BJP struggles to gain ground in Orissa

The Bharatiya Janata Party’s (BJP) aim to grab power in Orissa in 2019 appears to be very unlikely proposition in the present context as the saffron party is now caught in the web of serious internal dissension.

Alleged neglect of senior state-level leaders in the party affairs and failure of the present leadership to galvanise organisational machinery at grassroots, according to political experts, has rendered the party in a state of despondency.

Ever since its separation from the BJD with whom it shared power for over nine years in the state, the party has been constantly struggling to elevate itself from the third position in the state politics but to no avail.

Prominent state leaders such as Bijoy Mohapatra, K.V. Singhdeo and Dilip Ray have kept themselves away from party activities for a few months for not being given adequate importance in its functioning. The three leaders did not get the “opportunity” share the dais with PM Narendra Modi at his Balasore Vikash Utsav on June 2. The fight among some leaders in the state BJP unit to for positioning themselves as chief ministerial candidates as also added to the owes of the party.

The bids by some leaders like Union petroleum and natural gas minister Dharmendra Pradhan and Jual Oram for one-upmanship in the party forum, overlooking its impact on the cadres, has handicapped the party from executing crucial political resolutions that called for taking on the ruling BJD on corruption and governance issues.

The saffron party has allowed many major issues like chit fund scam, farmer suicides, irregularities in allotment of plots and houses under discretionary quota to slip away from its hands because of lack of consensus among the top leaders whether or not to put the Naveen Patnaik government in the dock on those subjects.

“The BJP is still the third political force in state politics. Its vote share in the last Lok Sabha and Assembly polls was 21 per cent and in Assembly polls 18.5 per cent, respectively. With 26 percentage vote share, the Congress still enjoys in the second position. The BJP has to first tread the right path to stay in the reckoning as a major political force and then plan strategies for further consolidation,” the analysts point out.