Manmohan samal: In Odisha, the ruling Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) again appointed Manmohan Samal as the President of the state unit on Tuesday (July 08, 2025). BJP’s central election supervisor Sanjay Jaiswal announced a re -appointment of Samal to this post in the presence of senior leaders at the party’s state headquarters.
Jaiswal said that he was the only leader to file nomination for the post and hence he was elected unopposed. This will be the second consecutive term of Samal as the president of the state unit and the fourth consecutive term.
50 percent of the state’s population OBC
His earlier three terms were from November 1999 to October 2000, October 2000 to May 2004 and March 2023 to July 2025. Born on 15 April 1959 in Bhadrak district, Samal is from the Other Backward Classes (OBC) community. OBC is 50 percent of the state’s population. He joined politics in student life and was elected as a member of the Akhil Bharatiya Vidyarthi Parishad (ABVP) in 1979.
Samal has also been a minister
He continued to move forward and in the early 2000s, the Biju Janata Dal (BJD) led by Naveen Patnaik was made a minister in the BJP coalition government. He handled departments like Revenue and Disaster Management and Food Supplies and Consumer Welfare. He was then an MLA from Dhamnagar constituency.
BJP sources said that Samal played a role in forming the BJP government in the state by defeating the BJD government, which has been in power for 24 years, last year. As a reward, the central leadership appointed him to this post again for the fourth time. He was barely made the chairman of the state unit on ad hoc basis a year before the election in 2023.
BJP seats in the state gained an edge
Sources said that in a short time, his efforts ensured BJP’s victory over 20 of the 21 Lok Sabha seats in the state. The BJP won 78 seats in the 147 -member assembly, while Patnaik’s BJD got 51 seats. The Congress got 14 seats, Marxist Communist Party (CPI -M) one seat and three independents won over three. However, Samal himself lost the assembly elections from Chandbali seat.
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