The ruling BJP in Goa is in a bit of a bind. As if the perennial dissenter Vishnu Wagh wasn’t enough, the Calangute MLA Michael Lobo has well and truly emerged as a more worrisome dissident, who has taken on the BJP in a manner which is potentially more serious and damaging.
While the jury is out on the act of the MLA, deciding to take the law into his own hands – which he clearly did – by supporting the demolition of one of the dance bars in Calangute, Mr Lobo will get the support of locals, who are facing the scourge of prostitution and drug rackets in the Calangute-Baga belt.
It is also a matter of debate, whether Lobo’s cowboy style gungho-ism, and the hunger strike will be limited to a massive photo and publicity op or whether this will indeed be a part of a comprehensive agenda where the targets for attack will not be cherry picked according to political affiliations, but cover everyone who should be held guilty.
But there is indeed no debate over the issue Michael Lobo has picked and the pattern which has emerged over the issues he has picked. For instance his solidarity with tiatrists when Herald took the lead in exposing the Government’s inherent plan to have a censor boards for tiatrs – (a plan which has now got a quiet burial), went against the party line. Yet he stood by the tiatr community.
On the issue of shack demolitions on the orders of the national Green Tribunal or the one on the collection, transportation and treatment of garbage, Lobo has supported shack owners and other locals against the tourism department, on the other side.
The game changer has been his decision to protest the demolition of shacks by harassing tourists during an extremely lean and disappointing season and the unfairness in expecting shacks to follow the tourism policy and other guidelines, by incurring costs, and then demolishing them. In this face off between shack owners and tourists, Michael Lobo has stood out as being one with the locals and the Tourism Minister and the government as being against them. It doesn’t require a pundit in politics to figure how this will play out electorally. Unlike Vishnu Wagh the evergreen dissenter, Michael Lobo has not picked any issue where the focus is on him. It has not been about a Cabinet berth or a chairmanship of an autonomous body (and yet he managed to get the decision on including Calangute and Candolim under the NGPDA which he heads), unlike Wagh’s major demands.
This is a key differential. What the BJP should be worried about is that Lobo, unlike Wagh, is expanding the constituency of the new and real opposition, through the informal umbrella of six MLAs (which Herald has called the G6) consisting of Lobo, Rohan Khaunte, Naresh Sawal, Vijai Sardesai, Vishnu Wagh and Alexio Reginaldo Lourenco. This group has serious intent and consists of GenX MLAs without the baggage of ideology or the guilt of any organisational and party mistakes. Moreover the independent MLAs Khaunte and Sawal won on the anti-Congress vote and had begun by fully supporting the Manohar Parrikar-led government.
Meanwhile, Curtorim MLA Lourenco, the lone Congress MLA, has been the solitary voice of the party in the absolute wilderness, especially during Assembly sessions and has taken pan constituency issues like the protest in Tiracol over the Golf course and the bridge and the loss of land of the locals.
The BJP hasn’t quite realised this, but if this group gets wind and strength then many BJP MLAs who are not party politicians in the traditional sense, but want to grow in strength as people’s leaders will identify with similar issues, which will make them take positions that are against the government.
This is what the BJP will find it difficult to reconcile, since it will be forced to respond to issues raised and will not be able to dismiss them as mere opposition rabble rousing. The BJP’s challenge will be to pacify the same politicians who won on a BJP ticket because they were different. Their current differences with their own party and government is not good news for 2017.
