Biju Janata Dal (BJD) MlA and spokesperson Sashi Bhusan Behera has an air of arrogance around him. Now in the wake of his ruling party taking a beating from the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) in the panchayat elections, he personifies the BJD’s shamelessness in bragging about the ‘number 1’ position of the party in the State.
Even as the third phase of the rural polls repeated the pro-BJP trend more than the earlier two rounds, Behera called a Press conference here and parroted the BJD’s claim that it is ahead of the BJP in the number of winning Zilla Parishad seats.
Numerically no doubt, the BJD leads the list of poll winners. But what Behera refused to admit that his party’s tally has been much substantially truncated by the saffron force when compared to the 2012 panchayat elections.
Behera appears to be a person who hates to look at the ground realities in politics and does his spokesman job to please his boss Naveen Patnaik, though by misleading the latter. He forgets that he has frequently been under open attack by supporters of the BJD itself in his own turf, the Jayadev Assembly constituency on the outskirts of the State capital city.
Political observers marvel at Behera’s one-upmanship in volunteering to prop up the BJD’s image amid its electoral reverses when much more mature party spokespersons keep away from their job obviously feeling unable to defend the indefensible.
Behera, reportedly an aspirant for a Minister’s berth, perhaps does not want to join other senior party leaders who have been attacking intraparty saboteurs for the poll setback and are in favour of an in-house introspection on the causes of the reverses.