Congress Replaces Puri Lok Sabha Candidate After Her Ticket Return Due To 'Fund Crunch'
Congress Replaces Puri Lok Sabha Candidate After Her Ticket Return Due To ‘Fund Crunch’
Lok Sabha Elections 2024: Hours after the Congress candidate in Odisha’s Puri parliamentary constituency returned the ticket to the party leadership, the party fielded another contestant from the seat. Replacing the Journalist-turned-politician Sucharita Mohanty, Congress president Mallikarjun Kharge named Jay Narayan Patnaik as the official candidate for the upcoming Lok Sabha Elections 2024.
The change came after Sucharita Mohanty returned her nomination to the party saying that she lacked the fund to fight the election. She also alleged that even after her request, the party did not disburse any money to her as campaign funding.
She said that while she wrote a letter to the party general secretary KC Venugopal, no response was provided to her by the party and no step was taken.
“I have returned the ticket because the party was not able to fund me. Another reason is that in some of the seats in seven Assembly segments, winnable candidates have not been given the ticket. Instead, some weak candidates got the ticket. I couldn’t contest like this,” Sucharita told news agency ANI.
“Our campaign in the Puri Parliamentary constituency has been hit hard because the party has denied me funding. AICC Odisha in-charge Ajoy Kumar ji categorically asked me to fend for myself. I was a salaried professional journalist who entered electoral politics 10 years ago. I have given all I have into my campaign in Puri,” Mohanty wrote in her letter to KC Venugopal.
Taking a jibe at the poll time drama in Congress, former party leader Sanjay Nirupam took a swipe at KC Venugopal, calling him a ‘wheeler-dealer’ and said this is ‘today’s poor Congress’.
“The wheeler-dealer who makes financial deals to give posts to Congress members and takes a commission from every minister in state governments for each work scolded the woman candidate (Sucharita Mohanty) so much that she withdrew her candidature,” former Congress leader Sanjay Nirupam who joined the Shiv Sena (Eknath Shinde) said.