Baijayant “Jay” Panda, a Lok Sabha MP from Kendrapara in Odisha, has resigned from the Biju Janata Dal. Panda said he was “heartbroken” that no one from the party turned up to pay their last respects to his father, industrialist Bansidhar Panda, who died on May 22.
He will submit his resignation to Lok Sabha Speaker Sumitra Mahajan soon.
The party had suspended Panda in January and asked him to resign from the Lok Sabha, accusing him of submitting a false affidavit before the Election Commission ahead of the 2014 elections. Panda continues to deny the allegations, and had called them “bizarre”.
In a letter to party chief and Odisha Chief Minister Naveen Patnaik, Panda wrote that he wants to “quit the kind of politics into which our BJD has descended”. He pointed out a series of incidents of “unceasing humiliation” from within the party that led him to the decision.
He said Bansidhar Panda was a “very close friend, supporter and associate” of Biju Patnaik, the chief minister’s late father, after whom the party is named. “Several colleagues” in the party told Jay Panda that they had been stopped from visiting him after his father’s death, Panda claimed in his letter.
Jay Panda was one of the founding members of the Biju Janata Dal in 1997, soon after Biju Patnaik’s death. He is a four-time MP, and served two terms in the Rajya Sabha before being elected to the Lok Sabha twice.
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