SATURDAY, APRIL 20, 2024
Sujay Gupta
SShortly after the short lived headiness of getting a whiff of power after the election results were declared in 2017, the downslide of the Goa Congress began with less than a week post polls. As winning Congress MLAs dived into organising victory rallies and much more, the ground beneath their feet caved in with an inept central leadership fumbling and reluctant to stake claim to form a government.
At that point, the then Congress President Luizinho Faleiro, under whose leadership the organisation got a structure and the party got character, was made a convenient fall guy. Faleiro’s purported ‘fault’ was following the doctrine of ‘eklo chalo re’ to drive home the message that only a complete majority will revive the party and give a government it can shape and control. No one believed him till he literally pulled off a miracle. And then they pulled him down. Vishwajit Rane played the political equivalent of Kaun Banega Crorepati’s, (the quiz show) ‘fastest finger first’ by getting sworn in as Congress MLA and within minutes doing the Houdini act and leaving the party, by swiftly moving out of the Assembly.
Later on, the temporary man for all seasons and reasons Babush Monserrate was drafted in to try and form a government by toppling the BJP government, a feat they declared they could achieve in 24 hours after Luizinho Faleiro was removed as GPCC chief. More than 24 months have elapsed since Faleiro’s resignation was finally accepted by the High Command. Far from forming the government, the Congress party in Goa has been hit by a tsunami of defections, the majority of them under the “watch” of the current GPCC president, Girish Chodankar.
So much was the aura of Monserrate that one fine day, the entire bunch of Congress MLAs arrived at Casa Monserrate in the “Republic’ of Taleigao, to literally genuflect at the feet of the ‘game-changer’ in the hope that a Faleiro less Congress would come to power before the sun rose on the Miramar beach the next day. The game did change, but not quite the way the Congress perceived it would.
Led by Monserrate, 10 Congress MLAs, in July 2019, defected to the BJP en masse. So the next time anyone in the Congress talks of coming to power, they should add a caveat that no one should assume that they are talking of the Congress coming to power.
The Congress has lost virtually every election it has contested since then failing to retain seats from where their MLAs defected, getting routed in Mandrem, Valpoi and Shiroda. The irony of Shiroda cannot be repeated often enough. The Congress fielded a man who the masses had clearly rejected as a BJP candidate Mahadev Naik. In the by-election, its saffron-turned Congress candidate Mahadev Naik could not even protect his deposit suffering two maha elections in a row. He is a political non-entity now.
The writing on the wall is clear. Most of these defectors had won on their own strength and not the party’s and would carry their votes to any party they defected to.
As the new AICC General Secretary in charge of the Goa desk, Dinesh Gundu Rao arrives, in the footsteps of his not so illustrious predecessors Chella Kumar and Digvijay Singh, he will see a rudderless party, a CLP of five MLAs of which one can effectively discount both Ravi Naik and Mr Pratap Singh Rane. Mr Rane’s son is too firmly entrenched in the BJP to allow his father’s Poriem Assembly seat remain in Congress seat (unless of course, some miraculous twist happens yet again) while Ravi Naik has made his de-facto loyalty to the BJP very clear by facilitating the admission of his sons into the BJP. Here is an open charge which Mr Naik may well respond to. Not only did he facilitate the entry of his sons to the BJP, he personally went and met three leaders in the BJP organisation to seal the deal across at least two meetings, in one of which the Chief Minister was also present.
Has the GPCC even initiated an inquiry into the manner in which a senior leader’s sons left the party, let alone contemplate disciplinary action against him if his actions appear to be verified?
So what plan does Gundu Rao have to give the Congress a semblance of hope? Or is he here to do an aerial survey that political leaders do of flood or earthquake-hit areas of devastation? Quite clearly the state of the Congress is nothing short of that.
The saga of defections and desertions has made every promise of the Congress seem like hyperbole. And even as Girish Chodankar takes umpteen press conferences and issues statements against the BJP, he needs to come face to face with this fundamental question. Does he have any control over his party? He took a year to form a working committee and distribute roles to people. But has he managed to change exactly those traits in the party due to which it got routed in 2012 by the BJP?
What really is the point of getting a so-called young Turk as party president when there is a frantic race to give tickets to all the old-timers well past their political expiry date? Will we see those dark days again when party tickets are traded, merit takes a backseat and fresh faces are discarded?
There is another very sensitive issue that the Congress must deal with. With its recent decisions to induct certain elements in the party, the Congress has moved further away from the path of cleaning its political stables than ever before. The question that one asks is whether these decisions are taken at the highest levels after a lot of thought or are they just ad hoc moves taken in the spur of the moment keeping short term vested interests in mind. If the Congress were to even dream of coming to power in Goa, which at this point is just a dream, then it must explain the nightmarish decisions it takes.
It’s true that the BJP has a lot to answer for. The economy is in a shambles, alternate forms of wealth creation have not been put in place, the COVID handling has does have a lot to desire for and there is an absolute collapse of law and order.
Any opposition party could have seized the vacuum in Governance but the Congress is in no position to, due to the quality of its leadership, its lack of MLAs and no organisational talent. The irony and the extreme pity is that the fondness for the grand old party and the sentiments linked to it still pull at the heartstrings of many Goans. The other day, this columnist was at the Cutbona jetty in Salcete, South Goa, speaking to some trawler owners. One of them during the course of the conversation let slip that he wanted to contest the next Assembly elections on a Congress ticket as a fresh face. An hour later, this writer reached Betul where a traditional fisherman who has never contested any elections expressed a desire to fight the next election on a Congress ticket with a disclaimer “if they give it to me of course”.
The Congress is not listening to these voices. It does not have its ear to the ground. It is unwilling to look at the despondency of the youth and invite them to the party to be its leaders and not rely on the tried, tired, tested and wasted faces who it is negotiating with.
The Congress does not realise that the Aam Admi Party, notwithstanding its nil record last time is serious about another push and if it leaves spaces in particular and a political vacuum bereft of clean, fresh leadership, then the alternative can emerge as a serious force.
AICC General Secretary in charge of Goa, Dinesh Gundu Rao’s family, earlier led by his late father R Gundu Rao, a former Chief Minister of Karnataka, hails from the coffee rich Coorg district. He must tell the Goa Congress leaders that it’s high time they wake up and smell the political coffee or else it will be reduced to a pale and pathetic relic of its former self.
Forget 24 hours or 24 months. It may well be a 24-year political sanyaas for the grand old party if it doesn’t course correct right now.
