As Digambar Kamat’s fate hangs in balance before the court decides on his bail application, which leaves him vulnerable to arrest, the issue is slowly slipping out of the Congress hands. With the party completely at sea and not knowing the extent of the involvement of either Digambar Kamat and Churchill Alemao or others in the opposition for that matter, it has been shocked into silence. The wind has been taken completely out of its sails and this is evident in the on going assembly session, when the party is barely going through the motions.
The only main opposition tigers, Alexio Reginaldo Lourenco and Vijai Sardesai, already affected by the lack of opportunities to ask questions or place issues, have undoubtedly got into a semi-pause mode, with an eye and a half at the proceedings in the Crime Branch and in the court.
The only line that the Congress has taken is that of vindictiveness, and of the BJP using the Crime Branch. But the fact remains is that the Congress has given up and left it entirely to the individual supporters of Digambar Kamat and Churchill Alemao to fight this out. This is not withstanding the Leader of the Opposition Pratap Singh Rane’s token act of visiting Margao and giving a speech in favour of Digambar Kamat.
But with seven people deposing under section 164 of the CrpC of which the majority has specifically stated that they have been witness to bribes being paid to the two former Chief Minister, the Congress, in the Assembly and out of it, has been pushed completely on the back foot. In just three weeks, the entire upswing against the BJP for its failure on critical issues like the Regional Plan delay, the unrest over the Medium of Instruction and the government openly backing projects like the Tiracol Golf Course and Villa project, which was resonating in the villages of Goa, has been stymied or at the very least put in a state of suspended animation.
Let us not forget. That is Laxmikant Parsekar’s limited objective and if that is so, then the limited objective has been achieved. Mr Digambar Kamat, for one has realised this and therefore his desperate attempt to drag PWD Minister Sudin Dhavlikar in the ambit of the scam. However Kamat’s logic that Dhavlikar should be in the ambit because he headed a State Level Coordination Committee to oversee the project will not hold. The loan agreement was signed a year later when Mr Kamat was the chief minister and Churchill Alemao was the PWD minister.
By now the Congress Legislature Party and the organisation should have gone on an absolute overdrive about the fact that it was the BJP Government which gave project director, the tainted A M Wachasundar an extension till the project completion. At the same time this entire project has been executed under BJP rule and most importantly, unimaginable salaries have been officially paid to project executives with no clear idea of the work they have executed.
As one Congress leader exclaimed to Herald in utter frustration “We just do not know what to do. We have been well and truly xxxx”. The last word, of his sentence can well be imagined because it cannot be written.
