Bhubaneswar: The Biju Janata Dal has demanded strong action against the Bharatiya Janata Party for the series of attacks on its leaders and workers in the last few days in Pipili area. In a memorandum given to the State Election Commissioner, the Biju Janata Dal has said that on the 11th of April, at Delang in Pipili Assembly Constituency, Bharatiya Janata Party leaders orchestrated a violent attack on the Biju Janata Dal senior leader and Minister Susant Singh. They attacked him and smashed the front and rear windshields of the car in which he was present.
The trail of violence by BJP did not end there. Prior to the above incident, they violently attacked a Biju Janata Dal election meeting for Pipili by-poll and beat up Biju Janata Dal party workers so severely that two of them are being treated for injuries in Pipili Assembly constituency while one of them was so severely beaten by BJP workers that he had to be shifted to Capital Hospital, Bhubaneswar, in a very serious condition.
When the women family members of those injured BJD workers went to the Medical Health Centre in Delang, to find out about their health and well-being, the BJP workers present there abused them and also pulled at the clothes of those women relatives of the injured BJD workers.
The Biju Janata Dal has said that violence in politics and elections is nothing new for the BJP. During the Bijepur by-elections in 2018 as well, the BJP had resorted to severe electoral violent attacks which was followed by continued electoral violence during the 2019 General Elections in Odisha. Recently, 50 lakh rupees were seized from two BJP leaders in Pipili which they wanted to use to illegally influence the Pipili by-poll.
The BJP has been trying to import into Odisha their electoral violence tactics on the same lines as seen in Uttar Pradesh and Bihar, and turn the peace-loving Odisha into a violence-affected State. The people of Odisha are peace-loving and have been defeating the BJP continuously due to the fear that BJP will try to turn Odisha into another UP or Bihar in terms of political violence. The people of Pipili will again defeat the BJP in Pipili by-polls and thereby defeat their political and electoral violence agenda.
We demand that strict and exemplary action be undertaken against those BJP leaders and workers who are guilty of such violent attacks and to ensure that strict measures are taken so that the BJP does not illegally influence the Pipili by-poll through its violence and attacks on the Biju Janata Dal leaders and their women family members.