Jharsuguda: The nomination papers of all the 14 candidates for the upcoming Brajarajnagar bypoll that is scheduled to be held May 31 was declared valid after a thorough scrutiny Thursday. Returning officer and sub-collector Dayamaya Padhi declared all the nomination papers valid.
Among the candidates are BJD’s Alaka Mohanty, BJP’s former MLA Radharani Panda, Congress nominee and former speaker Kishore Patel, Communist Party’s Ramesh Tripathy, Odisha Janata Party’s Manoj Pradhan, Hindustan Nirmala Dal’s Bijay Jalan, independent candidates Parbati Behera, Tapan Kumar Swain, Suprit Kumar Behera, Aditya Pradhan, Manoj Meher, Sitaram Behera and Dinabandhu Biswal. Senior BJD leaders and ministers including Naba Kishore Das, Padmanabha Behera, Tukuni Sahu, Prasanna Acharya, and Susanta Singh had participated in the nomination filing programme for Alaka Mohanty, wife of Late Kishore Mohanty.
The BJD leaders claimed that they will win the byelection by a big margin of over 50,000 votes. “Chief Minister Naveen Patnaik always stands with the people in sorrows and happiness of their lives. Late Kishore Mohanty was also having a strong relation with people of this area. So, we will definitely win the by-poll by a margin of over 50,000 votes,” claimed Padmanabha Behera.
Similarly, for mer MLA Radharani Panda and Kishore Chandra Patel filed their nominations on behalf of the opposition BJP and Congress respectively. In a show of strength, the political parties held rallies during the filing of nomination papers of their respective candidates. Several state-level leaders also attended the rallies. Notably, the bypoll was necessitated by the untimely demise of BJD MLA Kishore Mohanty in December last year.
Counting of votes and declaration of results are scheduled for June 3. Worth mentioning, BJP’s Panda bagged the Assembly seat by defeating BJD candidate Anup Kumar Sai in 2014. She, however, lost to BJD’s Kishore Mohanty by a margin of 11,634 votes in 2019. Similarly, Congress’ Patel, a three-time MLA, unsuccessfully fought from the seat in 2014. In 2019, Congress had left the seat for CPI.