Bhubaneswar:The Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) on Saturday trashed all speculations about a possible alliance with the ruling Biju Janata Dal (BJD) and announced that it would field its candidates in all 147 assembly and 21 Lok Sabha seats in 2024.
The announcement came following a four hours of brainstorming between three central leaders and state leaders here at the party office.
Soon after the meeting, Bhubaneswar Lok Sabha member Aparajita Sarangi told reporters that BJP state observer Sunil Bansal categorically stated that the party would go the polls in the state on its own strength and there was no question of any understanding with the ruling dispensation.
Apart from Sunil Bansal, two other central leaders – BL Santosh and Vijay Pal Singh Tomar — have been camping in Odisha for three days now to shape up party’s strategy for the 2024 elections.
“Our party observer for Odisha, Sunil Bansal, today categorically told us that the BJP will aggressively fight in all the 147 assembly and 21 Lok Sabha seats. He exhorted us to be ready for the big battle. From January 5 next year, the state unit will launch an all-out electoral battle against the BJD and we will surely form the next government here. Besides, we will make significant improvement over our 2019 Lok Sabha results,” said Sarangi.
Until today, speculations were doing the rounds that the BJP might go for alliance with the BJD as the latter has always supported the saffron party both inside and outside the Parliament on crucial issues. Besides, the central BJP leaders’ soft stand towards the BJD president and CM Naveen Patnaik in the past five years and the BJP silencing its guns on corruption and “deteriorating” law and order issues had fuelled the speculation of a possible pact between the two parties.
In fact, a section of state BJP leaders, as grapevine has it, was in favour of forging an alliance with the BJD, arguing that it would help the party win maximum number of Lok Sabha seats.
In 2019, the BJP had won 8 of the 21 Lok Sabha seats. Similarly, it had bagged 23 of the 147 assembly seats.
