COVER STORY
Verdict for change
PAMELA D'MELLO
dmello.pam...@gmail.com
in Panaji
The Congress suffers a crushing
defeat, its worst performance
since 1980.
PHOTO: CHIEF MINISTER MANOHAR
Parrikar (left) with Governor
K. Sankaranarayanan after the
swearing-in in Panaji on March 9.
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.
PHOTO CONGRESS LEADER CHURCHILL
Alemao (second from right)
leaves the counting centre in
Margao on March 6.
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.
http://www.frontline.in/stories/20120406290602500.htm
ENDS
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