Bhubaneswar: The Congress, which has been out of power in Odisha for the last 23 years, is looking to revive its fortunes in the state in the 2024 elections. State party leaders, who had a meeting with AICC president Mallikarjun Kharge, Rahul Gandhi and other senior leaders in Delhi on Wednesday to discuss the strategy for the coming polls, appear upbeat about its prospects.
“Most of the senior state leaders including Pradesh Congress Committee (PCC) president Sarat Pattnayak were present at the meeting. The AICC president was optimistic about our prospects in the state and said that Odisha will be in focus in the next elections,” said former PCC president Jaydev Jena, adding that the party has no dearth of issues against the Naveen Patnaik-led Biju Janata Dal (BJD).
“Corruption, unemployment, and complete lack of progress on any front remain major issues. We are also going to highlight the helplessness of chief minister Naveen Patnaik who seems to be a puppet in the hands of bureaucrat-turned-politician V.K. Pandian. We will also tell people that the BJD and BJP are two sides of the same coin,” continued Jena, who thinks that the Congress which has been going through a bad phase in Odisha stands a good chance this time.
Talking to media persons after the meeting with AICC bigwigs in Delhi, Sarat Pattnayak said that the party would step up its fight against the BJD and BJP, which he said are equally corrupt. “We discussed the strategy for 2024. The biggest issue against the state government is corruption and the number of scams that are taking place,” averred Pattnayak.
Other senior party leaders, including general secretary and former MLA Lalatendu Mohapatra, also exuded confidence about the party doing better in the coming elections compared to the past. “We are better prepared this time and the strategic meeting held in Delhi is going to help us a lot. The most important thing is that people of the state now know that BJP and BJD are having a fixed bout in Odisha. They are going to reject both of them,” said Mohapatra.
However, notwithstanding the optimism of state Congress leaders, things are not going to be easy for the party if its record in the state is anything to go by. Plagued by factional feuds, the fortunes of the party have been declining consistently in Odisha since 2000, when it was thrown out of power in the wake of a disastrous super-cyclone that generated a wave of public anger. A BJD-BJP coalition government led by Naveen Patnaik came to power in 2000 and even though the coalition collapsed in 2009, with the BJP pulling out, Patnaik remains in charge.
Odisha chief minister Naveen Patnaik. Photo: X (Twitter)/@Naveen_Odisha
While the BJD won 103 assembly and 14 Lok Sabha seats in the simultaneously held polls in 2009, the Congress could manage 27 assembly and six Lok Sabha seats in those elections. The BJP was reduced to a single-digit (6) figure in the 147-strong state assembly. It failed to win even a single Lok Sabha seat in the state.
However, in the 2014 elections, the vote share of the Congress in Odisha’s Lok Sabha seats nosedived to 26% from 32.75% in 2009. The party won 16 seats in the state assembly but could not open its account in the Lok Sabha. In sharp contrast, the Naveen Patnaik-led BJD swept the polls – grabbing 20 of the 21 Lok Sabha seats and 117 seats in the state assembly. The BJP won 10 assembly seats and the Sundergarh Lok Sabha seat.
Congress hit rock bottom in the 2019 elections, when it won just nine seats in the state assembly, losing the tag of the main opposition party to the BJP – which bagged 23 seats. In the Lok Sabha, the Congress had a consolation victory in Koraput, where its candidate scraped through by a narrow margin. The main beneficiary of the Congress’s plummeting fortunes in Odisha has been the BJP, which not only emerged as the main opposition party. Its Lok Sabha tally went from 1 to 8 in 2019.
“In the initial days of the Congress’s slide in the state, the party which gained most was the BJD. But as its decline became more acute, it was the BJP which started benefitting. Erstwhile Congress loyalists transferred their votes to the party. In the latest phase which began in 2019, the Congress was near decimation in the state. I don’t see any chance of its revival. The BJP will gain from the Congress’s fall and the anti-incumbency factor which is going to hit the Naveen Patnaik government,” said state BJP general secretary Bhrigu Buxipatra.
In the panchayat elections held in the state in 2017, the BJP had made major gains with its zila parishad tally going up to 297 from 36 in 2012, mainly because of a sharp decline in the Congress’s popularity – its total zila parishad seats came down to 60 from 126. However, in the 2022 rural polls, when the Congress’s ZP tally went down further to 37, it was the BJD which gained the most, claiming a record number of 766 zila parishad seats. The BJP also suffered a massive jolt, getting reduced to 42 ZP seats from 297.
The sharp decline in the Congress’s fortunes in Odisha can be directly attributed to the internal feuds, which have prevented it from presenting a united face in the elections. Most of the PCC presidents have had to struggle with this problem and Sarat Pattnayak, who took over from Niranjan Patnaik in May last year, is no exception. His running feud with senior party leaders Chiranjib Biswal and Mohammed Moquim, the MLA from Barabati-Cuttack, has been the talk of party circles. Both the leaders were suspended by him a few months ago on the charges of indulging in anti-party activities.
During Niranjan Patnaik’s term, on the eve of the 2019 elections, he faced a virtual revolt when then state party working president, Naba Kishore Das, who was an MLA from Jharsuguda, quit the party along with his colleague from Sundergarh Jogesh Singh. Das won the election on a BJD ticket and became a minister in the Naveen Patnaik government. He was assassinated in January this year. His exit from the party was an embarrassment for the Congress, which faced another rebellion when former Union minister Srikant Jena and his protégé, former Koraput MLA Krushna Chandra Sagaria, raised some prickly issues plaguing the state Congress and were expelled from the party.
Political analyst Shashi Kant Mishra believes that the problem of infighting and bickering in the state Congress is unlikely to end anytime soon. “It has been the bane of the party. I don’t see any realistic chance of the party’s revival in the state unless this problem is addressed effectively,” said Mishra.
