State Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) dissident leader Bijay Mohapatra on Friday took a potshot at party national president Amit Shah after the party’s ignoble defeat in Thursday’s election for the Komna Zilla Parishad Zone in Nuapada district, the home turf of BJP State president Basant Panda.
It is time for Shah to ponder over how his claim of the BJP capturing 120 of the 147 seats in the State Assembly in the 2019 elections would materialise, Mohapatra remarked while talking to reporters here.
Notably, Shah, during his three-day visit to the State in the first week of this month, had asserted at all his public meetings that
In fact, the Biju Janata Dal (BJD) emerged an impressive victorious in the Nuapada poll with the BJP finishing a third being behind the Congress. The outcome was particularly depressing for the BJP as the ZP Zone forms part of the Nuapada Assembly constituency, which Basant Panda won in the 2014 elections.
Moreover, the BJP had come out a cropper without bagging a single Nuapada ZP seat in this year’s panchayat polls though the party captured as many as 10 of the 30 ZPs in the State against none earlier.
So, Bijay Mohapatra, who has long been at loggerheads with the BJP State leadership, lost no time to come out with the reaction unpalatable and embarrassing to the party.
Commenting on Mohapatra’s statement, BJP State general secretary Prithwiraj Harichandan sarcastically said the former should better look after his own interests. In fact, the BJP leadership has been holding the same view any time Mohapatra made adverse statements on the party’s affairs.