The State Election Commission on Tuesday announced the results of the Odisha Panchayat elections 2022. The ruling Biju Janata Dal (BJD) has registered a landslide victory in the rural polls contrary to the earlier speculations that the Opposition would give a tough fight to the party.
Out of the total 851 Zilla Parishad zones, the BJD has won a record number of 766 leaving the Opposition parties far behind. The BJD has secured 52.73 per cent votes out of the around 2.10 crore votes polled in the rural elections.
However, during this rural polls, the BJP came a distant second by winning only 42 seats against 297 in 2017. Congress came third by winning 37 ZP zone seats. The grand old party had won 60 seats in the 2017 Panchayat polls in Odisha.
As the BJD has won maximum of zones in all the 30 districts, the Naveen Patnaik-led party is most likely to form all the ZPs. In 2017, the party was able to form ZPs in only 20 districts while the BJP and the Congress had then formed 8 and 2 ZPs, respectively.
An analysis of the 2022 rural poll results indicates that the biggest setback has been received by the BJP as the party lost 255 zones. Adding insult to injury, the party failed to win even a single seat in as many as 10 districts- Jharsuguda, Deogarh, Mayurbhanj, Jajpur, Bhadrak, Jagatsinghpur, Rayagada, Koraput, Malkangiri and Nabarangpur.
The Congress fared quite well in at least four districts (Koraput, Rayagada, Kandhamal and Bolangir). In Koraput, the party had given the BJD a run for its money by winning as many as 12 ZP seats. However, it couldn’t win a single ZP zone in as many as 18 districts, leaving the party much to introspect.