Odisha’s Sambalpur gears up for a tough battle on May 25. Heavy-weight leaders from BJP and BJD will lock horns to gain a mandate.
The mineral rich epicentre of western Odisha will see a close contest between senior Union minister Dharmendra Pradhan and Pranab Prakash (Bobby) Das.
The constituency is the most-talked about seat of 2024 Lok Sabha polls in the state.
While Pradhan is pitted against Pranab Prakash (Bobby) Das, the organisational secretary in Biju Janata Dal and officially number two in the party, making it an intense battle, what remains at the back of the mind of both is the fact that in the last two Parliamentary polls, the fate of the winning candidate was sealed by a narrow margin.
In 2019, the margin between the winner (BJP) and loser was under 1 per cent, translating to just about 9,000 votes. The gap was 3 per cent in 2014 when BJD won the seat and 2 per cent in 2009 when Congress emerged as the winner. All the three parties won the Sambalpur seat once in the last 15 years.
Incidentally, the last time Pradhan contested an election was also in 2009 when he lost the assembly poll. Subsequently, he was elevated to the Rajya Sabha by the saffron party and rose to become one of the senior most ministers in the Narendra Modi cabinet.
Locals are of the view that the BJD candidate was not a push-over and people were happy with large scale renovation work at the state’s second most important temple.
There has been Rs 200 crore redevelopment of the temple and surrounding areas by the state government. The administration will also start a Mahanadi aarti in front of the temple for which ghats and a sky-walk are being constructed.
After the falter of bonhomie following the failure of a plan to stitch a BJP-BJD alliance. The saffron party’s star campaigners are now crisscrossing states fiercely attacking the BJD supremo as it hopes to gain from Odisha to make up for the loss of seats in other parts of the country.
Bharatiya Janata Party accused CM Naveen Patnaik for picking up an outsider like Das who hails from the coastal area to contest the poll in western Odisha. However, even Pradhan is not a local as he comes from Angul, which is more than 100 km away from Sambalpur and is part of another Lok Sabha constituency.
If Pradhan is seen as one of the BJP’s chief ministerial faces should it win Odisha, Das also comes from famed pedigree. The son of the late Ashok Das, a popular Janata Dal leader, the 51-year-old is a three-time Jajpur MLA and was made BJD organisational secretary in 2020.
To fight the “outsider” tag, Das earlier declared Sambalpur as his second home, pointing to the fact that his father Ashok Das had pursued his higher education in the city, making it a “60- to 70-year relationship”. He has been sported consistently in Sambalpuri Ikat shirts in the poll campaign, instead of his regular white shirt. Senior BJD leader is considered the third-most powerful individual in the party after the CM and his close aide VK Pandian.
Both Patnaik and Pandian, the BJD’s star campaigner this time, have spent extensive time in Sambalpur. They have accused Pradhan of doing nothing for the constituency as Union minister.
Out of the seven assembly constituencies under Sambalpur, BJD currently holds four while BJP has three. Over the years, the vote share of the Congress has declined.
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