Inspired by the success of Bharat Jodo Yatra by Rahul Gandhi, former Chief Secretary of Odisha Bijay Patnaik will join the Congress at the headquarters of the All India Congress Committee (AICC) in New Delhi on Thursday.
He will head for Delhi along with many youth leaders and Odisha Pradesh Congress Committee (OPCC) president Sarat Patnaik to join an event where admission of new members to the party will take place in presence of Congress president Mallikarjun Kharge.
Earlier, it was believed that Bijay Patnaik, a 1976-batch Odisha-cadre IAS officer, who retired as Chief Secretary in 2013 after an eventful career of 37 years, would enter into politics as a BJD MP. Later, speculations were rife about his joining the Congress, but he stated that he had no interest in politics.
In 2015, Patnaik had joined the Anil Agarwal Foundation as President of the Vedanta University Project. However, he quit the Vedanta Group two years later stating that lack of interest from the Anil Agarwal Foundation in establishing a university led to this decision.
Meanwhile, the joining of new members into the Congress is believed to have been inspired by the encouraging response received by the Bharat Jodo Yatra, a mass movement spearheaded by Rahul Gandhi to unite the country in the face of divisive politics. After the five-month-old foot march which concluded recently in Kashmir, the Congress will embark on a ‘Hath Se Hath Jodo’ campaign, which will be launched by AICC general secretary Priyanka Gandhi Vadra and organised at village and block levels in the first phase followed by district and State levels.