Meet the giant killer who dealt Naveen Patnaik his first political defeat: BJP’s Laxman Bag

Apart from losing his Chief Minister chair of 24 years, Biju Janata Dal (BJD) supremo Naveen Patnaik also lost the Kantabanji Assembly seat that he contested from.

Kantabanji was the second seat Patnaik fought from, alongside his bastion of Hinjili, which he retained only by a narrow margin of 4,386 votes.

The leader who emerged as the giant killer in Kantabanji was the BJP’s Laxman Bag, who secured 90,876 votes against Patnaik’s 74,532. The Congress’s sitting MLA Saluja, a four-time winner from here, finished third with just 26,839 votes. It was the first time the BJP won Kantabanji.

In the 2014 Assembly polls, Bag had finished third from the same seat when the BJD’s Ayub Khan had won. In 2019, he had lost the seat by just 128 votes to the Congress’s Santosh Singh Saluja.

Bag, 48, says he was “unsure” of his political fortunes this time as well, when Patnaik announced he would contest from Kantabanji along with Hinjili. However, he ended up defeating Patnaik by 16,334 votes. “The voters were silent through the campaign, but they voted smartly,” says Bag.

Known to have strong roots in the constituency which has a long history of distress migration, especially to brick kilns in Andhra Pradesh and Telangana, Bag is believed to have built a base by helping migrant workers in case of trouble.

Besides the state-wide wave which powered the BJP in the Assembly polls, his connection to the Yadav community, which is dominant in the region with a population of around 40,000, also seems to have worked in his favour.

Summarising Bag’s achievement, a close aide said: “Before he contested the 2014 polls, Bag had no previous experience of any electoral politics. He also has no family background. Bag was doing social work in the