BHUBANESWAR: BJD president and Odisha Chief Minister Naveen Patnaik will also contest from the Kantabanji assembly constituency in Bolangir district of Western Odisha along with his traditional Hinjili seat in Ganjam district.
This was announced by Patnaik himself on Wednesday while releasing the 5th list of nine candidates for the Assembly elections in the state.
Patnaik in 2019 assembly elections had also contested from two seats.
He won from both the Hinjili and Bijepur assembly segment in Bargarh district of western Odisha.
However, Patnaik later resigned from Bijepur and retained the Hinjili seat.
Naveen’s candidature from a western Odisha seat once again is aimed at thwarting the BJP’s advances in the region. The saffron party has made deep inroads in western districts of the state, winning a major chunk of both its Lok Sabha and Assembly seats from the region.
Further, announcing the list of eight other Assembly candidates, the chief minister said seats have been swapped between veteran party leader Prasanna Acharya and Rohit Pujari. While Rairakhol Assembly seat has been allotted to Acharya, Pujari, the sitting MLA from Rairakhol, has been shifted to Sambalpur.
The move was taken after Acharya expressed unhappiness with the party’s decision to field him from Sambalpur. He was interested in contesting from Rairakhol from where he was elected in 2009. He had met Chief Minister Naveen Patnaik on April 12 requesting him to reconsider the decision to field him from Sambalpur.
The BJD also dropped former minister Sameer Das from the Nimapara seat and replaced him with Dilip Nayak. Nayak had recently quit the BJP and joined the regional party. Besides, former minister and senior leader of the party Rabi Narayan Nanda has been replaced in the Jeypore seat by his wife Indira Nanda. The party also dropped former deputy speaker Rajani Kanta Singh from Angul and replaced him with his wife Sanjukta Singh.
Sitting MLA from Kuchinda, Kishore Nayak has also been replaced by Rajendra Kumar Chhatria, a former Congress MLA who had won the seat in the 2009 election. Arundhati Devi, wife of BJP MP from Sambalpur Nitesh Ganga Deb who joined BJD on Tuesday, has been fielded from the Deogarh Assembly seat. She has been pitted against sitting BJP MLA Subash Chandra Panigrahy.
Besides, the party has nominated Sulakhyana Geetanjali Devi, the scion of the Dharakote royal family, from the Sanakhemundi Assembly seat. She is the daughter of former BJD MLA Nandini Devi who had won in 2014.
While the party has repeated Barsha Singh Bariha from Padampur, it dropped Purna Chandra Baka and replaced him with his niece Laxmipriya Nayak from Chitrakonda.
(With input from Agencies)