Jajpur MLA Pranab Prakash (Bobby) Das immensely enjoys Chief Minister Naveen Patnaik’s trust even if he has not been made a Minister this time.
The latest occasion in which this was evident relates to the ruling BJD’s preparations for the prestigious July 20 elections to the Patkura Assembly constituency. Party sources said that when Patnaik decided to field Bed Prakash Agarwalla’s widow Sabitri from Patkura, he immediately called up Bobby and assigned him the onerous task of ensuing the party’s victory with a big margin. Since then, Bobby has been camping in Patkura and formulating and executing strategies to achieve the goal.
The BJD, the party sources said, aims a victory margin of as high as 30,000 votes though it secured a lead of only 6,000 votes from the Patkura Assembly segment in the last Lok Sabha elections for the Kendrapada seat. Naveen Patnaik seems hell-bent on preventing Patkura BJP candidate Bijay Mohapatra from an entry to the State legislature.
As Naveen Patnaik has strong confidence in Bobby, known as the ‘Field Marshal of BJD’, he has given the young operator many helping hands including seven senior Ministers, 22 MLAs, an MP and scores of other leaders. Bobby has been reporting the day-today developments to the party supremo, who is scheduled to hit the campaign trail only for a day on July 17.
Bobby has Patnaik’s trust since a long time, particularly during the Assembly by-polls in Bijepur in 2017 and the general elections this year when his political acumen and loyalty was proved.
He had taken campaign leadership and ensured victory of the BJD in Bijepur even as the seat was in hands of the Congress for more than a decade.
It was significant that Bobby had predicted that the BJD would get 105 to 112 seats in the Assembly this year while and the party grabbed 112 seats.