A campaign vehicle of BJP in Bhubaneswar. Picture by Sanjib Mukherjee

Bhubaneswar, March 28: Congress candidates locked in triangular contests have a silent prayer on their lips — a rise in the vote share of the BJP. They are hoping that an increase in BJP votes will help them to get the better of their BJD rivals.

If the trend of the last Lok Sabha elections is any indication, Congress candidates have an advantage in situations where the BJP makes heavy inroads into the votebank of the BJD.

In the 2009 elections, Congress candidates emerged victorious on a number of seats, particularly in west Odisha, where the BJP has been traditionally strong, taking advantage of this factor.

In the Bargarh Lok Sabha seat, for example, the margin of Congress candidate Sanjay Bhoi’s victory over BJD’s Hamid Hussain was around one lakh votes. The BJP candidate Radharani Panda had polled 1.57 lakh votes.

It was, more or less, the same story in Sambalpur where BJD candidate Rohit Pujari lost to Congress’s Amarnath Pradhan by around 15,000 votes with BJP’s Surendra Lath polling 1,50,910 votes. Had the BJP not fielded a candidate or had its candidate a weak one, Pujari would have won the contest hands down.

In Sundargarh, which is among the few industry-dominated Lok Sabha constituencies of west Odisha, the BJD had backed a CPI(M) candidate following a pact with the communists. However, while Salomi Minz of the CPI(M) did not do particularly well in those elections managing only 71,582 votes, BJP’s Jual Oram, a former union minister and the present national vice-president of the party, polled 2,68,430 votes. The net result of this division of anti-Congress votes was that Congress candidate Hemanand Biswal scraped through with a narrow margin.

Strong BJP candidates had also made the task of Congress candidates easy in Balasore and Kalahandi. While in Balasore Union minister Srikant Jena benefited in a big way from the presence of BJP’s Kharabela Swain, who had polled 2,19,908 votes, thus nixing the chances of BJD backed NCP candidate Arun Dey, the gainer in Kalahandi was Congress’s Bhakta Charan Das, who romped home with a margin of over one lakh votes against his nearest BJD rival Subash Chandra Nayak with BJP candidate Bikram Keshari Deo, a scion of the local royal family, polling 2,21,851 votes.

With the BJP still struggling in Odisha, but hoping to put up a better show this time, thanks to the Modi factor, the Congress would once again look to capitalise on the division in Opposition votes.

“A strong BJP candidate in a triangular contest involving the BJD suits our gameplan. They will end up eating into each other’s votes, while our base in the state, more or less, remains intact,” said a Congress leader not willing to be named. The BJP leadership, too, seems to be aware of this but it is a calculated risk they have to take.

“We treat both the BJD and the Congress as our enemies. We will give the polls our best shot irrespective of what the results are,” said a BJP leader.