Bobby Hopes Crash: Even Protégé Declines By-Poll Favour

Bhubaneswar: The hopes of Pranab Prakash Das alias Bobby, for a by-election in Jajpur district by getting the seat vacated, to regain his foot hold in the district has crashed. Sitting BJD MP Sujata Sahoo has given clear indication about not vacating the seat or pave the way for Das to seek election to the Assembly. Sahoo asserted that she has not been asked by Das, who was instrumental in getting her the ticket during Assembly elections, to resign and facilitate a by-election.

“I have not been asked by my leader to resign nor he has expressed his keenness to contest a by-election,” Sahoo recently told media. With this the hopes of Bobby are unlikely to be realized soon and he may have to wait longer to return to the Assembly. Bobby knows it well that once out of sight, one is erased from public mind and it takes an unusually long time to regain foothold in politics. Once considered ‘Chanakya’ in the Biju Janata Das and closest aide of Chief Minister Naveen Patnaik, Bobby is at present in a ‘fish out of water situation.’ It pains a lot to be crestfallen.

Bobby had great ambitions. He had managed to win the total confidence of former Chief Minister and Party supremo Naveen Patnaik and doing things as he wanted. His clout was such that even senior leaders of the party were scared of him, of course till the advent of VK Pandian in governance and subsequently in the party. The decline in his clout was noticeable when he kept the gates of the meeting halls where Pandian met the people in the name of grievance hearing. “I don’t mind being called the Kritadas,” he had claimed then.

Bobby was further relegated to background when he was pitted against Union Minister Dharmendra Pradhan in the Sambalpur Lok Sabha constituency. He had little inkling, surprisingly for a person touted as ‘Chanakya’ of Odisha politics, that his downfall has begun. BJD was finding it very difficult to come to grips in the Western Odisha areas where the BJP was strong. Add to this the popularity of Naveen Patnaik was on the downslide. Bobby misjudged the situation and unwittingly landed in a piquant situation. His last straw was fielding his mother from Korei—to make it a safe seat for him in case he lost Sambalpur. But the people in Korei revered his mother being the wife of a stalwart Ashok Das and saw the design of Bobby and ultimately defeated it.

This threw Bobby out of the electoral pond and he has begun gasping for breath for the past four months. Now, Sahoo has virtually declined to extend any favour to Bobby and relinquish the seat to facilitate a bye-election. Bobby is also sidelined in the party after party’s poll debacle and it remains to be seen how he fares—succeeds in persuading some MLA to quit or waits for nearly five more years to regain his standing in the party.

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