The Goa Congress president John Fernandes has been reduced to a puppet, after using the Congress office to show support for his crony, an illegal miner to level charges of bribery against his own senior leader Pratapsing Rane. With such unclean hands, Fernandes has issued show cause notices to four Congressmen to explain why action should not be taken against them for anti-party activities. While there is every justification in taking action against Ravi Naik, Joaquim and Valanka Alemao and Fransisco Sardinha for various anti party activities and utterances, the action has been reduced to a sham on two counts. Firstly, the PCC president himself should face serious charges of indiscipline for literally prostituting the Congress office, by allowing a man convicted by a court for using his pistol to intimidate and fire at people and with a clear track record of illegal mining, to address a press conference at the PCC office to level serious bribery charges against the senior most Congress leader in Goa. This isn’t about the efficacy of the charges which the Special Investigation Team will go into, even though the hollowness and contradictions of complainant make it evident that they are baseless. What needs to be looked at is that the Goa Congress President played into the hands of the BJP and gave Chief Minister Parrikar an open goal to shoot by lapping on to the charges of bribery and asking the SIT to investigate them. Can a PCC president selected for being supposedly upright (which has been thoroughly exposed by the Dahej Minerals expose) be trusted when his actions clandestinely show that he is in the same political bed with the BJP Chief Minister, having the same class enemy against whom scores have to be settled – Pratapsing Rane.
Let this be said. Again this isn’t about the veracity of the charges against the Ranes, it’s about how either an immature or an extremely devious PCC president took decisions, without consulting the party to react to a Herald story which exposed him. In his anger and frustration at key letters written by him in support of the discredited supposed so called mine owner, appearing in the Herald, he decided to attack who he thought ‘leaked’ those letters, Pratapsing Rane . Thus, on the basis of a mere assumption and unable to control his anger, he took a series of decisions, like allowing the supposed mine owner to address the press in the PCC office, that have caused extreme embarrassment to the party and its seniormost leader.
That is why when the same GPCC president, who should have been sacked by now, issues show cause notices to party dissidents, it appears like a cruel joke.
His double standards are clearly evident when he picked the obvious but much softer targets. Yet he did not pick Dabolim MLA Godinho for action. Godinho has said that it’s a matter of time when he leaves the Congress for the BJP, has openly criticised the party and Fernandes himself, and above all got the Dabolim block Congress to pass a resolution of not supporting the South Goa Congress candidate for the Lok Sabha elections. These ‘anti party activities’ make the others against whom notices have been issued, look like saints.
So what is John Fernandes afraid of – that if Godinho discards his notice, the party will be forced to expel him and thereby allow him to remain as unattached MLA? If that is the case, then why is such a big deal being made of cracking down on dissidence? The PCC should say that it is taking on soft targets who have no weight in the party but are scared to take on the real dissident, Mauvin Godinho.
In any case, in the light of the secret Fernandes- Parrikar romance, is it surprising that the PCC president is not touching the Dabolim MLA who is openly a Parrikar-man now?
