INDIA VOTES 2024: After Surat & Indore no-show, Congress’s Puri nominee exits Lok Sabha race, cites lack of funds

Aditi Tandon

New Delhi, May 4

The saga of Congress candidates withdrawing from the Lok Sabha election race continued on Saturday with the party’s Puri nominee, Sucharita Mohanty, the latest to back out.

Mohanty, who quit journalism to join politics in 2014, returned the ticket today, citing lack of funds to run an impactful campaign. Hours after she exited, the Congress fielded a new face, Jai Prakash Patnaik.

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Mohanty, the third Congress candidate to retreat from the electoral battle field in 12 days after nominees in Gujarat’s Surat and Madhya Pradesh’s Indore, said she had set a good precedent by returning her ticket so that the party could field someone financially better placed to take on the BJP and the BJD in Puri. On April 22, BJP’s Surat candidate Mukesh Dalal was elected unopposed after the nomination papers of the Congress nominee were rejected and eight others withdrew from the race. On April 29, Congress’ Indore Lok Sabha nominee Akshay Kanti Bam, in a shock move, withdrew his papers and joined the BJP. He left the ground wide open for BJP candidate and sitting MP Shankar Lalwani.

Mohanty, in a letter to AICC general secretary KC Venugopal on Saturday, said the party’s Odisha in-charge had asked her to fend for herself.

“Our campaign in Puri has been hit hard because the party has denied me funding. The AICC in-charge has asked me to fend for myself. I was a salaried journalist and entered electoral politics 10 years ago. I have given all I have to my campaign in Puri. I tried a public donation drive to support my campaign for progressive politics without much success so far. I also tried to cut down campaign spending to the minimum. Since I could not raise funds on my own, I knocked the doors of the party leadership to commit funds necessary for an impactful campaign,” Mohanty said.

She said as in 2014, there was a groundswell of popular support for the Congress in Puri, but “fund crunch was holding the party back from a winning campaign”.

“I regret that without party funding, I won’t be able to carry out the campaign in Puri. I, therefore, return the Congress ticket,” she said.

Mohanty said her BJP and BJD opponents were both “money bags and were running vulgar campaigns centred on the show of wealth rather than the show of strength”.