Bhubaneswar: After 25 years, a chief minister will be running the government in Odisha assisted by two deputies.
Mohan Charan Majhi was sworn-in as the first BJP CM of Odisha along with KV Singhdeo and Pravati Parida as the deputy CMs. The saffron party has repeated this arrangement in Odisha after trying out the formula in government formation in Chhattisgarh, Madhya Pradesh and Rajasthan.
However, this is not the first time that the state will see such an arrangement. Hemananda Biswal and Basanta Biswal had served deputy chief ministers in the Congress government led by Janaki Ballav Patnaik in 1995-98.
Senior BJP leader KV, who belongs to the erstwhile royal family of Patnagarh, is a six time MLA, while Parida is the first time MLA in Odisha Legislative Assembly from Nimapara constituency. KV was the president of the state unit of the BJP from 2013 to 2016. He was also a cabinet minister in the BJD-BJP coalition government from 2000 to 2009. His wife Sangeeta Kumari Singh Deo is the MP-elect from Balangir.
He won the Patnagarh Assembly constituency five times in a row in 1995, 2000, 2004, 2009 and 2014 after the 1990 defeat against Janata Dal’s Bibekananda Meher by mere 1,925 votes. He lost the seat in 2019 but avenged the defeat against BJD’s Saroj Kumar Meher five years later by a narrow margin of 1,357 votes.
A social worker, Parida won the Nimapara seat in Puri by a margin of 4,588 votes against BJD’s Dilip Kumar Nayak after 3 successive defeats. She contested the 2009 elections as an independent candidate and as a BJP nominee in 2014 and 2019.