The BJP on Tuesday picked four-time Keonjhar MLA Mohan Charan Majhi who is from the tribal Santhal community as Odisha’s Chief Minister. Majhi will take oath along with Deputy CMs K V Singh Deo and Pravati Parida, who will become the first woman Deputy CM of the state, at the Janata Maidan in Bhubaneswar at 4.55 pm on Wednesday. “Though I was confident that he would be chosen as a minister after the BJP won the majority, I never thought that he would become the CM. Whatever he has got is because of the blessings of Lord Jagannath. I am very proud of him,” Majhi’s wife Priyanka Marndi told reporters. They have two sons. Majhi, 52, will become the first Odisha CM from the BJP. He has been associated with the party for a long time and is a surprise pick for the top post. He comes from Raikala in Keonjhar and was a teacher at the local Saraswati Shishu Mandir, part of a network of schools run by the RSS’s educational wing Vidya Bharti before beginning his political career as the sarpanch in 1997. Majhi was elected to the Assembly for the first time in 2000 and was re-elected in 2004, becoming the Deputy Chief Whip in the BJD-BJP coalition government. The CM-elect failed to hold his ground in the 2009 elections after the BJD and the BJP broke their alliance following the Kandhamal riots and the BJP took a massive hit. The BJD won 103 of the 147 Assembly seats, up 42 constituencies, while the BJP finished third with a tally of six seats, down from 26. Majhi failed to win in 2014 too but bounced back in 2019 to win a third term from Keonjhar even though the Naveen Patnaik-led party won all the remaining seats. In the district. With the BJP becoming the principal Opposition party, Majhi was appointed the party’s chief whip and he took on the Naveen government head-on. Majhi filled the vacuum in the state leadership after Leader of the Opposition Pradipta Kumar Naik was hospitalised because of his prolonged illness because of Covid-19. When the party repeated Majhi in this election, he won Keonjhar with a margin of 11,577 votes, defeating the BJD’s Mina Majhi. Majhi will be the first CM from Keonjhar in the northern part of the state. The district, rich with mineral reserves, is among the major contributors to the state’s GDP. The new Deputy CMs The BJP stuck a regional balance while picking the two Deputy CMs. Six-time Patnagarh MLA Kanak Vardhan Singh Deo, 67, is from the erstwhile royal family of Patnagarh in Odisha’s western region and a former president of the state unit of BJP. The grandson of former Odisha CM Rajendra Narayan Singh Deo, Kanak Vardhan was elected to the Assembly for the first time in 1995 and continued to hold Patnagarh till 2019 when he lost to the BJD’s Saroj Meher. He defeated Meher this time by 1,357 votes. From 2000 to 2009, when the BJD and the BJP were in a coalition, Kanak Vardhan managed key portfolios such as Industries and Urban Development. His wife Sangeeta Singh Deo is the current Balangir MP. She won the seat in 1998, 1999, 2004, and 2019 too. Kanak Vardhan and Sangeeta’s daughter Nivritti was by her parents’ side through the poll campaign. She is married to Lakshyaraj Singh Mewar, the scion of the erstwhile royal family of Udaipur, Rajasthan. The second Deputy CM is Pravati Parida, a first-time MLA from the Nimapada Assembly constituency in the coastal Puri district. Though Pravati, 57, contested in 2014 and 2019, she lost to the BJD’s Samir Ranjan Dash. She managed to win the seat this time after Samir joined the BJP after being denied the ticket. Parida, a qualified lawyer and enrolled as an advocate in the Orissa High Court, has earlier served as the state president of the BJP Mahila Morcha.
