Bhubaneswar: The BJP has repeated Avimanyu Sethi for Bhadrak seat as the party’s 5th list of candidates for Lok Sabha elections was released on Sunday.
There were speculations that BJP would be introducing some new faces by dropping a few sitting members of Parliament and replacing most of the candidates who lost the 2019 polls. The name of Dhamnagar MLA Suraj Suryabanshi was doing rounds for Bhadrak parliamentary seat.
Suraj, elected to the Assembly for the first time in a bypoll in November last year following the death of his father and former MLA from Dhamnagar Bishnu Charan Sethi, was a front-runner for the Bhadrak Lok Sabha seat which the BJP had lost to Manjulata Mandal of BJD by a margin of 28,791 votes in 2019 elections.
Sethi, the son of eight-time MP and former Union minister Arjun Sethi, was BJP’s candidate from Bhadrak and had secured 4,84,254 votes against 5,13,045 by his BJD rival in a multi-cornered contest.
Sources in the party said Suraj had the backing of state BJP president Manmohan Samal who played a major role in getting him elected in the bypoll. The only time Samal was elected to the Assembly was from Dhamnagar in 2004 and he shared a special bond with late Bishnu Sethi.
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