Rajya Sabha member Pyarimohan Mohapatra has stated that Chief Minister Naveen Patnaik had called him from london on the night of May 29, 2012, the day he was allegedly planning to dethrone Patnaik from power.

“The Chief Minister asked me satirically, ‘You are my guru. Why are you doing this while I am not in townIJ You are trying to grab the Chief Minister post. You can’t be my permanent guru.’ I responded saying you are not the permanent CM. If you think that I am trying to unseat you, you may think as you like,” Mohapatra told a local news channel on Thursday, exactly two years after the politically

significant day.

Mohapatra, who was later dismissed from the ruling BJD, denied the charge that he had tried to upstage Patnaik.

“Had I tried to unseat Naveen Patnaik, I could have done so in 2009 or in 2012 by taking party MlAs outside the State instead of keeping them in my house. All that I wanted to do was to show that despite his (Patnaik’s) direction to the party MlAs not to visit me, as many as 33 MlAs gathered at my place,” Mohapatra said.

Mohapatra, who now heads the Odisha Jan Morcha, said the trust deficit between him and Patnaik had widened since 2010. “Naveenbabu believed that I had siphoned away Rs500 crore from the party funds. Had that been the case, why should I have struggled to provide even elementary campaign expenses to my candidates,” he asked, clarifying that he was not involved in the money matters.

Mohapatra said he had wanted to create an AIADMK in Odisha to defeat the BJD in the last elections.