2022 goa assembly elections

Defying Anti-Incumbency, BJP Set To Retain Power in Goa

The BJP’s win will be particularly sweet for Pramod Sawant, a rookie MLA who took over as chief minister in 2019 after Manohar Parrikar’s death.

Panaji: Beating anti-incumbency sentiments, the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) is set to return to power in Goa for a third consecutive term. The saffron party won 20 of the 40 seats in Goa’s legislative assembly, and is expected to form the government with the help of three independents, and possibly the Maharashtrawadi Gomantak Party (MGP), which won two seats.

“Independents are coming with us, MGP will also help us form the government,” the BJP’s Goa in-charge Devendra Fadnavis said in Panaji.

The Congress, which was expected to better its 2017 tally of 17 seats, managed only 11. A huge factor that weighed against the Congress was the presence of the Aam Aadmi Party (AAP) and the Trinamool Congress (TMC), both playing out their pan-India political ambitions for a slice of the secular vote in this state.

AAP took two seats in the once Congress stronghold of Salcette taluka. In Navelim, a Catholic-majority constituency which the former Congress chief minister Luizinho Faleiro (who moved to the TMC for a Rajya Sabha seat) had won seven times, the fierce contest between the Congress, TMC, NCP and AAP allowed the BJP candidate, Ulhas Tuenkar to sneak in with a consolidation of the minority Hindu vote.

Accepting the verdict of the people, the Congress’ senior leader P. Chidambaram pointed out that the non-BJP voters were hopelessly divided. In some constituencies, Congress candidates lost by thin margins.

The BJP’s win will be particularly sweet for Pramod Sawant, a rookie MLA who took over as chief minister in 2019 after Manohar Parrikar’s death. Sawant survived a scare earlier in the day when he was trailing in the count but made it through with a margin of just 666 votes over the Congress challenger Dharmesh Sanglani.

Apart from Sawant, prominent winners from the BJP include Vishvajit Rane and his wife Divya and Babush Monserrate and his wife Jennifer. Luck also seemed to smile on the BJP in this election. The former Congress chief minister Ravi Naik – who moved over to the BJP, scraped through with a margin of just 77 votes in Ponda.

Luck didn’t however favour Manohar Parrikar’s son Utpal, who contested as an independent from his father’s constituency, Panaji. He lost to Babush Monserrate by just 716 votes. Monserrate, the fulcrum of defections from the Congress to the BJP in the last term, was among only three defectors (out of 12) to survive voters’ wrath. The nine others were sent packing.

Babush Monserrate. Photo: The Wire

Monserrate reacted angrily to his and his wife’s much reduced margins of victories. He lashed out against his own party, saying the result showed the BJP workers haven’t accepted him and his wife into the party. “They worked against both of us. I never accepted this result of such a reduced margin. The BJP did not help us win. We won because of our own workers,” the leader said. Monserrate said this showed a failure on the part of the BJP’s leaders.

With Sawant’s position firmly cemented with the party victory, it is unlikely the BJP will see the need to change the chief minister, despite the rising angst against Sawant even in business circles for his poor leadership qualities and his litany of failures – the mishandling of the COVID-19 crisis, the restarting of mining, the ups and downs of the tourism industry, the damage to the environment from the three linear projects and a host of others.

Another trend is the consolidation of the Hindu vote, which has given the poor performing BJP and its RSS-bred chief minister yet another term.

Unlike Parrikar, Sawant made no effort to reach out to Catholic constituencies. All through the campaign, he focused primarily in keeping the AAP and TMC in play, banking on a division of the non-Hindu vote; he constantly parroted the BJP central leadership’s attack on Jawaharlal Nehru; talked of rebuilding temples that had been destroyed by the Portuguese to build churches.

He also trained his guns on Mamata Banerjee, trying to paint her as a supporter of “Muslims and Rohingyas”, primarily to damage the MGP – which had a prepoll alliance with the TMC. The strategy appeared to have worked. The MGP was expected to take at least five seats managed just two, which makes it all the more vulnerable now to being leaned on by big brother BJP.

Goa Elections: Polling Underway in Goa; 301 Candidates in Fray for 40 Assembly Seats

“Voting began at 7 am and will conclude at 6 pm in the single-phase elections in the coastal state,” the officials said.

Panaji: Polling began Monday morning in Goa, where 301 candidates are in the fray for the 40 Assembly seats, election officials said.

“Voting began at 7 am and will conclude at 6 pm in the single-phase elections in the coastal state,” the officials said.

