In Goa too, it must be careful, while building its party, that leadership is chosen and built from within so that paratroopers are not forced to descend to take on the mantle of leadership. As the AAP is increasingly becoming a serious player in these elections, it should know that the bottom up approach has always worked for it and never the top down. It’s leader Arvind Kejriwal himself has been a product of bottom up politics.The reason why it needs to play its Goa card carefully is because this is still unchartered territory. As AAP moves into the interiors of Goa searching for, above all else, acceptance, its biggest challenge will be to get Goans to buy into the reality that these elections are about them and thus the leadership has to emerge from within. If this holds for candidates, and a leader has to be found within them, as the face of the campaign and their Chief Ministerial nominee, AAP should declare that their first leader from Goa will be a true blue, born and bred Goan.
This is important all the more because fledgling Regional front like Goa Forward have already upped the ante against High Command culture, and stated that the AAP, the Congress and the BJP are subjected to the High Command culture.
For AAP though, the leadership issue may not quite be a priority but declaring that, whenever that happens, its leader will be Goan who has contributed to Goa, certainly is one. On the eve of Arvind Kejriwal’s rally in Goa in Mayem there was more than a whiff and a rumour that veteran TV Journalist Rajdeep Sardesai could be AAP’s pick for Goa. This was promptly denied and the rumour died down till again when they have resurfaced. Sardesai has firmly as well as with tongue firmly in cheek, denied this possibility.
On the eve of yet another visit of Arvind Kejriwal, later this month, the AAP is planning to get in to the business end of its preparations and move from the ginger stage of feeling the ground to the more comfortable stage of engaging in meaningful conversations. But it isn’t going to be easy. In a tough battle ground with emotive issues, balancing them will need the guile of a trapeze artist and we aren’t quite sure if Team Kejriwal can handle publicly sentiments which are contrary and vary within a radius of even 20 to 30 kilometres. For instance, Team Kejri may well meet an anti-Mopa (airport) activist of the GFDO in Cortalim and it is less than half an hour encounter a pro-Mopa group in Mapusa. This is where the trapeze artist will have to be found. The AAP too is in no position to take a firm stand on whether it wants the Mopa airport or not. Similarly on the Medium of Instruction issue, it does back grants for existing schools but cannot interpret the principle of choice for parents, to root for grants to new English schools. This is because it needs to enter Ponda, Valpoi, parts of Satari, Pernem among others, without any tags. AAP has entered the Goa battle ground which is littered with issues not of its own making. Thus, asking AAP to find a solution to those is unfair, but as they say everything is fair, more so in war than in love.
But unlike Delhi, where fixing the basics- water and power bills took precedence over emotion, in Goa, issues unique to villages will need to be handled as deftly as the big ones. In Goa the pieces of the small picture have a sharper focus than the macro big picture.
So in a sense and more, AAP may have to redefine, as it surely must be discovering, the semantics, the grammar and the body language of election preparation, because this is Goa.
