Odisha MP was suspended from BJD in January this year; his ‘open flirting’ with BJP is believed to have irked CM Naveen Patnaik.
New Delhi: Odisha Lok Sabha MP Jay Panda, who resigned from the BJD after months of a bitter feud with Odisha CM and party chief Naveen Patnaik Monday, said he had felt “unwanted” in the party.
The MP from Kendrapara had been suspended from the BJD in January this year for allegedly indulging in “anti party activities”, after he openly criticised the party leadership following the 2017 local elections.
However, despite Panda’s high-profile, media-friendly image and active buzz around his ‘open flirting’ with the BJP, sources in both the BJD and the BJP say the journey ahead will not be an easy one for him.
“It’s with deep anguish, hurt and sorrow that I have decided to quit the politics into which our BJD has descended…,” Panda wrote in a letter to Patnaik. “With the BJD and you yourself having made it abundantly clear that I am unwanted, it is only right to disassociate from it.”
He said he would convey his decision to the Lok Sabha Speaker.
The 54-year-old leader’s announcement comes ahead of the Odisha assembly election as well as the Lok Sabha polls in 2019, when the BJP is looking to put up a formidable challenge to the ruling BJD.
BJD’s face in Delhi
Panda — who was a Rajya Sabha member from 2000 to 2009 and became a Lok Sabha MP thereafter — has been the party’s most visible face in Delhi.
The bitterness between him and Patnaik, which has been brewing for a while, reached a peak when neither Patnaik nor other BJD leaders paid tributes to his father Bansidhar Panda — known as an architect of industrialisation in Odisha — when he died on 22 May.
“I was heart-broken when several BJD colleagues conveyed that they had been restrained from coming by to pay their last respects to the departed soul. That the BJD doesn’t want me anymore, and in fact wants me out, is now irrefutably clear,” the MP said.
“I have stoically borne many humiliations over the past four years, but this is the last straw, it is now beyond my self-respect to continue to be associated with the party in an atmosphere as mean minded as this,” Panda said in his resignation letter.
From 2000 to 2014, Panda became the introverted Patnaik’s link to Delhi and the party’s voice in the national media. However, sources in the BJD say things began to turn sour after the Narendra Modi-led government came to power in 2014 with a huge mandate, and it was his constant reaching out to Modi that irked Patnaik.
Sources in the BJD say it had now become “absolutely untenable” for Panda to continue in the party and he had “little option but to resign to save face”. They, however, added that despite speculation of his talks with the BJP, it “won’t be an easy path for him given his limitations as a politician, and the BJD is well aware of that”.
MP from the ‘safest seat’
The US-educated politician has won the Lok Sabha election from what is seen as the safest seat for BJD — the coastal Kendrapara. In fact, it was the only seat which voted for a non-Congress candidate — Biju Patnaik as Janata Party candidate — even when the Congress swept the polls to claim 20 out of 21 parliamentary seats in the state in 1984 following former Prime Minister Indira Gandhi’s death.
According to a top BJP source, Panda’s “quitting is far more difficult than it seems”.
“What does he bring to the table for the BJP? The party might take him in, but not on his terms. This weakens him,” said the BJP source.
“He has no mass base, something the BJP needs in Odisha. His current seat is an out and out BJD bastion, so we will have to give him another seat with no guarantee he would win,” the source said.
“He is a well-known face in Delhi but by now, the BJP has enough of its own. Plus, his business interests make him a liability,” added the BJP source.