Verdict for change

PAMELA D’MELLO
in Panaji

The Congress suffers a crushing defeat, its worst performance since 1980.

PTI

AS Goa’s new Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) government settles down in office, it is easy to forget that a month ago the Congress seemed confident of returning to power in the State. The party is shell-shocked at its crushing defeat, its worst performance since 1980. The Congress won a mere nine seats, and, worse, eight of its Ministers lost the election. The party lost 11 seats, eight of them to the alliance between the BJP and the Maharashtrawadi Gomantak Party (MGP), two to independents and one to the newly revived Goa Vikas Party (GVP), floated by Francisco Pacheco, former Tourism Minister of the Nationalist Congress Party (NCP). The NCP, Congress’s alliance partner, lost all of its three seats, two to the BJP and one to an independent. Independents, meanwhile, increased their seats from two in the previous Assembly to five.

The BJP increased its tally from 14 in 2007 to a simple majority of 21 on its own and 24 in combination with its partner. Its alliance with the MGP is one of the many factors that scripted huge wins for the party. Ever since it rode piggyback on the MGP in 1994, the BJP has grown in the State at the cost of the MGP’s soft Hindutva credentials. In the past few Assembly elections, the MGP, which is now reduced to being the hegemonic entity of two brothers, Sudhin and Deepak Dhavlikar, in Goa’s interior Ponda taluk, contested on its own and entered into post-electoral alliances with the Congress for government formation. A regular split in the traditional vote bases of the BJP and the MGP gave the Congress an advantage in the past.

This time, the MGP and the BJP found themselves on a common platform in opposing government grants to mainly Christian primary schools which wanted to shift from Konkani medium to English medium. This emotive plank helped the alliance consolidate traditional Hindu votes in some regions, to the detriment of the Congress. Sangh Parivar organisations such as the Hindu Janajagruti and their women’s wings helped with a hushed campaign to vote for the lotus and even for the Christian candidates in their fold.

The BJP contested 28 seats, left seven to the MGP and strategically supported five independents and other regional outfits such as the GVP in the Christian-dominated Salcete taluk. In a crucial departure from its earlier stance, the BJP sidestepped its own loyalists and picked “winnable” candidates who were new to the party but had the financial wherewithal to run a campaign.

The strategy worked. Anti-incumbency and an anti-Congress wave decimated the Congress in this taluk, which in the past had given the Congress all its eight Assembly seats. This time, Salcete swung its votes in favour of three independents, two GVP candidates and one BJP candidate. The Congress won two seats.

Swing in Catholic votes

In another careful strategy, the BJP replicated a successful experiment in fielding Christian candidates. Over several terms, its Mapusa MLA Francis D’Souza had returned unerringly and with huge margins to the House, benefiting from both the BJP-MGP vote base and his own status in the community. This time the BJP gave at least six Christian nominees the ticket in constituencies with sizable Christian population. It kept away all hard-line Hindutva elements and agendas from the campaign and instead concentrated on corruption and development issues.

All six of the alliance’s Christian nominees won. “There can be little doubt that the Church played a big role in the move away from the Congress,” said hotelier Ralph de Souza. In its pre-election statements, the Council for Social Justice and Peace, the wing of the Church that comments on social matters, had “advised” people to vote wisely, for honest, non-corrupt candidates. And this time, it overtly downplayed its traditional anathema to “communal” politics.

Voters here have long been uncomfortable with their back-against-the-wall plight of having to choose between Congress regimes that sank into corruption and real estate speculation (a bugbear with Christian voters) and the BJP-MGP’s brand of communal politics.

“Voters seem to have been simply fed up with the arrogance and hubris of the Congress and the BJP. It was an anti-Congress wave, not a pro-BJP wave, and certainly not an endorsement of the Hindutva ideology,” said Dr Oscar Rebello, a physician and an activist. According to the Citizen’s Initiative for Communal Harmony, “the anger generated by the Congress and its abysmal levels of corruption clouded the people’s minds so much that they failed to see or overlooked the communal ideology of the BJP.”

The no-nonsense charisma of BJP leader Manohar Parrikar and his abilities as an able administrator played no small role in the voters’ choice of the party. There is still a great deal of mistrust with the BJP, alongside the realisation among a section of the people that while some towering Christian politicians have been eased out, those now elected to the House are largely businessmen, some of whom have in the past displayed scarce abilities to put aside their business interests and stand up to a strong leader.

