In the last five months, since Laxmikant Parsekar was sworn in as chief minister, this administration has shown all signs of lethargy and a disinclination to step up the pace. The instances of this are many – in the appointment of chief executive officer (CEO) for the Investment Promotion Board, in the process to start mining and get the export duty reduced, in the ongoing road works that are upsetting people and creating dust and noise pollution, in arresting Nuvem MLA Francisco (Mickky) Pacheco where the police are tying themselves up in knots in attempts to find excuses for the delay in making the arrest, in providing medicines to government hospitals, in finalizing the Regional Plan. The list could go on and it almost appears that Goa has resigned itself to this slow pace at which the government works.
But, as was seen this week, the administration and the political establishment can act with alacrity when one of its own is threatened by something as minor as ‘embarrassment’. Within hours of the Margao Judicial Magistrate First Class (JMFC) issuing a search warrant of Defence Minister Manohar Parrikar’s official residence in Delhi in the search for Pacheco, the administration moved the Sessions Judge at his residence the same night and obtained a stay on the JMFC’s order. The extent of embarrassment is definitely not proportionate to the speed of the government’s reaction. Goa too is embarrassed, not so much that the Defence minister’s house could be searched, but because its lawmaker has been convicted of slapping a government official.
Very rarely has a direction from a court received such a swift reaction from this government. The lightening speed at which the administration responded was electrifying. People actually read in their newspapers that a stay order had been obtained on a court order that they had not read about before. That reveals the speed at which the government has acted on this matter.
There have been instances which have required that the government and its departments display some amount of speed in their reactions. Take for instance this very case of Pacheco’s conviction being upheld by the Supreme Court. The chief minister refused to make a statement on this until he knew more on the court order. There were days spent when Goa waited to see how Pacheco would respond to the Supreme Court order. He arrived in Goa and only then did he put in his papers as minister. All this leads one to wonder whether having a convicted minister in his cabinet was not an embarrassment to the chief minister. He surely didn’t have to wait for Pacheco to resign. As chief minister Parsekar was well within his rights to drop him from the cabinet immediately. It is his prerogative who he has in his ministry. But he chose to wait, in much the same way that this government has been choosing to wait on most other issues, however, important they may be.
If a search warrant of the Defence minister’s official residence is an embarrassment, then so too was Pacheco’s continuation in the ministry, after his conviction was upheld, an embarrassment to the people of Goa. Here we have two court orders – one by a JMFC and the other from a Supreme Court bench. The reactions from the state government to both have been totally different. A government that can leap to get a stay order on a search warrant by a JMFC, can and should have acted just as speedily in executing an arrest warrant by the JMFC after the Supreme Court order. The matter is an important one for Goa as the person who has been convicted is himself a lawmaker, having been a minister holding important portfolios, including that of tourism in the past. This too is an embarrassment.
If only the government could show the same amount of alacrity in dealing with matters that are pressing and important to the State, we could have seen so much more development in all areas. Having proved that it can move speedily, the government must now take up all the files, development works and policy matters that are pending before it and initiate action in all of them. There is much to be done, and given that this Assembly term has crossed the halfway mark, time is now limited. The current speed at which the government works is, well, embarrassing to the people of Goa and needs to be improved.
