By D.N. Singh
Soumya Ranjan Patnaik’s love with electoral politics has always remained a tempestuous love story of hope and despair. Now a Rajya Sabha MP from the Biju Janata Dal, Patnaik has been fielded by the party to contest for the Khandapada assembly seat amid protests from the BJD cadre there. That’s a different aspect that we shall deal later in this column.
Patnaik had never remained stationary in politics having earned the sobriquet of a ‘frequent turn-coat’. Hailing from a family rooted in Congress politics, Patnaik had his debut in politics in the Bharatiya Janata Party. Somehow fate did not smile on him there for long when he had to fall in line with the family track and joined the Congress party under the leadership of late J.B.Patnaik, the invincible patriarch of Odisha politics then. Making a paradigm shift from extreme right to Centrist idealogy.
A media entrepreneur and politician, Patnaik in a quick turn of events, got disillusioned by inner realities there and was expelled from the Congress. Then he floated his own outfit called Ama Odisha.
Patnaik had contested for the Khandapada assembly in 2009 on a Congress ticket and in 2014 contested for the same seat from his own party Ama Odisha but lost both the times.
Not to be disappointed by the two consecutive debacles, he has come to the fray yet again with a BJD ticket to blister through the dry tracks of Khandapada for a fresh take-off this time. Despite the aura of Naveen Patnaik that he may have in mind to cash in on, the path to his success now seems undulated by the sitting BJD MLA Anubhav Patnaik and his followers who have come out openly to protest against Soumya Ranjan Patnaik’s candidature.
If the heckles among the local cadre really turn to be a kind of game-changer then Soumya Ranjan Patnaik may face his third Waterloo in Khanadapada’s scorching summer solstice . Else only a win can only help him remove the tag of a habitual loser.
