Bhubaneswar/Khurda/Puri: On the face of it, Biju Janata Dal (BJD) president and state chief minister Naveen Patnaik still holds sway over Odisha. In the just concluded 2017 three-tier panchayat elections, BJD remained the lead party with 473 zilla parishad seats out of 853. Dharmendra Pradhan, BJP’s chief strategist in Odisha and minister of state for petroleum and natural gas. Photo: Manoj Verma/MintIn 2014 general elections, BJP managed just one seat—Jual Oram, the Union tribal affairs minister, from Sundergarh, a district in western Odisha. And two years earlier, in the three-tier panchayat elections, the party could win only 36 out of 853 zilla parishad seats.

Source: Mint March 09, 2017 00:22 UTC