The Bharatiya Janata Party, which had to contend with leaders quitting the party like its principal political opponent BJD, on Tuesday named the candidates for 21 more Assembly seats in Odisha after much winnability deliberation.
The coastal state has 147 Assembly constituencies out of which the BJP a fortnight back had announced the names of 112 candidates. With today’s announcement, the party has named 133 candidates with the contestants for the remaining 14 seats expected to be announced in a week.
The Delhi High Court on Monday stayed the conviction of former union minister Dilip Ray recently.
Prominent among those fielded by BJP includes veteran politician and former union minister Dilip Ray, who has been nominated for the politically significant Rourkela Assembly seat. Ray, a three-time MLA and two-time member of upper house of Parliament, is facing trial in a coal allocation irregularities of a Jharkhand block in 1999, was earlier sentenced to three-year jail term in a coal scam case. However, he received a reprieve after Delhi High Court had stayed the conviction, paving the way for him to contest the polls. It is pertinent to note here that 71-year-old Ray was the Minister of State (coal) in the erstwhile Atal Bihari Vajpayee government.
By giving the Assembly ticket to Ray, the saffron party pins the hope that it will bolster its prospects in the high-profile Sundargarh Lok Sabha seat. The LS seat is witnessing an absorbing poll battle between the sitting BJP MP and ex-Union Minister Jual Oram and hockey Olympian Dilip Tirkey.
The BJP has already declared its candidates for all the 21 Lok Sabha seats.
Assembly and Lok Sabha elections in the coastal State will be held simultaneously in four phases on May 13, 20, 25 and June 1. In the 2019 Lok Sabha polls, the Biju Janata Dal (BJD) with 12 seats bagged the maximum number of seats, followed by the BJP (8) and the Congress (1).
In the 2019 Assembly election, held simultaneously with the general election in 2019, the BJD had recorded thumping electoral success winning 113 of the 147 seats. The BJP stood at distant second with 23 seats, followed by the Congress with 9. The CPM won one seat and another was bagged by an Independent.