Indomitable BJD wins Bijepur seat, aggressive BJP’s hope dashed

BJP fails to prevent to Naveen from wresting Bijepur seat

By Suryanarayan Panda

Bijepur/Bhubaneswar.Feb 28: Despite its aggressive campaigning in Bijepur, the Bharatiya Janata Party has failed to put up an impressive seat. The party got more than 41,00 less vote than the winning candidate Rita Sahu, indicating that it was still clueless on the poll strategies the BJD supremo has been applying to score in poll exercises.

While the BJD candidate Rita Sahu polled 1,02,871 votes, the BJP candidate got 60,938 votes. The Congress, which was representing the seat in Assembly for the last three terms, finished the poor third by bagging just 10,274 votes.

At least 1,81,716 voters had cast their ballots in favour of 13 candidates in the fray.

Meanwhile, many in social media platforms posted that Odisha Pradesh Congress Committee (OPCC) president Prasad Harichandan had resigned from his post owning moral responsibility for the debacle. However, Mr Harichandan could not be reached for his comment.

The Bijepur poll was considered as battle of honour by all the three political parties and they all tried to win the seat to boost morale of their rank and file ahead of the 2019 assembly polls.

While the BJD chief and chief minister Naveen Patnaik led the battle from the front for his party, Union minister Dharmendra Pradhan was spearheading the BJP campaign.

The Congress, on the other hand, failed to put up a spirited front to defend the seat as some of the prominent leaders stayed away from the campaigning.

Bypoll to Bijepur was necessitated following death of incumbent lawmaker Subal Sahu on August 22, 2017. Polling was held on February 24.