Veteran leader, former Minister and AICC member Ramkrushna Patnaik resigned from the Congress on Saturday. His wife Kumudini Patnaik, who is a former MP from Aska, too resigned from the party.
The Patnaiks, in their resignation letters sent to PCC president Jayadev Jena, have expressed their displeasure over the manner in which the party is being run. However, they said that they have not made up their mind about their next course of action. There are speculations that the Patnaiks may drift towards their old party, the Biju Janata Dal. Ramkrushna Patnaik, popularly known as the Ganjam Tiger, told reporters here on Sunday that he and his wife had earlier informed the PCC as well as the AICC as early as on January 25 that they would not be interested in contesting the 2014 elections. Finally, Patnaik and his wife sent in their resignations to the PCC and AICC as his proposals to help activate the party at the grassroots level continued to be ignored by the party bosses, he said. Kumudini Patnaik said she had agreed to contest the coming lok Sabha polls from Aska after the party leadership requested her to reconsider her decision not to contest. “I had agreed to be a candidate after they persuaded me subject to the condition that they do not ignore the claims of people who are solidly behind us,” she said. “We may not contest in the coming elections and that seems likely,” she said. Political observers, however, believe that the Patnaik couple’s resignations may have followed the PCC’s latest decision to field the son of former Aska Congress MP Ramachandra Rath in place of Kumudini Patnaik. This would impact the political scenario not only in the Aska lok Sabha constituency but in Ganjam district as a whole, the observers said.