Dr Wilfred de Souza, the seasoned politician, feels that “Christians have been played for fools this election by the BJP”.

Congress, its own enemy

While the BJP suffers from the complete domination of a single leader, the Congress has too many. In Goa, power centres in the Congress revolved around Vishwajit Rane, son of former Chief Minister and Speaker of the outgoing Assembly Pratapsing Rane; Chief Minister Digambar Kamat; and Ministers Churchill Alemao, Atanasio Monserrate and Ravi Naik.

The party’s ticket distribution exercise – conducted under intense media spotlight – saw each satrap successfully jockeying for the ticket for relatives and cronies, with an eye on a majority in the legislature party and chief ministership. In the process, at least three loyalists were ditched in favour of “winnable” last-minute defectors from the BJP. That these loyalists-turned-rebels won at the hustings was an indication of both the flawed choices the Congress made and the voters’ disgust with its politics.

“There’s something called the aesthetics of corruption, when it gets too vulgar and too in-your-face, it can be the tipping point,” said Alito Sequeira, the sociologist and Goa University professor. The four seats allotted to the Alemao clan would certainly qualify for this, as was the arrogance and presumption in setting out to eye the top job even before a vote was cast.

While the leaders jostled for the ticket, the Congress ran an unorganised campaign. In contrast, the saffron party was hyperactive on Facebook, new media sites and the Internet. Digambar Kamat’s supporters are livid that the party did not sufficiently highlight the Chief Minister’s accessibility, responsiveness to public demands and achievements – he scrapped special economic zones (SEZs), held the country’s first-ever citizen participatory Regional Plan, gave a tremendous boost to art and cultural activities, implemented the Sixth Pay Commission, and introduced schemes such as the distribution of subsidised vegetables and grain and those for the girl child and senior citizens. The Congress ran a lukewarm campaign and was unable to counter any of the BJP’s doublespeak on family raj or the Sangh Parivar’s communal agenda in the State.

BJP and NGOs

The BJP’s campaign was well-planned, aggressive and spread out. The party has in the past decade systematically set up a network of NGOs and back-room activists who bat for it covertly. Occupying the activist space, these satellite NGOs whipped up anti-Congress sentiments, encouraged a split in the votes to the BJP’s favour, and brought the issue of corruption centre stage. Team Anna’s India Against Corruption (Goa unit), with its vote for change slogan, ran a campaign in the State just days ahead of the election. Speeches at the meetings left no one in any doubt about who it favoured.

Another NGO, The Forum of Good Governance, ran a multi-crore advertisement campaign in the print, television/cable and hoarding media that damaged the Congress’ prospects significantly. “How does an NGO get crores [of rupees] to sponsor defamatory advertisements of that nature?” asked Congress’ Rajya Sabha member Shantaram Naik. He holds that the NGO was a smokescreen to beat the expenditure curb of Rs.8 lakh for candidates and has complained to the Election Commission about it. It ended up making a mockery of the Election Commission’s guidelines, he says. While the BJP thanked the media after the campaigning closed, several Congress leaders complained that the media had been less than fair to it. Aside for a BJP mouthpiece, at least one other English daily played an aggressive role in creating an anti-Congress wave.

Political analysts accord no small measure of the BJP’s victory to the effect of a delimitation and redrawing of Assembly constituencies that took place under an earlier BJP regime. At least a few of the seats it won came because of the “delimitation effect”. The accusation – not unfounded – is that in redrawing the Assembly segments, Christian segments were sought to be weakened, by adding in pockets with the majority population and vice versa. This was especially done in Salcete taluk.

This was quite clear in the case of the Cuncolim segment, where the Congress lost to the BJP. “Cuncolim was always Christian-dominated, and even in case of a split of votes, the BJP could rarely win the seat. With delimitation, it added two other areas, Balli and Ambaulim, from a different taluk and revenue district. This seems to have changed the arithmetic here,” says Guilerme Almeida, a local journalist.

And, for all the noise made against mining and real estate lobbies, more than a normal share of legislators in the new House, irrespective of party affiliations, have direct connections to these lobbies. While some columnists hail the “people’s verdict for change”, there are some who caution that Goans may have jumped from the frying pan into the fire.

Faleiro to resign as NRI chief today

PANAJI: Goa commissioner for NRI affairs Eduardo Faleiro will resign from his position with effect from Thursday, he announced to the media on Wednesday. Faleiro has held the post since February 2006.

