Lok Sabha Elections 2024: Denied funding, Congress Puri candidate Sucharita Mohanty returns ticket, party names Jay Narayan Patnaik instead

New Delhi: The Congress party’s Lok Sabha campaign in Odisha received a setback on Saturday with Sucharita Mohanty, the candidate for Puri constituency, opting out of the race citing lack of funds.

The journalist-turned-politician said she had been asked by the leadership in the eastern state to use her personal money for the election campaign. “It is clear that only fund crunch is holding us back from a winning campaign in the Puri Parliament seat,” she wrote in a letter to KC Venugopal, Congress general secretary in charge of organisation.

Sucharita said her campaign was hit as the party denied her funding with AICC Odisha in-charge Ajay Kumar asking her to fend for herself.

With just two more days to go for the last date of nomination for the Puri Lok Sabha seat, she decided to step down so that someone else can be nominated by the party. Late evening Congress announced Jay Narayan Patnaik as the party's new candidate from the temple town.

A salaried-professional who entered electoral politics 10 years ago, the former journalist said she had put whatever she had in Puri besides trying crowd-funding to sustain her campaign, but could not generate much.

“I tried a public donation drive to support my campaign for progressive politics without much success so far. I also tried to cut down the projected campaign spending to the minimum. Since I couldn’t raise funds on my own, I knocked at your’s and all other doors of our party’s central leadership,” she wrote in her email to Venugopal.

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

Sucharita fought her first Lok Sabha election from Puri parliamentary constituency in 2014 when she secured 25% of votes and came second after BJD’s Pinaki Misra who won it. Five years later, Congress changed the candidate, but fared poorly at the polls with just 4% vote as the voting percentage for BJP swelled.

This is the third jolt for Congress in 2024 Lok Sabha polls after Surat and Indore where the opposition party candidate is no longer in the fray, virtually handing over victories to BJP even before polling.