BJD Ticket Cancellation: Arundhati Devi’s Social Media Post Raises Eyebrows

Bhubaneswar: Bamanda ‘Rani’ Arundhati Devi has expressed her resentment over ticket cancellation through a social media post.

“Sita Mata had rightly said that there is no respect for women in this world,” she posted with a crying photo of the iconic figure from Ramanand Sagar’s Ramayana.

The snatching of the ticket after she had begun campaigning in the assembly segment came as a humiliation for the royalty while also raising questions on the BJD’s ‘respect for mother’ slogan.

Arundhati, who had earned a nomination for Deogarh assembly seat a day switching sides from BJP to BJD, was replaced with Romancha Ranjan Biswal on Thursday in what appeared to be a change in the BJD’s strategy for the Sambalpur’s big battle where party organisational secretary Pranab Prakash Das is pitted against Union Minister Dharmendra Pradhan of the BJP.

Deogarh Assembly seat is part of Sambalpur parliamentary constituency. 

Arundhati is the wife of erstwhile Deogarh king and BJP’s Sambalpur MP Nitesh Ganga Dev. Besides local resistance, she was facing problems at home with her husband openly declaring that he was ready to campaign for the BJP candidate in Deogarh.

Her nomination had also brought infighting in the regional party to the fore which made it difficult for Pranab to penetrate Deogarh, a stronghold of Dharmendra and BJP MLA candidate Subash Chandra Panigrahi. To bury the hatchet, the BJD brought back Biswal, who was BJD’s candidate in 2019 as well, but had lost to BJP’s Subash Chandra Panigrahi by a margin of 7,106 votes, according to party insiders.