https://www.dhakatribune.com/opinion/op-ed/2021/10/29/op-ed-khela-hobe-in-goa
Big intrigue in India’s smallest state, as Mamata Banerjee’s All India Trinamool Congress surges noisily into Goa’s political landscape in anticipation of legislative elections to be held early next year. This weekend, ‘Didi’ herself is in residence. She announced an overt challenge on Twitter: “As I prepare for my maiden visit to Goa on 28th, I call upon all individuals, organisations and political parties to join forces to defeat the BJP and their divisive agenda. The people of Goa have suffered enough over the last 10 years.” After promising, “together we will usher in a new dawn for Goa by forming a new govt that will truly be a govt of the people of Goa and committed to realising their aspirations,” she added the hashtag #GoenchiNaviSakal, which means “a new dawn for Goa” in Konkani. Earlier this week, three of the TMC’s brightest national stars also flew into the state, where they jointly addressed a “people’s chargesheet” against the incumbent BJP-led government and the Congress administration that preceded it, for “20 years of political instability, misrule, and suffering for the people of Goa.” Shaded by the Corinthian monument dedicated to Tristão de Bragança Cunha, who was “nationalist India’s first ambassador” in France in the 1920s, veteran legislator Prof. Saugata Roy (he was a Union Minister in Manmohan Singh’s government), popular entertainer and very recent BJP defector Babul Supriyo (a Minister of State under Narendra Modi) and the wonderfully eloquent Mahua Moitra levelled reasonably well-justified claims against the entrenched political class, that clustered in an expected vein; irresponsibility, incompetence, venality, cynicism, arrogance. So far so good, because extraordinary misgovernance is amply evident in this tiny, relatively wealthy and well-educated state after the decline and demise of Manohar Parrikar, its dominant political force ever since he first became chief minister in 2000 (between 2014-17, he left to serve as Narendra Modi’s defence minister). The disgraceful shenanigans got so bad, and were so far out in the open, that the BJP’s own appointed Governor Satya Pal Malik (he is in office in Meghalaya after leaving Goa under opaque circumstances) freely admitted to the news anchor Rajdeep Sardesai this week: “there was corruption in everything the [Sawant] government did. I probed the matter and told the prime minister about it [but he asked the same culprits who were responsible, and obviously they wouldn’t admit it, so] I was removed.” Still, even if every part of Goa’s electorate is perfectly cognizant of the problems posed by their entrenched political class, and also generally unstinting in their admiration for the outspoken rhetoric of the likes of Moitra, the great mass of Goan voters remains conspicuously dubious about whether the TMC presents any kind of workable solution. This is, of course, because Goa is not Bengal. What worked in one corner of the subcontinent cannot be assumed to comprise the automatically winning formula in another region with its disparate and distinct history, culture and identity. Thus, the first thing TMC got wrong in Goa is also its very first thing, period. >From the moment it announced entry for this electoral cycle, it has kept on peddling Didi and her party as “street fighters,” but this state has no history of poll violence, and Goans greatly value and safeguard their relative peace and harmony. For voters here, instead of a promise with potential, the “streetfighter” epithet comes off as an ominous threat, not at all assuaged because it is the old-school Goan politician - and recent Congress defector – 70-year-old Luizinho Faleiro who keeps repeating it every chance he gets. Even more significantly, the TMC has as yet failed to generate any persuasive answer for why exactly it helicoptered into Goa from across the country. When asked on Tuesday in Panjim, new entrant Babul Supriyo was notably unconvincing: “Goa and Bengal are connected by heart. Two states that play football. What is your staple food? Fish and rice. We do the same. In terms of our entertainment, the way we think, the way we eat, if you see the number of Bengali tourists who come to Goa every year, you will understand that this is a very natural destination for the TMC.” Jettisoning meaningless drivel to find the right mix and message to achieve its goals in Goa is not just a TMC challenge, it also puts the uncommonly hyped reputation of Prashant Kishore and his trailblazing Indian Political Action Committee at stake. Over the past decade, after starting the Citizens for Accountable Governance (CAG) engine substantially credited for Narendra Modi’s historic sweep to dominance in 2014, this unquestionably brilliant “political aide” (in his own description) has helped to engineer an astonishing string of victories against the arrayed forces of his previous cohort: Bihar (2015), Punjab (2017), Andhra Pradesh (2019), Delhi (2020) and both Tamil Nadu and West Bengal this year (there was also a devastating loss in Uttar Pradesh in 2017). Kishore often repeats that it will take much more than an inchoate anti-Modi sentiment to defeat the BJP. There has to be an acceptable face to rally enough people, along with coherent platforms that are positively different from what’s already on offer. Four days after his own arrival in Goa, in an informal “tête-à-tête” with residents, he admitted – rather refreshingly – that he has so far found no answers for either of those requirements in Goa, and if the elections were to be held today, “the BJP would win.”