Meet the giant killer who dealt Naveen Patnaik his first political defeat: BJP’s Laxman Bag

The leader who emerged as the giant killer in Kantabanji was the BJP’s Laxman Bag, who secured 90,876 votes against Patnaik’s 74,532. The Congress’s sitting MLA Saluja, a four-time winner from here, finished third with just 26,839 votes. It was the first time the BJP won Kantabanji.

In the 2014 Assembly polls, Bag had finished third from the same seat when the BJD’s Ayub Khan had won. In 2019, he had lost the seat by just 128 votes to the Congress’s Santosh Singh Saluja.

Bag, 48, says he was “unsure” of his political fortunes this time as well, when Patnaik announced he would contest from Kantabanji along with Hinjili. However, he ended up defeating Patnaik by 16,334 votes. “The voters were silent through the campaign, but they voted smartly,” says Bag.

Known to have strong roots in the constituency which has a long history of distress migration, especially to brick kilns in Andhra Pradesh and Telangana, Bag is believed to have built a base by helping migrant workers in case of trouble.

Besides the state-wide wave which powered the BJP in the Assembly polls, his connection to the Yadav community, which is dominant in the region with a population of around 40,000, also seems to have worked in his favour.

Summarising Bag’s achievement, a close aide said: “Before he contested the 2014 polls, Bag had no previous experience of any electoral politics. He also has no family background. Bag was doing social work in the constituency and was involved with the VHP and Bajrang Dal.”

Patnaik had chosen Kantabanji as part of a strategy to stop the BJP gaining momentum in western Odisha. A similar move had paid off for the BJD in 2019, when Patnaik had contested from Bijepur in western Odisha along with Hinjili. Not only had the BJD chief won from Bijepur, but he had also won all the other Assembly seats under the Bargarh parliamentary seat, even as the BJP had swept the Lok Sabha polls in the region.

This time, the result was exactly the opposite. The BJD not only lost the Balangir parliamentary seat, under which Kantabanji falls, to the BJP’s Sangeeta Singh Deo, it also faced defeat in four other Assembly segments of the total seven under Balangir.