Bhartruhari Mahtab, who gave BJD the edge from Cuttack since 1998, now in BJP’s Odisha list

Mahtab, the son of Odisha’s first chief minister Harekrushna Mahtab, will lock horns against BJD’s Santrupt Misra, former HR head of Aditya Birla Group.

Mahtab had won the Cuttack Lok Sabha seat, a BJD stronghold, in 2019 by over 1.21 lakh votes. He secured 49.47% votes against BJP candidate and former CRPF director general Prakash Mishra, who got 4.03 lakh votes in the seat, which accounts for 38.04% of the votes. In 2019, Congress’s Panchanan Kanungo got only a 9.42% vote share from the seat.

Of total seven assembly segments under Cuttack Lok Sabha seats, the BJD won six while the remaining seat had gone to Congress.

As Misra is new to politics and Congress hardly has any strength in the constituency, BJP sources said they expect a bipolar fight against the BJD.

Cuttack is a prestigious seat which was earlier represented by leaders like Biju Patnaik of Janata Dal and JB Patnaik of Congress, both of whom also served as chief ministers.

In Kandhamal, the BJP fielded Sukanta Kumar Panigrahi, with a strong RSS background, as its candidate. Panigrahi had contested the communally-sensitive seat in 2014 and finished third by securing only 13% votes.

Kandhamal had witnessed communal violence in 2008 following the murder of VHP leader Swami Laxmanananda Saraswati. He was shot dead along with four of his disciples by unidentified assailants in his ashram on August 23, 2008. The riots claimed 38 lives and is believed to be a reason why Odisha CM Naveen Patnaik broke off ties with the BJP ahead of the 2009 polls.

Since then, the BJD has been winning the seat. BJD candidate Rudramadhab Ray won the seat in 2009 with a 44.5% vote share and in 2014, the party’s Hemendra Singh won the seat by securing 50.2% votes. In 2019, BJD’s Achyuta Samanta, who has also been fielded again for the coming polls, won the seat with a 49% vote share.

While the BJP finished third in 2009 and 2014 in Kandhamal, it emerged second in the last Lok Sabha polls as party candidate Kharabela Swain had secured 33.2% votes.

The BJP has named Rabindra Narayan Behera, a technocrat, from the Jajpur parliamentary constituency, a seat reserved for the scheduled caste (SC) candidates. Behera had served as the director, National Informatics Centre (NIC), Bhubaneswar. Behera will fight against BJD’s Sarmishta Sethi, also the sitting MP from the seat.

BJP has announced candidates for all 21 Lok Sabha seats in Odisha. Four women figure in the list.