Bhubaneswar: Manas Mangaraj, BJD parliamentary party leader in the Rajya Sabha, attended two meetings of INDIA bloc floor leaders with Congress president Mallikarjun Kharge — one on Friday and another on Saturday — fueling speculation of the Naveen Patnaik-led party moving closer to the Congress.Mangaraj, however, told TOI that BJD’s participation was limited to protecting states’ interests on delimitation.Mangaraj attended one meeting ahead of voting on the women’s reservation bill on Friday and another day after the bill failed. He said BJD had been consistent in its stand on safeguarding Odisha’s interests. “My attending the opposition meeting should be seen in the context of BJD’s concern over Odisha’s political representation at the national level, which could have been affected had the delimitation bill been passed. The government was pushing the delimitation bill under the guise of the women’s quota bill, which was already passed in 2023,” he said.He said that while several opposition leaders welcomed BJD’s presence at the meeting for the first time, he made it clear that BJD president Naveen Patnaik had always placed Odisha’s interests above everything else. “BJD’s participation in the meeting was purely in that context,” Mangaraj said.Mangaraj added that although senior BJP leaders claimed every state would see a 50% increase in Lok Sabha seats, there was no such clarity in the bill. He also questioned why the government did not introduce the bill during the recently concluded budget session or wait until elections in West Bengal and Tamil Nadu were over.Speculation about growing proximity between BJD and Congress has been rife since the two parties jointly backed an Independent candidate in the Rajya Sabha election last month. It gained further momentum after Pradesh Congress Committee chairman Bhakta Charan Das said earlier this month that a pre-poll alliance between the two parties was possible — a claim that was not ruled out by anyone in the BJD.
