Rourkela: District headquarters Sundargarh is one of the key Assembly constituencies in the district. The BJD has never won from here despite putting in all efforts, and will leave no stone unturned to ensure victory for the party candidate this time around in the event the alliance discussions with the BJP failed. That will make it a straight fight between the BJP and BJD since Congress has become a spent force here. Interestingly, the seat was either won by the Congress or BJP over the years. BJD could never win this prestigious seat ever since its creation in 1997.
Therefore, this is going to be a matter of prestige for the BJD to romp home this time. The constituency at present is represented by Kusum Tete of BJP. In 2019, she defeated BJD’s Jogesh Singh by a margin of 7,364 votes. While Tete had bagged 83,118 votes, Singh managed to secure 75,734 votes. Congress candidate Amita Biswal, daughter of former chief minister Hemananda Biswal pooled just 12,087 votes. Interestingly, Singh suffered defeat after he defected from Congress and contested on a BJD ticket. “It seems BJD symbol was not lucky for him as he had won the seat in 2009 and 2024 on Congress symbol,” said Prashant Das, a local resident.
Sundargarh has never been favourable to BJD. It used to be the bastion of former Congress heavyweight Kishore Patel, who had sway over the constituency in the 1990s’. Patel had a strong presence in the area which was popularly known as his ‘backyard’, said another local voter. The BJP managed to win here on two occasions, and the victorious candidates were Shankarshan Naik and Sushma Patel. Sushma won in a by-election following the death of her husband Shankarshan. Fortune smiled on Tete who was earlier a BJD leader and a close ally of minister Sarada Nayak. “When Singh was taken into the BJD fold, Tete moved to the BJP camp at the instance of Sarada, and rest is history, as they say,” said a BJP activist.
Now in all likelihood Tete, who has remained fairly active in the constituency, is going to be repeated. “She has been successfully raising the issues of the constituency on all platforms,” said Shakti Patel, a resident of Sundargarh town. Recently she brought Governor Raghubar Das to a slum cluster to show the latter the living conditions of the inhabitants, which was a deviation from the Governor’s itinerary, Patel said to drive home his point. Nevertheless, the BJP appears optimistic about Tete’s victory, alliance or sans it. “We will win on our own and don’t require the help of BJD, with or without a coalition,” said a senior district BJP functionary.
RAJESH MOHANTY, OP