About Manmohan Samal
A biography assembled from published sources: the record of a man born in Bhadrak in 1959 who has spent more than four decades inside Odisha’s public life, most of it running a party organisation rather than holding a seat.
In summary
Manmohan Samal is the president of the Bharatiya Janata Party’s Odisha unit and a Member of Parliament in the Rajya Sabha representing Odisha. He has held the state presidency across four terms — the first beginning in November 1999, the current one running from March 2023 and renewed unopposed in July 2025 — and he has sat in Parliament twice, from 2000 to 2004 and again from April 2026.
Between those two parliamentary terms he served one term in the Odisha Legislative Assembly, for Dhamnagar, from 2004 to 2009, and held two departments in the state ministry: Revenue, and Food Supplies & Consumer Welfare. Since 2009 he has contested the Chandabali Assembly seat twice and lost it twice.
The through-line is organisational. Samal’s influence in Odisha politics has been exercised mainly through the party structure — office-bearer lists, district committees, candidate selection, campaign direction — and the single event most often attributed to it is the 2024 Assembly election, in which the BJP won a majority in Odisha for the first time.
Bhadrak, 1959
Samal was born on 15 April 1959 in Bhadrak district, on Odisha’s northern coast. His father was Kambhupani Samal and his mother Basant Kumari Samal. He belongs to a community classified among the Other Backward Classes — a fact that news agencies noted when reporting his 2025 re-election, because the OBC categories together account for a majority of Odisha’s population and because social composition is a routine consideration in state party appointments.
Bhadrak matters to this biography beyond the fact of birth. Both Assembly seats Samal has contested in his career — Dhamnagar, which he won in 2004, and Chandabali, which he contested in 2019 and 2024 — lie within the district. His voter enrolment, as declared in his 2024 nomination affidavit, is in the Bhandaripokhari segment of the same district. A career that has ranged across the whole state has stayed anchored to one part of it.
The district itself sits in the deltaic belt north of the Mahanadi system, an area repeatedly exposed to cyclone and flood. That geography is relevant later in this account: the department Samal was given charge of in 2004 — Revenue and Disaster Management — is the arm of the Odisha government through which relief in exactly such districts is administered.
Bhadrak College, Utkal University, and a later degree in law
Samal is an alumnus of Bhadrak College. He holds a Bachelor of Arts and a Bachelor of Laws, both from Utkal University in Bhubaneswar — the state’s oldest university and, for his generation, the principal route into professional and public life for students from Odisha’s coastal districts.
He returned to formal study much later. The sworn affidavit filed with his 2024 Assembly nomination records a Master of Laws taken at Fakir Mohan University, Balasore, in 2016 — completed in his late fifties, in the years between his ministerial career and his return to the state presidency, and at a university in the district neighbouring his own. In the same affidavit he gives his occupation as social service, and his sources of income as a pension and agriculture.
A campus election, and everything that followed from it
In 1979 Samal was elected president of the students’ union at Bhadrak College. He contested as a student associated with the Akhil Bharatiya Vidyarthi Parishad, the student organisation aligned with the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh and, from 1980, with the newly formed Bharatiya Janata Party.
For a career that would later be defined by organisational work, this is an unusually exact starting point. Student union politics in Odisha’s district colleges in the late 1970s was the training ground in which a generation of the state’s political workers learned committee structure, membership drives, campaign logistics and the discipline of a cadre organisation. Samal moved from that base into the BJP’s state structure and rose through it.
The intervening years — the 1980s and much of the 1990s — are the least documented part of the public record, and this website does not fill that gap with invention. What is established is the destination: by November 1999 he was president of the state unit.
The first presidency, and the coalition years
Samal took charge of the BJP’s Odisha unit on 14 November 1999, succeeding Jual Oram. The timing placed him at the head of the state organisation during the most consequential realignment in Odisha’s modern politics: the alliance between the BJP and the Biju Janata Dal, formed in 1998 and in government in the state from 2000.
News agency accounts describe this stretch as two terms — November 1999 to October 2000, and October 2000 to May 2004 — while the consolidated record of the state unit’s presidents treats it as a single continuous tenure from 14 November 1999 to 18 May 2004. Both descriptions refer to the same period; this website counts four presidencies in total, following the news-agency convention, and states the underlying dates so the reader can see exactly what is being counted.
He left the state presidency in May 2004, when the office passed back to Jual Oram, and Samal moved into government.
Two houses, and two departments
Samal entered Parliament on 4 April 2000, elected to the Rajya Sabha from Odisha. He served that seat until 23 May 2004, when he resigned it: he had won the Dhamnagar Assembly seat in Bhadrak district at the state election held that spring, and could not hold both.
