Scratch the surface of the ruling Biju Janata Dal (BJD) and you will find it not as solid as the general perception goes.A majority section of the party’s leaders, mostly senior MlAs, are not happy with the goings-on in the organisation headed by Chief Minister Naveen Patnaik from its inception about one and a half decades ago.
While a section of the senior MlAs are sore over not being included in the Ministry, other sections have been sulking for being sidelined in the party organisation. A reliable BJD source said Naveen Patnaik wants these leaders to feel ignored!
Here is the case of senior BJD MlA from Athagarh and former Minister Ranendra Pratap (Raja) Swain. A vociferous anti-Congress and anti- Pyarimohan Mohapatra leader though he is, Swain has not been given a Ministerial berth ever since his brief stint as a Minister of State in the BJD’s second term.
Swain was kept out of power during the period when Pyarimohan Mohapatra was calling the shots in the party, and now things have not improved for him even more than a year after the end of Mohapatra’s regime. This is despite the fact that Patnaik during electioneering had promised the Athagarh voters to make Swain a Minister.
And as a less than consolation prize, Patnaik has appointed Swain as the head of a youth committee of the BJD to highlight the new State Youth Policy of the Government.
Similarly, senior MlA and another smalltime former Minister Pradeep Maharathy has been made the chief of the party’s agriculture committee to highlight the Government’s agriculture policy.
Though Swain and Maharathy have meekly accepted the posts, obviously not to incur big boss Patnaik’s displeasure and run the risk of being deprived of party ticket to contest next elections, they are far from happy over the sops
granted to them, say party sources.
While Maharathy keeps silent over the issue, Swain has, however, chosen to go to the social media terming his new assignment as a “lollipop”. And he has only restricted his reaction to this remark for he has to be in the virtual one-man (Patnaik) party.
Take the cases of several other senior MlAs like Nrushingha Sahu, Ananta Das, Prafulla Chandra Ghadai, Amar Prasad Satpathy, Bed Prakash Agarwal and Kalindi Behera, who have been sidetracked in the Government.
Another lot of MlAs such as Atanu Sabyasachi Nayak, Pushpendra Singh Deo and Pratap Jena are also not given any important assignments either in the party or in the Government after they were dislodged from the Ministry last year for once being cohorts of Pyarimohan Mohapatra.
These leaders are in the party for the namesake and are not as happy as Damodar Rout, Kalpataru Das, Bijayshree Routray, Debi Prasad Mishra and Arun Sahu, who are in the Ministry.
Though MlAs Pravat Tripathy and Sanjay Dasburma are not made Ministers, they are happy for having close proximity to the Chief Minister.
A majority of the leaders are known to be resentful of the way the party and the Government are being run. And this does not augur well for BJD which claims to be heading for a record fourth-time consecutive victory in the 2014 elections, feel observers.