Briefing the media, Faleiro said that he “did not at any stage seek the present appointment nor any other office in Goa” and that he had only taken up the post at the request of former Goa chief minister Pratapsingh Rane “considering that since I was in Goa I might as well help my fellow Goans in some way”.

Asked if he would continue if the new BJP government asked him to, Faleiro said he would not. He said his leaving was a “natural thing” which happens in a parliamentary democracy. He, however, explained that though his term was set to expire at the end of March, the Congress government had extended it by five years. With the exit of the Congress, Faleiro had to leave too. “I am honoured by the fact that the prime minister and the Union finance minister, among others, have praised this office, verbally and in writing, for its efficiency and the vast range of subjects of interest to NRIs that it deals with,” Faleiro said.

Faleiro also praised his two officers, vice-admiral (retd) John D’Silva, chairman of the Overseas Employment Agency and U D Kamat, director of NRI affairs, calling them “quite competent to run this office on their own”. Faleiro also hoped the NRI office would complete his unfulfilled projects.

PS. On behalf of the Goan of Australia we would like to express our sincere thanks to Mr Faleiro for the many intiatives, especially the Know Goa Program for the diaspora youth and helping out and giving a patient hearing to the concerns of Goans overseas.

Tony Colaco
President
GOA NSW Inc Australia.

Goa: Manohar Parrikar sworn in as Chief Minister

Panaji: BJP leader Manohar Parrikar was sworn in for the third time as the Chief Minister of Goa.

Governor K Sankarnarayanan administered the oath amidst a huge public affair ceremony arranged by the party.

Riding high on the anti-incumbency wave in state, the BJP-led alliance, which includes Maharashtrawadi Gomantak Party(MGP), drubbed the Congress by winning 24 of the 40 seats.

Mr Parrikar has been the chief minister twice from October 2000 to February 2005.

Mr Parrikar said yesterday that all the BJP ministers from his 2005 Cabinet would find place in the new dispensation, and that the Budget would be presented around March 24.

“There are five ministers who were in my old Cabinet. They will be sworn-in again,” Mr Parrikar said.

Mr Parrikar has promised to make petrol cheaper by 11 rupees by removing the Value added tax (VAT) and set up a Lokayukta within 100 days.

On his Facebook page, Mr Parrikar has also said that an amount of Rs. 1000 will be credited in the bank accounts of housewives every month as a measure to combat price rise and undertaking other infrastructural developments in the state.

“The BJP-MGP alliance will start implementing the manifesto immediately but it would take little time to deliver,” he said.

Read more at: http://www.ndtv.com/article/assembly-polls/goa-manohar-parrikar-sworn-in-as-chief-minister-184338&cp

Shifting sands

PAMELA D’MELLO
in Panaji

BY February 16, the last date for withdrawal of nominations, contenders for the Assembly elections scheduled for March 3 in Goa will have less than two weeks for active campaigning. Though there promises to be multi-corner contests and several candidates in each of the 40 constituencies, the battle for Goa is essentially between the ruling Congress and the opposition Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), which is making a bid to regain Panaji since its 2000-2005 tenure.

For every election after its electoral debut in the State in 1994, the BJP has had a firm chief ministerial candidate. But this time leadership tussles have erupted in the party, with Other Backward Classes (OBC) leader Shripad Naik making an aggressive pitch to re-enter State politics after three terms as Member of Parliament. Naik, the MP from North Goa, has been projected as a Bhandari Samaj leader within the party. The party’s central committee has denied him permission to contest the Assembly elections. He went into a sulk and is staying away from the Jan Sampark Abhiyan (mass contact programme) launched by the party.

Analysts see the move by the party as one intended to prevent another power centre within the BJP and a possible contest for the top job, thereby consolidating the position of former Chief Minister Manohar Parrikar, who hails from the small and closely networked Gaud Saraswat Brahmin caste, which holds dominant positions in the State’s business, professional, media and culture circuits. The OBC-Brahmin contest within the BJP has already become grist to its detractors, but more fundamentally it has thrown open the question of the Gaud Saraswat community’s upswing, with at least one newspaper editorial pointing out that it held the posts of both the Chief Minister and the Leader of Opposition in the past five years.