He was sworn into the Odisha ministry on 18 May 2004 under Chief Minister Naveen Patnaik, in the coalition government formed by the Biju Janata Dal and the BJP. He was given two portfolios at once: Revenue, and Food Supplies & Consumer Welfare. He held both until December 2008. The BJD ended the eleven-year alliance with the BJP in March 2009, ahead of that year’s elections, and the BJP left the Odisha government.
His Assembly term ran its full course to 2009. It remains the only term he has served in the state legislature.
Fourteen years without state office
Between the end of his Assembly term in 2009 and his return to the state presidency in 2023, Samal held neither the presidency of the state unit nor a seat in a legislature. The state presidency passed in that period through Jual Oram, Suresh Pujari, Kanak Vardhan Singh Deo, Basanta Kumar Panda and Samir Mohanty.
The reliably documented events of these years are electoral. In 2019 Samal contested the Chandabali Assembly seat and lost to Byomakesh Ray of the Biju Janata Dal: Ray polled 77,313 votes to Samal’s 69,233, a margin of 8,080.
Beyond that, published sources are thin, and this website does not speculate about what a party worker was doing in the years when he held no titled office. What can be said is that the organisation returned to him in 2023, which is not the usual trajectory for a leader fourteen years out of state office.
The return, the majority, and the Council of States
On 24 March 2023 Samal was appointed president of the BJP’s Odisha unit for the third time, succeeding Samir Mohanty. Fourteen months later Odisha voted in simultaneous Assembly and Lok Sabha elections. The BJP won 78 of 147 Assembly seats on a 40.07 per cent vote share — up 55 seats on 2019 — and 20 of the state’s 21 Lok Sabha seats. Mohan Charan Majhi was sworn in as Chief Minister on 12 June 2024, the first BJP chief minister in Odisha’s history.
Samal contested Chandabali again and lost again, to the same opponent, this time by 1,916 votes.
On 8 July 2025 he was confirmed for a further term as state president, unopposed, under the party’s ‘Sangathan Parv’ organisational election process. The declaration was made at the state headquarters in Bhubaneswar, with the Bihar MP Sanjay Jaiswal serving as the party’s central observer for the exercise.
He returned to Parliament the following year. Declared elected to the Rajya Sabha from Odisha on 16 March 2026, he assumed office on 3 April and took the oath on 6 April 2026, succeeding Mamata Mohanta in the seat.
A brief note
Samal married Pranati Samal in 1994. They have a son and a daughter. His 2024 nomination affidavit records his spouse’s occupation as a transport business.
This website publishes only the family particulars that appear in public biographical records and in the candidate’s own sworn declaration. Nothing further is inferred, and no private detail is added.
What the record establishes
Read end to end, the documents describe a particular kind of political career — one whose measure is not a long tenure in a legislature but the condition of an organisation over time. Samal has been in a legislature for roughly nine of the past twenty-six years. He has led his party’s state unit for roughly nine as well, in two widely separated stretches, and the second of those stretches coincided with the largest change in Odisha’s government in a generation.
It is also a career with plainly visible reverses. Two Assembly defeats in the same constituency, the second occurring in his party’s best-ever state result, are part of the record and are stated as such on every page of this website where they are relevant.
Both halves of that picture belong to an honest account. A profile that reported only the majority, or only the defeats, would describe something that did not happen.
Sources for this page
- Press Trust of India report on the July 2025 re-election of the Odisha BJP president (carried by The Week and Deccan Herald), for date of birth, district, community, 1979 students’ union election, ABVP association, portfolios and term dates.
- Consolidated record of presidents of the BJP’s Odisha unit, for the 14 November 1999 – 18 May 2004 tenure and the sequence of office-holders from 2004 to 2023.
- Biographical record of Manmohan Samal, for parents’ names, marriage, children, degrees from Utkal University, Rajya Sabha dates and ministerial dates.
- Sworn affidavit filed with the 2024 Odisha Assembly nomination for Chandabali, published by the Association for Democratic Reforms, for the 2016 LL.M. from Fakir Mohan University, stated occupation and voter enrolment.
- Declared results of the 2024 Odisha Assembly and Lok Sabha elections, and of the 2019 Chandabali contest, as reported by established news organisations.
- Pragativadi and Ommcom News reports of the ‘Sangathan Parv’ organisational election of 7–8 July 2025, for the unopposed return and the central observer.
- News Services Division, All India Radio (newsonair.gov.in) and Kalinga TV, for the 16 March 2026 Rajya Sabha result and the 6 April 2026 oath.