The last time he came to Odisha, to Puri during the Rath Yatra last year, Narendra Modi did not exactly set the Bay of Bengal on fire. But this time, the moribund state unit of the BJP is desperately hoping that the party's Prime Ministerial candidate will do what it has failed to do so far: to energise the demoralised party cadres and get the people to vote for the party in large numbers in the coming elections. The party is pulling out all stops to make sure that Modi's visit creates a splash, if not a wave, in the state.
PTI
But the party's dilemma is compounded by the fact that the man challenging Mohapatra is IPL chairman Ranjib Biswal, the candidate fielded by the Congress, the BJP's main rival at the national level. BJP MLA from Bonai Bhimsen Choudhury, suspended by the party for his alleged involvement in horse trading in the 2010 Rajya Sabha elections, has defiantly announced that he would neither abide by the party whip for the polls to the Upper House nor contest the next election on a BJP ticket. Apprehending fresh embarrassment, a third section in the party, led by vice president Ashok Sahu, is in favour of abstaining during the polls. No wonder, rather than take a call on the issue, a meeting of senior party leaders and MLAs, specifically convened for the purpose, decided to leave the final decision to the party's central parliamentary board instead.
It is this failure to put up a united front that caused the rout of the BJP in the municipal elections in western Odisha, an area that has been a traditional stronghold of the party, late last year. It did even worse in the elections to the Bhubaneswar Municipal Corporation (BMC) managing to win no more than two wards in the 67-ward corporation, losing two wards it held last time.
The BJP's malaise, however, goes deeper than the discordant notes sounded by a few leading lights of the party in Odisha. At the core of its dilemma is the question of how to deal with the BJD and Naveen Patnaik. While state unit president KV Singhdeo has said that Patnaik would soon end up in 'the cell next to Madhu Koda' in the Tihar jail for his involvement in the mining, coal and chit fund scams, the Central leadership of the party has been extremely squeamish about taking on the BJD supremo on the issue of corruption - or any issue for that matter.
Every central leader of the BJP, including party president Rajnath Singh, who has visited the state in the recent past has steadfastly refused to utter even a word against Naveen despite persistent questioning by the media. Perhaps this is in the fond hope that the BJD president may deign to have some kind of an understanding with the saffron party in a post poll scenario, if not revive the alliance in the run up to the parliamentary election later this year.
Ironically, far from returning the compliment, Naveen has done everything possible to give the BJP a bad name, branding it 'communal' and firmly scotching all speculation about a possible revival of the alliance - or at the very least some kind of an understanding after the elections. Even in the matter of the Modi rally, his government has put every conceivable roadblock to ensure that it does not turn out to be the grand affair that the state BJP hopes it will.
First, it refused to allocate the Janata Maidan, just about the only ground in the Odisha capital that can accommodate the five lakh people that the BJP hopes to gather for the rally. Then, when the state BJP asked for the Capital High School ground, it said grounds in educational institutions cannot be allocated for political purposes - brushing aside objections that the Chief Minister himself has violated this 'rule' on numerous occasions in the recent past, including during the just concluded municipal polls.
It is this dilemma that Narendra Modi will be called upon to resolve during his visit to the state on February 11. If he too follows in the footsteps of central leaders such as Lal Krishna Advani and Rajnath Singh and refuses to be drawn into a criticism of Naveen in the hope of his post-election support in forming a government at the Centre, the party may as well say goodbye to its dream of winning one or two Lok Sabha seats and more than the six Assembly seats that it bagged in 2009.
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