The Congress, meanwhile, is approaching the elections with a surfeit of competing generals, each shoring up his position for the legislature party leadership by lobbying for the ticket to be given to loyalists and family members. Chief Minister Digambar Kamat, who moved from the BJP to the Congress just ahead of the 2007 elections, is keen on getting the ticket awarded to a couple of BJP legislators who ditched their party ahead of the elections this time. Health Minister Vishwajit Rane, the ambitious son of Speaker and long-serving Chief Minister Pratapsingh Rane, has been buttressing his position in several neighbouring constituencies in and around the interior Sattari taluk his family dominates by giving local youth from his pocket borough government jobs in the health sector.

Goa’s personality- and family-based politics, a trend the Congress was unable to nip in the bud in 2007, has grown into a gargantuan problem for its managers in New Delhi. In 2007, the Congress denied Vishwajit Rane the ticket, but he contested as an independent. Its efforts to contain South Goa leader Churchill Alemao cost the Congress several seats when his regional outfit, the Save Goa Front, ate into its vote base. The Congress was finally forced to make peace with Churchill because of his damage potential.

(Following several attempts by the BJP in alliance with the Save Goa Front, the United Goans Democratic Party (UGDP) and independents to unseat Kamat, the Congress offered ministerships to Save Goa Front supremo Churchill Alemao, in return for his party’s merger with the Congress. The lone UGDP legislator, Atanasio Monserrate, joined the Congress to become a Minister, as did one independent, Vishwajit Rane, who became Health Minister.) This time round, the bid to contain family and dynastic politics has delayed the finalisation of candidates for several crucial seats, though the party had announced early that it would favour sitting MLAs.

As always, candidate selection is the Congress’ biggest nightmare. The Alemao brothers – Churchill and Joaquim, both Ministers in the government – are angling for seats for their children, Valanka Alemao (Churchill’s daughter) and Yuri Alemao (Joaquim’s son). Home Minister Ravi Naik is also seeking the ticket for his son, with suggestions that the Naik and Alemao sons will be accommodated by the Nationalist Congress Party (NCP) in two of the six or seven seats it is likely to get after pre-poll alliance talks with the Congress.

The Congress has a trickier problem with Education Minister Atanasio Monserrate, whose claim for a nomination for his wife reflects a tussle with a sitting Congress legislator for the control of prime real-estate pockets of suburban Panaji. Given Monserrate’s winnability, the Congress cannot afford to ignore him, but it has adopted a strategy to control his growing influence. The party has not forgotten its previous experience with Monserrate: in 2007, he procured the party nomination but at the eleventh hour ditched the party to contest for the UGDP, a regional outfit, leaving the Congress without a contestant in the Taleigaosegment.

Investigations conducted by the Income Tax Department and released to sections of the press on January 30, pointing to Monserrate having allegedly collected Rs.24 crore as fees for land conversions during his 2006 tenure as Town and Country Planning Minister, have hit the headlines in Goa. On January 31, just days ahead of the Congress announcing its list of candidates, IT sleuths raided several builders, prompting Monserrate to say that raking up a five-year-old matter was nothing but politics.

Regional parties

Goa’s once-strong regional parties have been reduced to what analysts dub as “spoilers” or as “kingmakers” as the case may be. The Maharashtrawadi Gomantak Party (MGP), which backed the Congress for the past five years, has this time kept its doors open for both the Congress and the BJP. Controlled by the sibling duo of Ramkrishna and Pandurang Dhavlikar, the MGP has to contest a certain number of seats to retain its registration. But its voter base overlaps with that of the BJP, a fact that is not lost on the Congress in its strategy to contain the BJP in its North Goa strongholds.

The BJP, likewise, lends its covert support to regional outfits – the UGDP and the Goa Vikas Party (headed by the flamboyant and controversial former NCP Minister Micky Pacheco) – that eat into the Congress’ Catholic vote base in Salcete taluk in South Goa.

The Congress faces a challenge in some seats from the activist priest Fr Bismarque Dias, who has announced his plans to contest under the Zagrut Goemkarancho Ekvott (Vigilant Goan Front), a grouping of anti-Regional Plan activists that sees itself as providing an honest alternative. Attempts by real-estate lobbies to subvert the citizens-designed Regional Plan 2020 have become a rallying point for middle class angst in Goa, all of it directed against the ruling Congress. While the economic boom in tourism, real estate and iron ore mining brings rich financial dividends, and a consumerist boom of gadgets and automobiles, Goa’s middle class is acutely conscious of the loss of its green tranquillity and life-work balance to urban chaos.

