BJP won the North Goa seat by a comfortable margin, but lost the South Goa battle to the INDI Alliance when EVMs were opened for vote counting of the Lok Sabha elections on June 4.
Photo Credits: Narayan Pissurlenkar
PANAJI
"We will win North Goa by over one-lakh and South Goa by over 50,000 votes margin," was an oft-repeated assertion by Chief Minister Pramod Sawant and BJP State president Sadanand Shet Tanavade in the run-up to the May 7 Lok Sabha elections.
Much of the confidence mustered by the Sawant-Tanavade duo to make the claim stemmed from the muscle and political pelf of an Opposition-maiming majority of 33-7 MLAs in the Legislature the ruling party 'acquired' through the defection of eight Congress MLAs into its fold.
However, a month later, when the Electronic Voting Machines (EVMs) were taken up for counting on June 4, the results did not go quite the way Sawant and Tanavade had thought they would.
While the BJP did win the North Goa seat spectacularly with Shripad Naik notching up his sixth successive win, even making good the one-lakh plus margin of victory prediction, it was in South Goa where all the strategies and tactics, including the ruling party's reliance on its overwhelming superiority over the Opposition in terms of number of leaders and legislatures that went woefully askew, resulting in the defeat of Pallavi Dempo against the INDIA bloc's Congress candidate, Captain Viriato Fernandes.
Sawant, Tanavade and the rest of the BJP leadership may have put up a brave front by projecting the South Goa loss as a minor setback and conveniently blamed it on the polarisation in Salcete and other minority-dominated pockets of South Goa following the rudimentary advisory of the head of Goa's Catholic Church, Cardinal Felipe Neri Ferrao.
However, the South Goa defeat at the hands of the combined Opposition (INDIA bloc) which had almost everything stacked against it -- 5:15 ratio of MLAs, a BJP-controlled State machinery and a better organisational machinery -- has largely dented the saffron party's dominance of Goa's current politics.
The South Goa defeat will take even longer for the State BJP to recover from given that its candidate, Pallavi Dempo, was a pick of the party's Central leadership led by Prime Minister Narendra Modi, who even addressed a campaign rally in Goa in that constituency at Sancoale.
When Dempo was officially announced as the candidate, all and sundry believed it to be a masterstroke -- an apolitical, fresh face with the potential to overcome the anti-incumbency factor. And with the Congress struggling to choose one among several aspirants, punters and analysts suggested she starts as the favourite.
What then went wrong for the BJP?
In his first reactions after the result, Tanavade blamed the defeat on the polarisation of the minority vote, particularly in the Salcete taluka where Fernandes earned a whopping 60,000-plus vote surplus over Dempo in the eight assembly segments there.
However, to dismiss Dempo's defeat on this singular factor would be a fallacy on the part of Sawant, Tanavade and the rest of the BJP's State leadership. A number of other factors and strategies the saffron party relied on, especially the admission of the eight Congress turncoats to rev up its numbers and puncture the Opposition, did not find favour with the electorate.
Problem of plenty
If the strategists in the BJP had presumed that having some of the heavyweight politicians from Salcete and South Goa on its side would work to Dempo's advantage and help her win comfortably, the electorate thought and voted otherwise, as the results in segments the turncoat MLAs represent, clearly show.
Three of the ex-Congress MLAs admitted into the BJP hail from South Goa -- Digambar Kamat, Aleixo Sequeira and Sankalp Amonkar. Kamat and Sequeira are veterans who hail from Salcete and the latter was inducted into the cabinet a few months ago. None of it helped or added anything of electoral import to Dempo's election report card.
On the contrary, it seemed to have had a counter-effect and a massive 12,000-plus vote lead was conceded in Sequeira's Nuvem and in Digambar's bastion of Margao, Dempo was just under 1,000 votes ahead of Fernandes. In Amonkar's Mormugao too, the result was far below the expectations of the BJP strategists.
The story wasn't much different in the assembly segments of North Goa seat which are represented by the new entrants vis-a-vis the vote tally of votes Naik garnered in them.
In Delilah Lobo's Siolim, always dominated by Naik in each of his five previous hustings, the margin was barely 2,000 votes. In husband, Michael's Calangute, Naik in fact conceded a stunning 2,000-plus vote lead to his closest rival Ramakant Khalap of the Congress.
In St Cruz where another turncoat Rudolf Fernandes is MLA, Khalap again scored a 2,000-plus votes more than Naik and in the latter's home constituency of Cumbharjua too, the BJP got just 1300-odd votes more than the Congress. Cumbharjua is represented by Rajesh Phaldesai, a part of the 8-member group that jumped aisles from the Congress to the BJP.
Turncoats face the heat
It's a no-brainer that Chief Minister Pramod Sawant and the BJP will urgently opt for several course correction measures both in government as well as the party organisation.
Such measures will be all the more necessary in the face of a buoyant and united Opposition, whose constituents have pledged to keep their political alliances going until 2027 when Goa is due to have its next assembly poll.
Topmost on the list of the course correction measures is likely to be for the saffron party leadership to revisit the positions and equations in the government and the party of the eight turncoats. And, the toughest ones for Sawant to handle, undoubtedly, will be the veteran duo from Salcete -- Digambar Kamat and Aleixo Sequeira.
While Kamat, it has been widely speculated, is anxiously awaiting an assignment commensurate to his political stature, Sequeira had already been accommodated as Environment and Law Minister in the cabinet at the expense of loyalist Nilesh Cabral, who seemingly had no justifiable reason to be axed.
If the South Goa election report card is a criterion adopted, as is often done, the fortunes fluctuating for these two heavyweights as well as the six other neo-saffronites cannot be ruled out.
