The countdown to the Bharatiya Janata Party’s (BJP) national executive meeting in Bhubaneswar scheduled on April 15 and 16 is becoming more and more pronounced by the day with the party’s national leaders embarking here one by one and trying to mount pressure on the State’s ruling Biju Janata Dal (BJD).
On Friday, BJP national spokesperson Sambit Patra called a Press conference here and sought to taunt Chief Minister Naveen Patnaik saying the BJP executive meeting, before taking place, “has already had an impact” on the State’s politics, especially against the BJD.
Dr Patra, who came here along with BJP national media in-charge Anil Beloni, was replying to Patnaik’s remark earlier in the day that the BJP executive meet “will have no effects on Odisha”.
Dr Patra claimed that the BJP with its overwhelming success in the recent panchayat polls in Odisha has paved the way for its victory in the 2019 general elections in the State.
“lotus will bloom at feet of lord Jagannath” in the 2019 elections, and “there will be a Nabakalebar of Odisha”, he said.
“It will definitely happen because the people of Odisha have realised that no development has taken place in the past 17 years (of the BJD regime),” he said, adding that effective developmental programmes would be executed in the State under the guidance of Prime Minister Narendra Modi.
Replying to the BJD’s charge that the BJP is trying to break up the State’s ruling party, Patra said the BJP’s mantra is “construction and not destruction”. The saffron party is wedded to a path of building a developed nation by following Modi’s agenda, he said.
Also noteworthy on Friday was a sillier reply of Naveen Patnaik to a silly media question before he left on a five-day visit to New Delhi.
A reporter asked whether Patnaik would meet the two BJD MPs MPs Tathagata Satpathy and Baijayanta Panda, who recently had a war of exchanges on Twitter about the state of affairs in the BJD in relation to the BJP. Patnaik said, “Maybe, I will meet them.”
The funny aspect of the matter here, according to observers, is why Patnaik would meet the MP duo in Delhi after so many days of the controversy when he being the party supremo could have called them to meet him in Bhubaneswar. After all, Tathagata Satpathy was in Bhubaneswar earlier this week and visited the State Secretariat.