Despite administering its candidates pre–poll temple oaths and sign anti–defection affidavits, the “defection–scarred” Congress has moved all its candidates to a resort in North Goa to guard against possible defections ahead of the results to the Goa Assembly election on March 10.
According to sources, the party, anxious to keep its flock together and prevent the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) from ‘tempting’ its candidates, moved all its 37 candidates to a luxury resort in Bambolim on Tuesday.
Evading media queries, some candidates claimed on Wednesday evening that they were heading home while some claimed that they were heading for birthday celebrations of the Congress candidate from Curchorem in South Goa.
Despite the party winning the highest number (17 of the 40) of seats in the 2017 election, it failed to seize the initiative to form the government, causing the late Mahohar Parrikar to form a BJP–led coalition with the help of the regional parties and independent candidates.
Later, the Congress was hit by defections as 10 of its MLAs had switched to the BJP en masse in 2019 causing the party to be whittled down to just two MLAs ahead of the 2022 election.
Mocking the Congress “resort politics”’, the BJP leadership said it was absurd that the Congress, despite being in the Opposition in Goa, was keeping its candidates together and claimed that the party would not be crossing single digit.
Goa Congress chief Girish Chodankar said the Aam Aadmi Party (AAP) and the Maharashtrawadi Gomantak Party (MGP) were in touch them and had promised support to form the government.
“The AAP has said that under no circumstances will they be supporting the BJP. Likewise, the MGP, too, will be supporting the Congress party as it had been repeatedly betrayed by the BJP. Senior MGP leader Sudin Dhavalikar was humiliated and thrown out of the Pramod Sawant–led BJP cabinet. There is no way the MGP will go with the BJP,” Mr. Chodankar said.
He said the present fight was not between the Congress and the BJP but between the “new Congress” versus the “old Congress”, given that most of the BJP members were Congress defectors.
While senior Congress leaders like poll strategist P. Chidambaram and Goa desk in–charge Dinesh Gundu Rao maintained that the party would win a simple majority, the Trinamool Congress said the Congress’ feelers to the non–BJP outfits like it, the MGP and the AAP was a vindication of the TMC’s insistence on forming an anti-BJP front ahead of the election.
“We had been urging the Congress all along to join an anti-BJP coalition. But they spurned our offer in the run–up to the polls,” TMC spokesperson Om Prakash Mishra told The Hindu.
With exit polls describing the TMC’s ally — the Sudin Dhavalikar–led MGP as being a possible kingmaker, Mr. Mishra said the bigger parties (the Congress and the BJP), who were now wooing the MGP, were loath to acknowledge that the TMC would be a significant player in the post–poll scenario.
“If the exit polls indicate a rise in the MGP’s graph, then it is precisely because the party has fought alongside the TMC on an anti–BJP plank. According to our calculations, the TMC is in a strong position in at least eight seats and the MGP in five,” Mr. Mishra said.
He quashed speculation that the MGP would go over to the BJP in the event the saffron party changed Pramod Sawant as Chief Minister.
“The TMC–MGP alliance remains firm…we will act in joint consultation. Such rumours are baseless.,”
Mr. Dhavalikar said no other party could influence the TMC–MGP alliance.
“We will take decisions after discussions with TMC general secretary Abhishek Banerjee, political strategist Prashant Kishor and the TMC’s leader in the Rajya Sabha Derek O’Brien… The MGP has always been ‘kingmaker’. This time, our target is to be the ‘king’,” said Mr. Dhavalikar.
