Utkal Congress

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Utkal Congress ( UC ) was a party that existed from 1970 to 1974 in the Indian state of Odisha .

Party history

In the state of Orissa (since 2011 Odisha ) there has always been a certain tradition of political opposition since India's independence that could not be absorbed by the dominant Congress party . From 1950 to 1962 the Ganatantra Parishad existed here , which could win between 20 and 40% of the seats in elections. In 1966 a faction of the Congress party under the name Jana Congress in Orissa had split off from the latter and had subsequently formed a coalition government in Orissa with the Swatantra Party (SWA).

In 1969 the whole of India split up the Congress party into a wing that supported the incumbent Prime Minister Indira Gandhi ( “Congress (R)” ) and a faction in which the old party ranks gathered ( Congress (O) ). This shook the entire organization of the Congress Party to its foundations. In Orissa in 1970 this led to the widespread separation of the local organization of the Congress Party under its local chairman Biju Patnaik , which constituted itself as the new 'Utkal Congress' party. On May 6, 1970, Patnaik announced his resignation from Congress (R) and in a letter to its party president Jagjivan Ram cited the centralistic and authoritarian leadership structure in the Congress party and disregard for local conditions as the reason. In a thesis paper Promises and Performances (“Promises and Performances”), Patnaik complained that Orissa “could never become a prosperous and economically successful state” without a “uniform political apparatus geared towards this purpose”. The aim was evidently to create a strong regional party in Orissa based on the model of Dravida Munnetra Kazhagam in Tamil Nadu .

Ideologically, the new party showed little difference to the congress party, but the UC emphasized its regionalist goals of industrialization and development of Orissa. UC took part in two elections to the Orissa parliament, 1971 and 1974. In 1971 it won 33 of the 140 constituencies, making it the third largest party (after Swatantra and Congress (R)). The party then formed a coalition government with the ideologically very different Swatantra Party and the Jharkhand Party under the non-party Chief Minister Biswanath Das . After Indira Gandhi's Congress (R) won the all-India election in a landslide victory in March 1971 , the coalition government was faced with an acid test. Indira Gandhi's government sought to end payments to former Indian princes ( Privy Purse ), a goal supported by Utkal Congress but opposed by Swatantra. A constitutional amendment was necessary for this (24th amendment to the constitution), which the states also had to agree to. In Orissa Parliament, the majority of the government began to crumble through defectors to the Congress (R). On June 9, 1972, Utkal Congress decided to reunite with Indira Gandhi's Congress (R) party. This finally gave Congress (R) a majority in the parliament of Orissa and Nandini Satpathy (R) was elected Chief Minister of a Congress Party government on June 10, 1992. The new Chief Minister rejected the full unification of the UC with the Congress ( The so rejected Patnaik then founded a new electoral alliance, the Pragati Party , in which all those who were in opposition to the Satpathy government (UC, SWA etc.) were supposed to gather. In fact, Satpathy lost its parliamentary majority due to defectors and therefore entered on Back on March 2, 1973, after which the state was placed under president's rule . In the election to the Parliament of Orissa on January 22, 1974, Utkal Congress received 35 of 146 seats.

A little later, on May 29, 1974, UC merged with six other parties to form the Bharatiya Lok Dal , a party not limited to Orissa, but active throughout India.

Biju Patnaik's original goal of building a strong regional party for Orissa was met much later. Shortly after his death, his son Naveen Patnaik founded the Biju Janata Dal (BJD) party on December 26, 1997 , which is now the dominant political party in the state of Odisha.

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ a b c Prakash Sarangi: Internal challenges to the 'Congress system': the case of the Utkal Congress. In: The Indian Journal of Political Science. Vol. 40, No. 3 (September 1979), pp. 433-452. JSTOR 41854972
  2. ↑ a b Election Results - Full Statistical Reports. Indian Election Commission, accessed May 15, 2015 .
  3. ↑ a b Rabindra Kumar Sethy: Political Crisis and President's Rule in an Indian State. APH Publishing Corporation (September 2003) ISBN 81-7648-463-6 , p. 151. f