BJD Legislature party to elect Naveen as leader today...

The Biju Janta Dal (BJD) Legislature Party will meet tomorrow to formally elect Naveen Patnaik as its leader. It will be held at 4.30 pm on Tuesday.

This follows the landslide victory by the party which won 103 assembly seats and 14 Lok Sabha seats in the just concluded elections.

The party is all set to form government with Naveen Patnaik as chief minister either on Wednesday or Thursday. Interestingly, Patnaik will head the state for the record third time in a row.

Meanwhile, there is hectic lobbying by the elected members of the party for getting berths in the Patnaik’s cabinet. Though party’s senior leader and chief strategist, Pyari Mohan Mohapatra met Patnaik to prepare a blue print on the new cabinet on Sunday, the list is yet to be finalised.

Mohapatra has indicated that though new faces will be given prominence in the new cabinet, the role of senior and experienced members will not be overlooked.

“The new cabinet will be a balanced one and there will be both new and old faces,” Mohapatra told the media. In this backdrop, the new cabinet will be a mix of new and experienced members, sources said. However, the senior BJD leaders are clueless about their fate as the final decision will be taken by Naveen.

The members who have already started lobbying for some key portfolios include energy minister Surya Narayan Patro, finance minister Prafulla Chandra Ghadai, Damodar Rout, Sanjay Das Burma, Pratap Jena and Arun Sahoo.

The names of Bikram Arukh, Bed Prakash Agarwal, former speaker Maheswar Mohanty, former minister Rabi Nanda, women and child development minister Pramila Mallick are also being considered for inclusion in the cabinet.

There is possibility of induction of more people in the ministry as the former alliance partner BJP had eight ministers in the previous ministry. While two BJD ministers were not given tickets for the 2009 assembly elections, two lost in the recently concluded elections to the state assembly.

Since the total size of the ministry is expected to be 21, there will be a number of new faces in the ministry. However, the pre-poll alliance partners like Nationalist Congress Party (NCP) and CPI will not have representation in the new ministry. Meanwhile, the Election Commission of India (ECI) has notified the constitution of the 14th state assembly, paving the way for the formation of the new government in the state.