The AICC General Secretary Digvijay Singh came on one of his not too frequent trips to Goa and went back, ostensibly a happy man, as he was given to understand that the Goa unit is on the move and the moribund dead pan organisation had received the life saving sanjeevani herb, originally brought by Lord Hanuman when Lakshmana was severely wounded in battle with Ravana.
What Mr Singh will probably realise down the line is that unless the Congress does an absolute cleansing of its past leadership from the electoral battle and brings in a new team with no remnants of the past, the herb will act as poison and further disintegrate the party into nothingness. The people of Goa have had enough. If the Congress is patting itself on its back, dreaming of a grand revival, it is only because no powerful anti-BJP opposition is yet to emerge.
The other fledging alternatives are yet to develop. Their journey has only begun.
The GPCC president Luizinho Faleiro admittedly has kick-started an honest effort to rebuild and reconstruct, but this itself will become an exercise in complete futility if a host of former Chief Ministers and ministers continue to be in the scheme of things. The visual impact of the oldies brigade in several photo frames during public functions or when AICC bosses come calling, is a sucker punch in the solar plexus of young and relatively young people who have joined the party or working for it, in the hope that 2017 will not just be the rebirth of the party but of a 100% young leadership without the hang ups or the hangover of a single leader who has won or lost elections in the past. The old timers who made the Congress suffer in 2012 have no place in the party except in its history books, and some of them, if they do find a place in the archives of the Congress, may not quite be able to look at them with any semblance of pride.
Almost all of them have been involved in and been successful in breaking the party or toppling its government in the past and each one of them – Mr Rane, Fransisco Sardinha, Mr Digambar Kamat, Babu Azgaonkar, Ravi Naik, Jitendra Deshprabhu and Subhash Shirodkar have a personal interest in wanting to contest the next election. None of them will go out of their comfort zones to lift a finger and fight for the party. They just want their fiefdoms protected. And we make this charge – too. None of them have spent a single personal rupee for the party but only for themselves. We stand to be corrected if this charge is incorrect and we wait to see who challenges this. Every action taken by them in their capacity as ministers has been to benefit them in many ways. And even if we don’t say it, the people of Goa voted them out because they decided that Congress ministers were corrupt.
When the GPCC president says that these leaders will be around to just guide the new brigade, we ask can we push Goa in the hands of even new leaders who are “guided” by this lot of old timers?
The bitter pill has to be swallowed. Mr Luizinho Faleiro must make an immediate announcement that old timers – and that could broadly mean those who have been ministers or MP’s for more than twice (with enough room to fine tune this) – will not be given tickets. He needs to make it loud and clear what his decision will be towards former Congressmen and ex-CM’s not in the party now like Churchill Alemao. This is not an answer that only the people want. Some of the new faces he has brought in and promised them tickets will also ask the same questions.
AICC General Secretary Digvijay Singh told Herald on his way back to the airport on Thursday, “The Congress cannot afford to speak to anyone from a position of weakness”. But with each passing day, as the old timers continue to angle for tickets and positions and the party does not clearly tell them that their expiry date is over, the party shows itself as weak and spineless.
