The elections in the Dhenkanal lok Sabha constituency this time will interestingly, include a fight between two members of late Chief Minister Nandini Satpathy’s family.
While Nandini’s younger son Tathagata Satpathy is seeking re-election from the seat as the BJD candidate, her elder son Nachiketa’s son Suparno Satpathy is the Aama Odisha Party (AOP) candidate here.
Though Tathagata has always been in a non-Congress party, Suparno had stuck to his grandmother’s grand old Congress till recently. As he did not get the Congress ticket for the seat, he switched over to the AOP led by Soumya Ranjan Patnaik, son-in-law of present Assam Governor JB Patnaik and younger brother of Congress leader and former PCC president Niranjan Patnaik. Soumya had turned a rebel in the Congress before forming the regional outfit AOP.
Even though the AOP has fielded nominees only on two lok Sabha and 36 Assembly constituencies, it has given candidates in all the seven Assembly seats under the Dhenkanal Parliamentary constituency, understandably at Suparno’s instance to help him in broadening his electoral base.Suparno’s supporters claim that he is the true representative of the Nandini Satpathy legacy in Dhenkanal compared to Tathagata.
The other significant contenders for the Dhenkanal lS seat are Rudra Narayan Pani of the BJP and Sudhir Samal of the Congress.