By Bizodisha Bureau, Bhubaneswar, March 4, 2019: Ending speculation over nine months, Baijayant Jay Panda, former BJD Leader, on Monday joined BJP ahead of Lok Sabha Polls.

Union petroleum minister and BJP’s leading Odisha face, Dharmendra Pradha welcomed Panda into the party fold. Soon after joining the party, Panda met BJP president Amit Shah at New Delhi.

“Nine months of introspection & widespread consultations w/colleagues & public. Grateful for support recd from all over. On auspicious #MahaShivratri I’ve decided to join @BJP4India & work under the leadership of @narendramodi Ji to serve Odisha & India to the best of my ability,” Panda tweeted on Monday.

Speaking to reporters after donning the saffron robe, Panda maintained that it was a natural choice for him to join the BJP. “There was a probability of my joining the BJP 22 years ago (when BJD was formed with BJP help in 1997). Unfortunately, it took 22 years to come here,” he said.

Panda had quit Naveen Patnaik led BJD last year after he had a bitter falling out with the BJD president and chief minister Naveen Patnaik. In his parting letter to the BJD chief, Panda said it was “irrefutable clear that the party wants me out”.

“It is with deep anguish, hurt and sorrow that I have decided to quit the kind of politics into which our BJD has descended,” Panda wrote at the time.

The 55 year-old Panda had difference with BJD leadership after the 2017 panchayat elections in state when he called for “introspection” for party’s fall in seats when the BJP had remarkably improved its performance. Baijayant had questioned “bureaucratic highhandedness” in BJD and had questioned the role of Naveen’s trusted IAS officer V K Pandian in subsequent months. He was suspended from the party in January last year for anti-party activities.

Odisha will have simultaneous polls to the Assembly and Lok Sabha and the BJP is likely to field Panda from Kendrapada Lok Sabha seat from where he was elected on BJD tickets in 2009 and 2014.

Odisha has 21 parliamentary constituencies and the BJD had won 20 of them in 2014. The BJP had won Sundargarh, represented by Union minister for tribal affairs Jual Oram.

The BJP has identified Odisha as one of the priority states ahead of the polls with Shah time and again saying that the party targets to garner 120 of 147 assembly seats. In the 2017 panchayat elections, the BJP emerged as the second largest party, pushing the Congress to the third spot.

Panda, had recently said that he is willing to join hands with anybody “committed to tackling the severe problems that Odisha now faces”.

Baijayant, who praised Prime Minister Narendra Modi in the past, even when he was with the BJD, said “It’s no secret that I have admired Prime Minister Modi’s leadership and the direction in which he is taking the country.”

Blasting BJD, of which he used to be the most prominent face in Delhi for past two decades, the four-time former MP said, “We have a situation in Odisha where governance has very sharply deteriorated over the years.”