Meet Sofia Firdous, the First-Ever Woman Muslim MLA of Odisha: 5 Facts

Ms Firdous, the Congress MLA from the Barabati-Cuttack seat in Odisha, made history as the first-ever Muslim woman legislator elected to the Odisha Assembly, defeating BJP’s Purna Chandra Mahapatra by a margin of 8,001 votes. Hailing from a political family, 32-year-old Sofia Firdous is the daughter of senior Congress leader Mohammed Moquim. She holds a Civil Engineering degree from Kalinga Institute of Industrial Technology and completed an Executive General Management Program at the Indian Institute of Management, Bangalore in 2022. Additionally, she was elected as the president of the Bhubaneswar chapter of the Confederation of Real Estate Developers’ Associations of India (CREDAI) in 2023 and serves as the East Zone Coordinator for the CREDAI women’s wing.

Having further established herself as the Co-Chair of the Bhubaneswar Chapter of the CII – Indian Green Building Council (IGBC) and a core member of INWEC India, she is married to entrepreneur Sheikh Meraj Ul Haque. Ms Firdous’ election victory follows in the footsteps of Nandini Satpathy, Odisha’s first woman chief minister, who represented the same constituency in 1972. In the 2024 Odisha Assembly elections, the BJP secured a majority, winning 78 of the 147 seats, thus ending Chief Minister Naveen Patnaik and Biju Janata Dal’s (BJD) 24-year rule in the state. In the Lok Sabha elections, the BJP claimed victory in 20 of the 21 seats in the state, with the remaining seat going to Congress, while the BJD did not win a single seat.