BJD continues 2019 trend, meets women’s Act promised quota of 33% tickets

With party president and Chief Minister Naveen Patnaik on Thursday nominating Lekhasri Samantasunghar from Balasore, the Biju Janata Dal (BJD) in Odisha is again set to field 33% women in the Lok Sabha elections.

On International Women’s Day (March 8) this year, ex- bureaucrat and Naveen Patnaik’s trusted aide V K Pandian had assured women workers that the party would continue to reserve a third of all Lok Sabha seats for women in 2024.

The regional party has so far nominated six women out of the 20 names it has announced for various Lok Sabha seats. Besides Lekhasri in Balasore, the party has fielded women in Koraput, Aska, Jajpur, Balasore, Jagatsinghpur, Bhadrak and Bargarh. In comparison, the main opposition, the BJP, has fielded four women on Odisha’s 21 seats.

The BJD — which had reached out to 22 national and regional parties in 2018 to build a consensus for the passage of the women’s reservation Bill, which was eventually passed in 2023 — had fielded 33% women candidates in the Lok Sabha for the first time in 2019. Of its seven women candidates, five had won.

In panchayati raj institutions and urban local bodies, the BJD government had in 2012 already increased the reservation for women to 50%, from the 33% that had been implemented by his father and ex-CM Biju Patnaik in the early 1990s.

A former Zoology lecturer, Lekhasri had joined the BJP in 2014 and became the face of the party’s Odisha unit on TV. Known to be a fierce critic of the Patnaik government, she caught eyeballs with her regular outburst against the BJD government on different issues. She had even taken to the roads to lead the BJP’s protest against BJD heavyweights on different issues.

On April 7, she announced her resignation from the saffron party on