‘Chanakya’ Of Odisha Politics Pyarimohan Mohapatra’s Daughter To Join Congress Today

Bhubaneswar: Sikta Pati, daughter of former bureaucrat and Rajya Sabha member Pyarimohan Mohapatra, will be inducted into the Congress party during a joining programme at the party headquarters in Odisha capital on Wednesday.

The event will be conducted at 5 pm in presence of Odisha Congress in-charge A Chellakumar and the party’s state unit president Sarat Pattanayak, party sources said.

This comes five days after former Odisha Chief Secretary Bijay Patnaik joined Congress at the headquarters of the All India Congress Committee (AICC) in New Delhi.

An MA in Economics, Sikta also holds an MBA degree. After Pyari’s demise on March 19, 2017, she joined Odisha Jana Morcha (OJM), the party founded by her father, and became its Secretary-General. In 2019, she joined the BJD in presence of party president and Chief Minister Naveen Patnaik.

Notably, Pyari was the chief advisor of Naveen, a political greenhorn then, on BJD affairs from 2000 to 2012. The confidant turned ‘backstabber’ in 2012 when he tried to engineer a coup in the party while Naveen was on his first overseas trip to London after becoming the Chief Minister. He was soon eased out of the party. Pyari then founded OJM but could make little impact in 2014 Lok Sabha and Assembly polls.