It is time that the Congress in Goa went scurrying back to the drawing board to discover what has gone wrong with its strategy and plot a comeback into the political arena. The party contested 37 seats in the Zilla Panchayat elections and won just four seats. This is the scorecard of the principal opposition party in the State, a party that has governed for long years but is today in complete disarray. At the end of a day, when Congress has fared at its worst in a long time in Goa’s electoral politics, its State unit president Girish Chodankar publicly admitted that the party failed to convince the people that it is changing and to weed out the perception from people’s minds that a vote to the Congress is a vote to the BJP as in the past the party MLAs have defected.
The question to Chodankar is: when the party is flirting with the very ex-MLAs who have quit and supported the BJP in the past – even welcoming them and their progeny back into the party – how does Congress ever expect the people to believe that it is changing? The electorate is smarter than the Congress may believe it to be. The electorate is neither blind nor deaf. They can see when they are being taken for a ride by a party that says one thing but does quite the other. After his admission, will Chodankar, as president of the State unit, drop these old warhorses that have returned to the party fold, and also the others who have awakened from their slumber to sniff at the possibility of a party ticket in 2022? It is not mere statements that will bring the party votes. It needs deeds that match the words that are said, and in that Congress has failed.
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The Congress failings do not end there. For the party it has been a long series of setbacks since their good showing in the 2017 State Assembly elections of winning 17 seats, but on which they were never able to capitalise or build upon. The change in party leadership, bringing in Chodankar to replace Luizinho Faleiro did not work. Instead the party has lost every election since this change of guard. Besides, the ZP polls were the first elections after former chief minister Digambar Kamat took charge of the legislative wing of the party, but it is obvious that the Chodankar-Kamat headship was not able to work any magic. The Congress performance has been abysmal, and the party leadership has to accept responsibility for the poor showing, not just admit that it happened. The party requires to wake up to the reality that it needs strong leadership if it is to win in 2022.
The Congress is also facing a new threat that comes in the form of the Aam Aadmi Party (AAP). The latter may have won just one seat – Benaulim – in the ZP polls, but this was a seat that Congress never expected to lose. The difference in the Congress and in the AAP is that the new entrant in Goa politics is displaying a hunger for victory that the old warhorse just cannot match, primarily because the Congress old guard has lost much of its vigour. That itself is enough for APP to wrest the initiative from the Congress in the State, which it is capable of doing. Yes, Congress needs to change, it needs to show the electorate by its deeds that it stands for the people and not merely for itself and its chosen few. A revamp of the entire party structure is long overdue, but will this be done?