Over 11 lakh people are eligible to cast their votes. They include 9,590 persons with disabilities, 2,997 aged over 80 years, 41 sex workers and nine transgenders.

The counting of votes will take place on March 10.

Goa is witnessing a multi-cornered contest, with the Aam Aadmi Party (AAP), the Trinamool Congress (TMC) and other smaller parties vying to make a mark on the state’s electoral scene.

Also read: Hobbled by Voter Anger and Rebellion in Goa, BJP Turns To Familiar Ploy: Targeting Nehru

To check the spread of COVID-19, voters have been provided hand gloves at the polling stations, an election official said. Over 100 ‘all-women’ polling booths have been set up in the state for the convenience of female voters.

The prominent candidates include chief minister Pramod Sawant (BJP), leader of the opposition Digambar Kamat (Congress), former CMs Churchill Alemao (TMC), Ravi Naik (BJP), Laxmikant Parsekar (independent), former deputy CMs Vijai Sardesai (GFP) and Sudin Dhavalikar (MGP), late CM Manohar Parrikar’s son Utpal Parrikar and AAP’s CM face Amit Paleker.

“The average number of eligible voters per booth in the state is 672, which is the lowest in the country, ” a poll official said.

“The Vasco Assembly constituency has the highest number of 35,139 eligible voters, while the Mormugao seat has the lowest number of voters at 19,958,” he said.

The Congress and the Goa Forward Party (GFP) are fighting the election in alliance, while the Mamata Banerjee-led TMC has tied-up with the Maharashtrawadi Gomantak Party (MGP) to contest the polls.

The Shiv Sena and the NCP had also announced their pre-poll alliance, while the Arvind Kejriwal-led AAP is contesting without a tie-up with any other political party.

The Revolutionary Goans, Goencho Swabhimaan Party, Jai Mahabharat Party and Sambhaji Brigade are also in the poll fray, besides 68 independent candidates

“There are 105 all-women polling booths, also called as the ‘pink booths’. Earlier, there were was a pink booth in every constituency,” the official said.

The state had recorded 82.56% turnout during the 2017 elections. The Congress then won 17 seats. The BJP, which bagged 13 seats, was quick to stitch up an alliance with some regional outfits and independents to form government in the state.

Prime Minister Narendra Modi, BJP chief J P Nadda and Union home minister Amit Shah campaigned in the last one month for the saffron party, which has not entered into any pre-poll alliance in Goa.

The Congress has fielded 37 candidates, while ally GFP has fielded three. Congress leaders Rahul Gandhi and Priyanka Gandhi Vadra campaigned for the party in the coastal state.

(PTI)

Hobbled by Voter Anger and Rebellion in Goa, BJP Turns To Familiar Ploy: Targeting Nehru

Amit Shah and Rajnath Singh have repeated PM Narendra Modi’s claim that Jawaharlal Nehru deliberately “delayed” military action to free Goa from Portuguese colonial rule along with India’s Independence.

Panaji: The last phase of the election in Goa has put a shaky Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) on the defensive, with the ruling party and its phalanx of big faces trying to distract the voter with an orchestrated attack against Jawaharlal Nehru and his role in Goa’s Liberation of December 1961.

Playing up Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s spiel in parliament that Jawaharlal Nehru had deliberately “delayed” military action to free Goa from Portuguese colonial rule along with India’s Independence, Union home minister Amit Shah and defence minister Rajnath Singh – campaigning in Goa on February 9 – sang the same tune.

Had Nehru been a decisive prime minister, Goa would have been liberated in 1947, rather than 1961, Shah said, with Singh echoing the attack.

“In trying to demolish Nehru’s image, the BJP believes it will help them damage the Congress in this election,” says Konkani writer, former editor and lawyer Uday Bhembre.

With voter resentment against the BJP running high, the Congress campaign has moved apace, placing it as the principal challenger in this election, as the high-pitched disruptions of the Aam Aadmi Party and Trinamool Congress fade into the background.

Bhembre says the BJP’s attack on Nehru’s role in liberating Goa is a “deliberate attempt to distort history” and in keeping with the party’s political strategy to discredit him.

“Nehru was a perfect democrat, and his decision to hold back on military action has to be seen in the context of the political history of the time,” he says. Caught up in the spiral of problems in running the country post Independence, the Goa case would hardly have figured in the agenda of the new Congress government. “In any case, the decision to annexe Goa was not Nehru’s alone, but the cabinet’s,” says Bhembre.

