Bhubaneswar, Sept. 21: Odisha chief minister Naveen Patnaik today sought to make it clear that the Biju Janata Dal would not abstain from voting in Parliament in the event of the Manmohan Singh government facing a trust vote.

“We will not abstain from voting,” said Naveen, while reiterating his party’s earlier stand of maintaining equidistance from Congress and the BJP. The chief minister, who is currently in New Delhi on an official trip, is reportedly being wooed by the Congress-led UPA, which is facing a crisis of sorts following withdrawal of support by Mamata Bannerjee’s Trinamul Congress.

The statement from Naveen assumes significance in the context of rumours that did the rounds here and in New Delhi yesterday that the chief minister had a change of heart and was willing to bail out of the UPA in the event of a crisis.

Some people sought to give it their own spin saying such a move from Naveen was not unexpected, as it had become imperative for him to align with either of the two major political coalitions in the country.

There were suggestions that that he might favour the Congress, which is scouting for new allies, in a subtle way by asking his party MPs to abstain from the Parliament in the event of a trust vote.

Naveen, however, has squashed these rumours in the larger interest of his party, a regional outfit, which is better off keeping equal distance from both the Congress and the BJP. While he has been waging a constant battle against the Congress-led UPA for the alleged neglect of Odisha in all spheres, his relations with the BJP have been less than cordial since the BJD-BJP alliance collapsed in the state in 2009.

The chief minister and other leaders of his party have been openly critical of the BJP and other Hindtuva outfits in the state for trying to exploit the communal feelings of the people.

The saffron party, too, has been making recurrent attacks on the chief minister, holding him squarely responsible for all the ills plaguing the state.

That being so, Naveen cannot afford to come close to either BJP or the Congress. For the past sometime he has been trying hard to bring non-Congress and non-BJP forces together at the national level to create a Third Front.

But if he has any ambitions of leading such a front, he may have to contend with the likes of Mulayam Singh Yadav and Nitish Kumar.