While Saldanha declined to comment on what transpired at the Secretariat in Porvorim earlier in the day where BJP leaders met, her supporters told Herald that the minister was visibly upset when she returned to her office at Cansaulim in the evening.
An emergency meeting was later convened at her office where her supporters insisted that BJP should field its candidate from Sancoale in the ZP polls instead of handing it over to the MGP.
While one supporter claimed the BJP had ditched Sancoale village, another supporter Achut Naik said, “Sancoale had always stood by the party and had even given them a lead in the recent Lok Sabha polls. I don’t know why the party has allotted the Sancoale ZP constituency to the MGP.”
Another supporter said Saldanha’s humiliation appeared to be in continuation with a series of setbacks that the MLA has had to face in the election to the post of Sancoale sarpanch, which was denied to a BJP candidate, Narayan G Naik.
They claimed that the State BJP leaders had engineered the move to prevent Naik from becoming the sarpanch, thereby letting down the local MLA.
