Stung by desertions, Congress stares at fourth defeat in Odisha

Bhubaneswar: It is fast assuming the proportions of an exodus. As elections draw nearer, senior Congress leaders are deserting the party with such alarming frequency that one wonders how many of them will be left by the time polls are held.

It all started with the resignation of long time Congressman Kumar Hemendra Singh, the president of the Nayagarh district unit of the party. He was soon followed by former finance minister Ramakrushna Patnaik and his wife and former MP Kumudini Patnaik. They were joined by Sibasankar Ulaka, son of Ramachandra Ulaka, former minister and veteran Congress leader from Koraput. Former minister Kamala Das was the latest to join the bandwagon on Thursday. [The resignation of smaller, local level functionaries are too numerous to be recounted.>

Of the four, it is the desertion of Singh and Ulaka that is going to hurt the Congress more than the other three because both have been Congressmen for as long as they have been in politics. While Singh has joined the BJD, presumably with a promise of the ruling party ticket from the Nayagarh Assembly seat (Odisha is having simultaneous polls for Lok Sabha and Assembly), Ulaka has chosen to cast his lot with the BJP.

The case of the husband-wife team of Ramakrushna and Kumudini Patnaik is a little different. Both were in the BJD—and before that with the Janata Dal, the party of which the BJD is an offshoot—before falling out with the party supremo and Chief Minister Naveen Patnaik and heading for the Congress. Both contested the 2009 election on Congress ticket and lost.

The Patnaiks are yet to make their move though a close confidante of the former minister told Firstpost they are in talks with BJD interlocutors about the terms of their rehabilitation in their erstwhile party.

Kamala Das, health and family welfare minister in the first Naveen Patnaik government formed in 2000, was dropped from the cabinet by the chief minister under what he called at the time the ‘shadow of corruption’. Like the Patnaiks before her, she too joined the Congress after being shown the door by Naveen. She has made it clear that she would be returning ‘home’.

While there are substantial differences in their Congress vintage, the one thing common to all the resignations was the outburst against the present leadership for the alleged ham-handed manner in which it has been running the party in Odisha. By all accounts, the ‘leadership’ now consists of the ‘Jena Brothers’ (campaign committee chief and Union Minister Srikant Jena and PCC chief Jayadev Jena).

Even as the spate of resignations took place, there have been other developments that should set the alarm bells ringing in the Congress.

First, there was high drama when Leader of Opposition in the Odisha Assembly Bhupinder Singh missed the election committee meeting of the AICC in New Delhi on 26 February, which was scheduled to discuss the candidates for the Lok Sabha seats in Odisha, and suddenly went ‘missing’. The normally voluble and highly accessible Singh, a lifelong Congressman, remained incommunicado for a full four days, predictably leading to talk about his quitting the Congress and joining the BJD. Speculation went wild that he had been promised the BJD ticket for the Kalahandi Lok Sabha seat before he resurfaced on 3 March to spoil the fun claiming that he was ‘seriously ill’ and ‘under treatment’ in a private hospital and had no intention of leaving the Congress.

This hospital apparently admitted him only on the condition that he would shun all worldly contact for the duration of his stay there. Despite all the restrictions imposed on him though, he did manage to talk to several Congress leaders over phone and even give a full length interview to leading daily Sambad’, a fact he has not repudiated even after resurfacing, while supposedly under treatment for an ‘alarming rise in the WBC count’.

The more likely scenario is that he was, while in hiding, waiting for a promise from the BJD leadership that he would be given the ticket for Kalahandi, a seat presently represented by former Union minister Bhakta Charan Das, and had no choice but to resurface when it did not come.

The aborted desertion move by the MLA from Narla, however, was small consolation for the minders of the party in Odisha because another vintage Congressman and party spokesperson Arya Kumar Gyanedra announced last Sunday that he would not take part in any party activity for the next one year in protest against the way the party is being run in the state. “The mining and builder mafia is calling the shots in the party when it comes to ticket distribution,” he said in the strongest indictment yet on the PCC leadership by a Congressman still in the party.

A sulking Niranjan Patnaik, senior Congress leader and the man Jayadev Jena replaced as PCC chief, has made it clear that he would not contest an election under the latter’s leadership.

There are definite indications that Kamala Das will not be the last Congress leader to leave the party nor Gyanendra the last to raise the banner of revolt against the Jena duo. Already, there are credible reports of the BJD opening channels of communication with several sitting Congress MLAs who have winning chances. While not all of them are likely to switch camps, at least some of them may find the prospects of a BJD ticket, which is being seen as an Entry Pass to the Assembly, too tempting to resist. In any case, those who lose out in the race for tickets can be trusted to queer the pitch for those preferred.

The Congress may not do as badly as it did in 1990 when it managed to win just 10 seats in a 147-member Assembly. But it does look extremely unlikely that it can win the 27 Assembly constituencies and the six Lok Sabha seats that it won in 2009.