With his hands tied by India’s commitment to the UN and the non-aligned movement to desist from using force in taking back Goa, the country’s first prime minister spent years exploring every diplomatic option to convince Portuguese dictator Antonio de Oliveira Salazar to give up Goa peacefully. The New York Times reported in July 1955 that Nehru had met with Pope Pius XII in Rome and brought up the “Goa question”.

Jawaharlal Nehru. Photo: Wikimedia Commons, public domain

Quoting from Pundalik Gaitonde’s book The Liberation of Goa: A Participant’s View of History, Bhembre says Nehru sent the Goan surgeon (Gaitonde) who had connections in London on various diplomatic missions abroad “to see that Salazar doesn’t force us to take military action”. Gaitonde, a critic of the colonial regime, had been arrested in Goa in 1954 and deported to Portugal. He was released in 1955, after which he became something of Nehru’s unofficial diplomat-at-large pushing for the cause of peacefully dismantling the colonial rule in Goa.

Calling out the BJP’s falsification of Goa’s resistance struggle is also personal for Bhembre. His father, Laxmikant Bhembre, was arrested by the Portuguese in 1946, sentenced to four years and deported to the notorious political prison in fort Peniche, Portugal (the jail is today the National Museum of Resistance and Freedom). Bhembre’s father spent 16 years in exile in Portugal before he was allowed to return to Goa after the Liberation.

Though the RSS played no role in the resistance to Portuguese rule, as Bhembre points out, in another attempt to reinvent the historical narrative, the BJP under the late Manohar Parrikar, felicitated scores of Sangh members for “participating” in the Goa freedom movement.

“The dynamics and politics of the liberation struggle of Goa had to consider the national and international geo-politics of that period. Today, historiography seems to be influenced by the colour of political ideology. Leaders are either humanised or demonised depending on which side of the political spectrum they belong,” says writer and professor of history Sushila Sawant Mendes.

Also Read: Hidden in Modi’s Attack on Congress Is an Admission of His Govt’s Failures During Pandemic

Rebellions and departures

It isn’t the Congress alone that’s pinching the BJP’s Achille’s heel in this election. The party’s been hit by a series of departures and rebellions that’s likely to overturn any hopes it has of making it anywhere close to the single largest party, leave alone a majority on its own.

The most prominent face to desert the saffron party is the former union defence minister Manohar Parrikar’s son, Utpal. Snubbed for a ticket by the BJP to contest in Panaji, the seat his father had won six times, Utpal Parrikar is contesting as an independent to take down the BJP’s official nominee, Babush Monserrate. He felt obliged to get into the contest to “fight the criminalisation of politics” in his father’s constituency, Parrikar junior said.

“I’m fighting the biggest battle of my life and putting my career on the line,” he told The Wire, more so because he’s had to “burn bridges with those at the highest level in the country”. The 42-year-old computer engineer was summoned to Delhi by Shah, who tried to get him to change his mind, but to no avail.

Utpal Parrikar’s defiance has been particularly embarrassing to the BJP not just because of the optics and media coverage he’s drawn, but also because it has spurred sympathy for his cause among Manohar Parrikar’s supporters across Goa. “This will cause the party to lose at least 500 votes in each constituency across Goa,” says one of his campaign managers. With a small voter base of roughly 30,000 each, 500 votes are significant in close contests.

Utpal Parrikar. Photo: Narayan Pissurlekar

Parrikar’s son is not the only BJP rebel in the race. The party’s former chief minister Laxmikant Parsekar is also contesting as an independent from Mandrem. Several others have moved to other parties.

One of the BJP’s biggest losses has been the crossover of its former minister Michael Lobo to the Congress. Lobo, who’s been baiting the saffron party for months, could influence the fortunes of the Congress in at least four seats around his constituency, Calangute, where he’s consolidated his political position over the last 10 years.

For the Congress, its former chief minister Pratapsingh Rane’s decision to pull out of this election – in deference to his son Vishvajit, who’s made himself at home in the BJP – is also a setback.

In 2017, the Congress had emerged the single-largest party with 17+1 (NCP) seats in the 40 member House. The BJP had slumped to 13 seats, down seven from its 2012 tally. But it managed to form the government cobbling a majority with the Goa Forward Party (GFP), the Maharashtrawadi Gomantak Party (MGP) and independent MLAs. GFP has a pre-poll alliance with the Congress in this election. The MGP has tied up with the TMC.