Considering this fact, the Congress manifesto committee has promised a review of the Regional Plan and legislative measures to prevent the sale of farmland to non-ethnics and non-agriculturists. All major and regional parties have promised to lobby for some form of special status to Goa as concerns over an influx of immigrants and the sale of large swathes of land to people from outside the State have come to the fore in public discussions here.

The BJP, with the slogan of a “vote for change” and “Goa deserves better”, along with the tacit backing of anti-corruption campaigners and myriad non-governmental organisations it has fostered, is attempting to tap into this angst. Team Anna is expected to canvass in the State a few days before March 3.

However, the BJP is attempting to ride the cry for “sustainable development” that comes from sections of the population, including the influential Catholic Church, along with a simultaneous and dichotomous advocacy of a fast-paced “Gujarat-type development model” for Goa. Parrikar has been making attempts to woo the State’s 30 per cent minority Catholic community, apologising for cancelling a Good Friday holiday during the party’s five-year term in power in 2000 and promising to curb his faults of “arrogance”.

Another arm of its strategy is to play on the traditional rivalry between Christian Brahmins and Christian Chardos (Kshatriyas), backing the latter off and on as the two castes tussle within the Congress. The BJP has taken several Christian politicians into its fold this time, including its former Tourism Minister and a traditional fishermen’s leader, Mathany Saldanha.

Government formation patterns in Goa have generally followed the power situation in New Delhi, a fact the Congress is well aware of. The choices of the electorate are made not on bijli-sadak-pani barometers but on more emotive policy issues of where the small State is heading, with identity politics playing an important role. With the constituencies in this State of 14 lakh people being small, victory margins can be as close as 200 votes, making the arithmetic of caste and community calculations and the effect of “spoiler” and “match-fixing” candidates all the more crucial. Factors of anti-incumbency, corruption, infrastructure and governance have been seen to have less effect on voter choices than access to power, access to aspirational avenues, personality-based loyalties and protection against business and community rivals in the intensely competitive small spaces operational here.

Mining, a tricky terrain

For this reason, despite the huge noises the BJP made in an earlier campaign on illegal mining in the State, the party has refrained from harping too much on the issue; hundreds of small businesses could be affected by a blanket shutdown of this major sector. In interior Goa, mining has split the population – those who earn revenues from it are willing to condone all its ill effects while others are up in arms against it, making it a tricky terrain for political parties to negotiate. A shrewd strategist, Parrikar, with an authoritarian streak, has an edge in governance compared with the Congress leaders with their please-all, inclusive and negotiation policies.

The BJP has also put on the back burner the emotive and divisive issue of government grants to English-medium primary schools. Bowing to parental sentiment, the Congress reversed an earlier policy of grants only to Konkani and Marathi-medium primary schools, prompting an agitation from regional language chauvinists who had the backing of the BJP and the MGP. With Christian-run primary schools largely seeking to revert to English schools, the BJP may well go slow on this campaign in its bid to woo the Catholics.

Muslim demand

Reflecting the growing number of migrant Muslims who have climbed from 3 per cent to 8 per cent of the population, the community has sought representation of one seat from the Congress. Chief Minister Kamat, who has a sizeable population of Muslims in his Margao town constituency, enjoys considerable goodwill from the community.

The Congress’s consideration for a representative seat could fall on the neighbouring Fatorda segment, currently represented by a BJP legislator. Either way, it is a demand the Congress has promised to consider.

Making their debut in the State’s politics this election are several parties, including Mamata Banerjee’s Trinamool Congress, which has appointed former Chief Minister Wilfred de Souza as its State unit president. The octogenarian de Souza, who found himself out of the NCP, has a knack for reinventing himself. This time he is aiming to contest from the Aldona seat, where he will most probably come up against the Congress’ Dayanand Narvekar.

Ram Vilas Paswan’s Lok Janshakti Party (LJP) and Sharad Yadav’s Janata Dal (U) have also announced their plans to debut in the electoral fray though nobody expects them to be anything but minor players in the State. The Shiv Sena has announced its plans to contest some 33 seats, while the Communist Party of India and the Communist Party of India (Marxist) have a tie-up between them to contest a few seats.

While the political line-up is yet to crystallise for the March 3 elections, what is clear as of now is that considering the fundamental nature of the issues that face the Goan electorate, the results of the 2012 elections will have a far-reaching impact.