Lok Sabha Elections 2024: Who is Sucharita Mohanty and why did she return her Congress ticket from Puri constituency?

Congress candidate from the Puri Lok Sabha constituency, Sucharita Mohanty, has declined to contest the elections and returned the ticket alleging lack of funding from the party.

Sucharita had been fielded from the Puri seat in Odisha against BJP national spokesperson Sambit Patra and BJD candidate Arup Patnaik, a former Mumbai Police Commissioner.

A journalist by profession, Sucharita is the daughter of former Congress MP Brajamohan Mohanty and joined politics 10 years ago.

In the Lok Sabha elections 2014, Sucharita had lost her seat to Biju Janata Dal's (BJD) Pinaki Misra.

The Congress candidate has withdrawn from the Lok Sabha elections 2024 and returned the ticket, giving Congress some time to select any other candidate for Puri constituency until May 6.

Why did Sucharita return her Congress ticket?

Citing lack of funds which forced her to back off from the campaigns and elections, Sucharita sent a mail to the AICC general secretary K C Venugopal on Friday.

She mentioned that the Congress has denied funds for her campaign. The now former candidate also claimed that AICC Odisha in-charge Ajoy Kumar asked her to campaign using her own resources.

"I was a salaried professional journalist who entered electoral politics 10 years ago. I have given all I have into my campaign in Puri. 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," she mentioned.

The Congress candidate from Puri had also tried a public funding drive for her campaign. Sucharita had shared a QR Code on her X account to raise funds to keep her campaign ongoing.

In a post she wrote, "I am a salaried professional woman with limited resources of my own to carry out a successful campaign to defeat the corrupt and Electoral Bond scamsters, BJP and BJD, in Puri."

"Faced with the ugly prospects that a fund shortage alone could stand between us and the victory in Puri against the Money Bags, I am sending out this SoS APPEAL to you," she wrote in her post on X.

She added, "PLEASE SUPPORT MY CAMPAIGN IN PURI BY ANY FINANCIAL CONTRIBUTION YOU CAN MAKE. SUPPORT GOOD POLITICS! DEFEAT MONEY BAGS & SCAMSTERS! MAKE A DONATION, big or small, using the UPI QR Code below."

"It is clear that only fund crunch is holding us back from a winning campaign in Puri. I regret that without party funding, it won't be possible to carry out the campaign in Puri. I, therefore, return the party ticket for the Puri Lok Sabha constituency herewith," she said in her mail to the AICC.

She told ANI, "I have returned the ticket because the party was not able to fund me. Another reason is that in some of the seats in 7 Assembly segments, winnable candidates have not been given the ticket. Instead, some weak candidates got the ticket. I couldn't contest like this..."

With PTI inputs...