05 Aug 2020  |   05:36am IST

GPCC sets the course, can party keep to it?

With around 18 months left before Goa goes to the polls, it is still early days to be making attempts at guessing the possible political combinations that could come up, but for a party that has otherwise been slow off the starting block in the past, the Congress has displayed some unexpected alacrity in gearing up in advance for the elections.

Seated side-by-side, the State Congress chief Girish Chodankar and Leader of the Opposition Digambar Kamat announced that the party organisation was going to be revamped, wherein new and young Congress workers would be given additional responsibilities, including preference in tickets for the State Legislative Assembly elections.

The Congress appears to have a very general roadmap ready for the polls. Winning elections or coming close to the magic mark is not a problem area for the Congress. The trouble that Congress faces is also not of a dearth of candidates, it has always had ample of aspirants to choose from, and in the past even loaned a candidate to its ally in a Lok Sabha poll. It also does not face a scarcity of young workers who are ready to take on new responsibilities. Again there are many and this has been seen often times in the past. The crisis that the Congress faces is that once these party workers have been elected, the party does not know how to retain them in the organisation. This, the party has experienced time and again over the past decades. 

This problem area of the Congress is not restricted to Goa, but is evident across India, where the party has lost its MLAs to the other side on an almost regular basis – Madhya Pradesh and Rajasthan are two very recent examples of how Congress MLAs desert the party. Goa also saw it in July last year when 10 MLAs quit the Congress. The party has to evolve a mechanism where it can hold on to the elected MLA under all circumstances. While it revamps its organisation, the party has to tell the electorate how it will keep its flock together once elected. That is the only way it could recover lost ground with the voters, who have had their trust in the party repudiated by the MLAs who have quit it and crossed to the other side.

These, however, are just announcements. The party has to follow up on this with action that will indicate that it is really serious about the next elections. It is not enough for the party to merely strengthen its party base in the State, it has to take it further, and more importantly it has to display unity in the party. On the day that this announcement was made, there was speculation of the sons of one of its senior MLA – Ravi Naik – joining the BJP. While the father maintained that he will not desert the party, he said that the sons are free to choose their political paths. Here is where the party requires to show an united front. Both of Ravi’s sons – Ritesh and Roy – have been Congress candidates in the past and lost the elections. If they now quit the party, how will the Congress react to this?

The Congress in Goa needs not ust a revamp of the orgnaisation but could well do with a complete overhaul. Decimated in the Assembly by defections, the party has only one MLA who is below the age of 60. In that sense it has to look for new faces to build up, but then it shouldn’t let opportunism on the part of the political wannabes merely looking for a vehicle to make it to the Assembly, deceive it. It is no easy task that the GPCC president has before him. Can he do it?