Congress that has been playing the blame game and had resorted to finger pointing in the State may just have got its first wakeup call from the party high command. The message clearly going out from the announcement and appointments that have been made by the All India Congress Committee in the party structure in Goa is that Delhi will be calling the shots in the coming months up to the elections and it will not be the State leaders who will do it. The high command, or rather the P Chidambaram and Dinesh Rao combine in the Congress that has taken charge of Goa, will be the decision makers. In the coming weeks Goa is going to see a lot of Chidambaram and Rao in the State.
Going against what was being speculated, the All India Congress Committee finally took a decision and retained Girish Chodankar as president of the Goa Pradesh Congress Committee. Chodankar has twice tendered his resignation from the post – once after the debacle of the party in the 2019 Lok Sabha elections and the second time when the party lost in the Zilla Panchayat elections last December. During that same period he lost two elections as a candidate. But the AICC has reposed its faith in Chodankar’s leadership, giving him an additional hand in that of Aleixo Sequeira who has been appointed as working president.
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Chodankar’s position in the party has been strengthened, it is now time for him, and alongside him Sequeira, to prove that they have the ability to lead the Congress into the election and to victory. Can they do it? Chodankar has also been tasked with reconstituting the blocks, all 40 of them that had been dissolved last week, and this act will determine whether he has firmly gripped the party reins. But he and the working president are not alone. With less than six months to go for the State Legislative Assembly elections, the party has also constituted various election-related committees wherein the Congress old guard has made a return and will be in position to take decisions on the party’s election strategy. In true Congress tradition the party has balanced religion, caste and gender in the appointments, ensuring that there is representation of all. However, it tilts heavily towards Salcete suggesting that this is the forum where the party wants to lead the next campaign charge.
As per the AICC statement, the ratification of the appointments of party chief and CLP leader and the new appointments to the committees has been approved following a proposal, but does not state who forwarded the proposal. In the light of the visit last week of former Union Minister P Chidambaram, who has been appointed as party election observer in the State, it can be assumed that the proposal was moved by him and the AICC in-charge of Goa, Dinesh Rao, who was also in the State at the same time.
The statement from the AICC while putting to rest all speculations of a change of guard in Goa, and of the older party generals making way for the young turks in the waiting, throws up a new challenge to the old guard. Loyalty, as stressed by Chidambaram, has paid off and along with the party president, working president and legislative party leader, the seniors too have been given tasks to prove themselves. Congress will be entering the election battle riding on the backs of its old war horses, some of who have delivered in the past. Politics today is a game very different from that played when many of these Congressmen were in their prime and dominated the political scene. Some of them may just have to relearn a few things and reset their political targets.
