BHUBANESWAR: Amid the ongoing Bharat Jodo Yatra by Rahul Gandhi to revitalise cadres and revive the Congress, the big takeaway from the Padampur bypoll is that the grand old party has ceased to be an alternative in Odisha, once its stronghold.
In a massive setback, Congress veteran and two-time MLA Satya Bhusan Sahu, who had secured 32,787 votes in the 2019 election from the seat, lost his security deposit. He could manage to poll only 3,594 votes.
After Dhamnagar, it was the second successive decimation of Congress. While Dhamnagar bypoll saw the shifting of Congress votes to BJP, going by the massive margin of BJD in Padampur, it appears its votes completely transferred to the ruling party. This is possibly because people do not see Congress as an alternative in the state owing to weak leadership and lack of organisational strength.
Even as the party’s vote share has continued to drop since 2000, the BJP has replaced it as the main Opposition in the state after the number of seats declined to nine in 2019 from 16 in 2014. The vote share also came down to 16.12 pc from 25.7 pc during the five-year period. Sahu accepted the defeat but claimed moral victory saying, “I fought the election fairly unlike the other two.”