BHUBANESWAR: With elections less than two months away, Friday turned out to be a day of mixed fortunes for ruling BJD. While former top corporate executive Santrupt Misra joined the party, senior tribal leader and former minister Premanand Nayak quit alleging he was sidelined.
Nayak is the second tribal leader to resign from the party in the last one month. Misra, who took early retirement from Aditya Birla group on December 28, joined BJD at Naveen Niwas here in the presence of Chief Minister Naveen Patnaik, 5T chairman VK Pandian and other senior leaders.
Welcoming him to BJD, the chief minister said, “He (Misra) left an important corporate job to help us in our good work. We will decide in what place he will be in the party.” Hours after Misra joined the party, he was appointed as the national spokesperson by the BJD supremo. There was speculation over Misra joining the BJD since he took early retirement from Aditya Birla. A native of Puri, Misra was the global director of human resources as well as group director of Birla Carbon and director of Chemicals.
Misra is the only top corporate personality to have joined BJD in recent years. There is speculation he is likely to be nominated for Rajya Sabha as the BJD will fill up three vacancies or may be fielded from Puri Lok Sabha seat in the general elections. Sources in the party, however, maintained Misra is most likely to get a Rajya Sabha berth. Talking to mediapersons, Misra said he will take up any work assigned to him by the leadership and abide by party discipline. Misra said he decided to join BJD as he was inspired by the ideology, personality and people-oriented work of the chief minister.
“I was inspired by the manner in which Chief Minister Naveen Patnaik has taken the state to new heights and has been ruling for last 25 years on the basis of fundamental principles and by bringing spiritualism into administration,” he said.
Meanwhile, the resignation of second senior tribal leader Nayak from the party within a month has given rise to talks of unrest brewing in tribal pockets of the state. Last month, another senior tribal leader and former minister Balabhadra Majhi from Kalahandi had resigned alleging he was sidelined within the party. Nayak too cited the same reason for quitting the party.
Nayak, a two time MLA from Telkoi (ST) in Keonjhar, was the minister of state for skill development and technical education in the Naveen Patnaik cabinet before he was dropped in June, 2022. “I am resigning from the primary membership of ‘Biju Janata Dal’. A valuable time, that spent with you will inspire me to serve better for my constituency further (sic),” Nayak said in the letter, a copy of which was shared with media.
However, Nayak had submitted the letter to the chief minister in October, 2023 and was waiting for a call from the Naveen Niwas. He made the letter public after prospects of negotiations dimmed. What irked him was that BJD inducted Dhanurjoy Sidhu who had contested against Nayak unsuccessfully as a BJP candidate into the party. Sidhu was defeated from the constituency as Congress and BJP candidate in 2014 and 2019 elections.
The state leadership of the party was encouraging a parallel organisation and had stopped involving me in any party programme for the last couple of months, Nayak rued.