No BJP-BJD deal after weeks of Lok Sabha seat talks

Talks between the Bharatiya Janata Party(BJP) and the Biju Janata Dal(BJD) over a proposed pre-poll alliance in Odisha ahead of the Lok Sabha and assembly polls next month broke down on Friday three weeks after they began, with both parties announcing that they would fight all 147 assembly seats and 21 Lok Sabha seats alone.

Assembly and Lok Sabha polls are scheduled simultaneously in the eastern state, which votes in four phases beginning on May 13 and ending on June 1.

Discussions between the two parties started in the first week of March, raising hopes of them coming together for the first time in 15 years; the BJD exited the National Democratic Alliance in 2009, but the two parties have largely cooperated in Parliament in the last decade.

On Friday morning, after days of protracted negotiations, BJP’s Odisha chief Manmohan Samal announced that the national party, which is also the principal opposition in Odisha, would fight alone across every seat “to create a developed India and a developed Odisha under the visionary leadership of Prime Minister Narendra Modi”.

“We feel that the states that have dual engine governments across the country, development and poverty alleviation work has been accelerated and they are making progress in all areas. But today in Odisha, many welfare schemes of the Modi government do not reach the grassroots due to which the poor sisters and brothers of Odisha do not get their benefits. We cannot agree with the state government on many issues related to the pride of Odias, the glory of Odisha and the interests of the people of Odisha,” Samal announced on X.

Hours later, BJD organisational secretary Pranab Prakash Das said in a post on X that the regional party will contest all the seats and win more than “three-fourths” majority under the leadership of chief minister Naveen Patnaik.

“The BJD will continue to take decisions keeping the people of Odisha in the forefront and in the true spirit of cooperative federalism and statesmanship required for nation building. New Odisha and Empowered Odisha will be our goal and we are on track to achieve this under the leadership of our leader Naveen Patnaik,” he said.

The negotiations between the two parties were driven primarily by the central leaderships of both parties. For the BJP, an alliance would have meant coming closer to the goal of the NDA achieving 400 seats in the Lok Sabha elections; with Patnaik ageing and anti-incumbency beginning to rear its head after five consecutive terms in power, the BJD sensed an opportunity to lock in a historic sixth term.

On March 6, a day after the discussions ostensibly began, the BJD signalled a possible alignment, issuing a statement that said it would do “everything in the greater interests of the people of Odisha and the state”.

“The party supremo will take the decision which will be apt for Odisha,” the statement said.

But leaders from both parties said that the talks came unstuck after failing to find common ground on a host of issues, including the number of assembly seats and Lok Sabha seats both parties would fight.

While the BJP had pushed for at least 50 seats in the assembly and 14 seats in the Lok Sabha, arguing that recent electoral evidence suggested that it was the party on the rise in Odisha, the BJD said that it was still the pre-eminent political party in the state by far, and did not want to part with more than 40 and 13 seats to the BJP in the assembly and parliamentary elections respectively, said the leaders cited above.

In 2019, the BJP won 23 seats in the assembly, 13 more than it won in 2014. The BJD won the elections with 112 seats, losing only five seats from its 2014 tally.

In the Lok Sabha elections in 2019, however, the BJD won 12 seats and the BJP eight, a significant shift from the 20 and one seats the two parties had won respectively in 2014.

One senior BJP leader said that the section within the party that opposed the alliance had prevailed, citing three main factors. “The first is that the writing on the wall is clear that the BJP is in a good position to win a majority of the Lok Sabha seats. The second is that the party is also confident of making gains in the assembly polls that are still fifty days away,” the leader said.

The third reason, the leader said, was the poll plank of “Odia pride”, emphasised in Samal’s announcement on Friday morning. The BJP is now set to target the BJD at their proposed plans of a non-Odia, a reference to bureaucrat-turned-politician VK Pandian, originally from Tamil Nadu but now considered the closest BJD leader to Patnaik. “Why should the BJP become a party to the sin of disrespecting Odiya pride. Why should we cede space to a non-Odia?” the leader said.

There was also anger on the ground from the cadres for both parties, leaders said. One Odisha-based BJP leader said, “The cadre on ground were looking forward to a decisive battle with BJD thanks to the increasing support for the party due to Modi’s rising popularity on the back of his developmental works and Ram temple construction.”

The BJP’s state in charge Vijaypal Singh Tomar said that there existed a great deal of resentment against Pandian in the state. “We are glad that the central leadership took note of our reservations.”

BJD leaders also admitted that while there may have been some benefit to a proposed alliance, cadre on the ground were worried about their political futures. “It had seemed to them that we were suggesting that the BJD is on the decline, and the party had surrendered the BJP. It is clear that at some point there will come the need for a change in leadership, and while there may be some angst against Pandian, submitting to the BJP is wholly unacceptable,” one leader said.

Another BJD leader said that the BJP had pushed “far too hard a bargain”, given that they only currently had 23 members in the assembly, and the BJD was the state’s pre-eminent political force. “Even for our cadre, who have fought and defeated the BJP over the last decade, to give them equal status was too bitter a pill to swallow,” the leader said.

BJD leaders added that there were also disagreements on specific high-profile seats such as Bhubaneswar and Puri that both parties had staked their claim on.

By Friday evening, there were already signs of a political battle between the once-near allies, with BJD MP from Cuttack, Bhartuhari Mahtab, resigning from the party’s primary membership. Leaders close to Mahtab suggested that he was likely to join the BJP. “The party was formed to fight against corruption and to stay away from self-aggrandizement. Believing this, the people of Odisha supported the party. But during the last few years, things have gone wrong and I often raised issues but nothing happened,” Mahtab said.