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Journalism of Courage
With party president and Chief Minister Naveen Patnaik on Thursday nominating Lekhasri Samantasunghar from Balasore, the Biju Janata Dal (BJD) in Odisha is again set to field 33% women in the Lok Sabha elections.
On International Women’s Day (March 8) this year, ex- bureaucrat and Naveen Patnaik’s trusted aide V K Pandian had assured women workers that the party would continue to reserve a third of all Lok Sabha seats for women in 2024.
The regional party has so far nominated six women out of the 20 names it has announced for various Lok Sabha seats. Besides Lekhasri in Balasore, the party has fielded women in Koraput, Aska, Jajpur, Balasore, Jagatsinghpur, Bhadrak and Bargarh. In comparison, the main opposition, the BJP, has fielded four women on Odisha’s 21 seats.
The BJD — which had reached out to 22 national and regional parties in 2018 to build a consensus for the passage of the women’s reservation Bill, which was eventually passed in 2023 — had fielded 33% women candidates in the Lok Sabha for the first time in 2019. Of its seven women candidates, five had won.
In panchayati raj institutions and urban local bodies, the BJD government had in 2012 already increased the reservation for women to 50%, from the 33% that had been implemented by his father and ex-CM Biju Patnaik in the early 1990s.
A former Zoology lecturer, Lekhasri had joined the BJP in 2014 and became the face of the party’s Odisha unit on TV. Known to be a fierce critic of the Patnaik government, she caught eyeballs with her regular outburst against the BJD government on different issues. She had even taken to the roads to lead the BJP’s protest against BJD heavyweights on different issues.
On April 7, she announced her resignation from the saffron party on X, blaming the state leadership for doing nothing. After quitting, Lekhasri said that despite her sincerity and hard work, she couldn’t earn the trust of the leadership, that there was nothing left for her to do in the saffron party.
“I express my gratitude to the CM for nominating me for the Balasore seat. The CM has a vision for the state and I will try to give my 100% to take forward the development agenda of the party and the state government,” said Lekhasri, who recently dumped the BJP to join the Patnaik-led party.
Lekhasri is the second senior leader, after Bhrugu Baxipatra, to switch from the BJP to the BJD in Odisha. Baxipatra is the BJD’s pick for Berhampur Lok Sabha seat. With Lekhasri, the number of BJP and Congress turncoats in the party’s Lok Sabha candidate’s list has risen to eight.
The BJD on Thursday also announced candidates for nine Assembly segments, thereby clearing names for 117 of the 147 Assembly segments in the state, which will go for simultaneous polls. The party has so far repeated most of its sitting MLAs, barring one seat, where it has replaced the sitting MLA with his wife.
In the Sambalpur Assembly segment, the BJD has fielded veteran leader Prasanna Acharya against senior BJP leader Jaynarayan Mishra, the Leader of Opposition in the last state Assembly. Acharya’s nomination from Sambalpur assumes significance, as the Sambalpur Lok Sabha constituency is set for a high-profile fight between Union Education Minister Dharmendra Pradhan and the BJD’s organisational secretary Pranab Prakash Das.
The party has also fielded 22 women out of the 117 candidates announced so far, which is lower than the party’s 33% internal reservation for Lok Sabha seats, although it is an improvement on 2019, when it had fielded 19 women across 147 seats, 12 of whom had won.
