepur assembly seat was a decision taken at the pen-ultimate time basing on a intelligence report, which had said that Patnaik did not enjoy the same charishma there once he used to.
Then Patnaik’s abrupt decision to also contest the Bijepur assembly seat in Bargarh district lent the fodder to the opposition to further churn the issue to its advantage. So the BJP went in favour of pitting Pitamber Acharya to take on the chief minister. Win or loss, Acharya’s candidature against Patnaik itself serves as a booster for Acharya’s political profile.
Acharya, a lawyer by profession, must be aware that targeting any rival in television debates is easy but when one comes down to the field the reality grows messy. What is indeed a bit amazing is that most of the BJP leaders in the state find it handy riding piggyback on one man’s popularity than believing on their own footprints in the areas.
Acharya’s decision to accept the challenge to face the chief minister in Hinjili, where the former has no foothold either politically or otherwise, is a daring one. Good that he has stood up for it and is ready to give the chief minister a strong chase riding on the crest of someone’s popularity.
For Hinjili, Acharya can be best described as a paratrooper and the decision to send him to take on Patnaik was, perhaps, an unscripted political strategy by the BJP for the sake of fielding someone anyway.
If intelligence inputs emitted ominous impulses for Patnaik, no chief minister, whosoever, can be so unwise to contest a seat that he or she might lose.
In a nutshell it were a mind game from both the camps, BJD and BJP. Patnaik’s choice for Bijepur might be a politically taken diversionary tactics to keep the rival cheerleaders away from Hinjili and overturn the feeling that Western Odisha is a bastion of non-BJD parties.
On this topic, the Prime Minister in his next visits may chose to take a few subtle digs at Patnaik to say that a change is required and Acharya may unleash his vocal firearms like any other diligent lawyer, but it is too early to hazard a guess now that what comes out – whether Acharya emerges a giant killer or Patnaik makes it for the fifth time.
