A turncoat and a greenhorn: BJD MLAs face heat in criminal cases filed on HC directions

The police filed an FIR against Sethy Sunday under Sections 294 (obscene acts and songs) and 506 (word, gesture or act intended to insult the modesty of a woman) of the IPC for allegedly misbehaving with a woman Zilla Parishad member in Keonjhar district.

The two women approached the high court following alleged police inaction in their respective complaints.

In the case of Das, the 29-year-old woman had initially lodged a complaint against him on May 13, 2022. She later moved the high court after police did not register it. In her latest complaint, she alleged that the BJD legislator did not turn up for marriage with her at a court in Jagatsinghpur on June 17 last year even though they had both applied for marriage registration at the office of the sub-registrar in Jagatsinghpur on May 17, 2022.

Das was elected to the Odisha Assembly in November 2020 when he won a bypoll from Tirtol, a Scheduled Caste (SC)-reserved constituency, which was necessitated following the demise of the incumbent MLA and his father Bishnu Charan Das.

A six-time MLA, Bishnu Charan had won five times continuously from the nearby Jagatsinghpur constituency since 1990 and from Tirtol in 2019. He had also been a minister for school and mass education in the Naveen Patnaik Cabinet from May 2006 to August 2007. He had to step down as the minister over his alleged involvement in the tampering of Bijay Sankar’s high school certificate (HSC) marksheet.

Bijay Shankar holds a BTech (mechanical engineering) degree. Despite his lack of political experience, he sailed through the bypoll with a margin of 41,703 votes, which was attributed to his father’s hold and the BJD’s organisational prowess in Tirtol.

Sethy, 67, is a two-time MLA from Anandapur, which is also an SC-reserved seat. A Zilla Parishad member from the BJP, Aseema Mishra, lodged a complaint against him on August 30, accusing him of “misbehaving” with her during a meeting at Anandapur.

Sethy had made his electoral debut from Anandapur in Keonjhar in 2004 as an Independent candidate, but lost. The seat was won by Congress strongman Jayadev Jena. Sethy’s fortune turned bright five years later when the BJD contested the seat for the first time after it broke up with the BJP ahead of the 2009 Assembly polls. The BJD gave him the ticket and he won.

In the 2014 polls, the BJD however denied its ticket to Sethy and fielded Mayadhar Jena, who had represented the seat as a BJP MLA from 2000 to 2004 during the BJD-BJP coalition government. A few months after Jena’s victory in the election, Sethy resigned from the BJD and joined the BJP.

Ahead of the 2019 polls, the BJP announced Sethy as its candidate from Anandapur. However, barely a week after securing the BJP’s nomination, he jumped ship and defected back to the BJD which gave him its ticket. Riding on the ruling party’s strong support base in Keonjhar, he again romped home.

Both Das and Sethy have refused to comment on the criminal cases registered against them.