Samikhsya Bureau
Long wait comes to an end as the Biju Janata Dal on Monday declared its candidate for nine Lok Sabha and 54 assembly seats for the phase one and two polls in Odisha.
The most significant takeaway is that as stated by Patnaik himself, he will be contesting for two assembly seats, Hinjili in Ganjam district and Bijepur in Bargarh district of western Odisha.
Among the nine Lok Sabha seats, the BJD has chosen to field eight new faces including four women candidates. The Lok Sabha constituencies going to the polls in both phase one and phase two are Kalahandi (Puspendra Singh Deo), Koraput (Kaushlya Hikaka) Nabrangpur (Ramesh Majhi) and Berhampur (Chandra Sekhar Sahoo) in the first phase and Balangir (Kalikseh Singh Deo), Bargarh (Prasanna Acharya), Aska (Pramila Bisoi), Kandhamal (Achyut Samant), Sundergarh (Sunita Biswal).
The four women candiates will contest Lok Sabha for the first time. However, leaders like Prasanna Acharya and Kalikewsh Singh Deo have been Lok Sabha MPs earlier. Singh Deo is Balangir’s sitting MP.
Naveen Patnaik’s candidature from the Bijepur assembly seat can come as a moral booster for the BJD in that area in western Odisha where relatively the Congress used to have a good footing. The BJP too appears more comfortable in western Odisha than in the coastal parts of the state.
