No doubt that Sawant came onto the scene to head a government at a difficult time and with no prior experience in statecraft the challenges of the small State were gargantuan. Not only had he to deal with issues affecting Goa, including the sharing of the Mhadei waters and finding a solution to the mining imbroglio, but he was heading a coalition with two regional parties whose leaders felt they had stronger claims to the top position.
He handled the latter first – broke up the Maharashtrawadi Gomantak Party within days of taking over and dropped Ramkrishna (Sudin) Dhavalikar from the post of deputy chief minister. Echoes of that war can still be heard during the ongoing Zilla Panchayat election campaign with claims and counterclaims being made from public platforms. Less than four months later 10 Congress MLAs broke from the party and joined BJP taking its strength to 27. It allowed Sawant to drop his other Dy Chief Minister from the Goa Forward Party (GFP), Vijai Sardesai. By mid July last year, Sawant was heading a government that had 28 MLAs in a House of 40 and some others supporting.
That brute strength in the Assembly didn’t, however, change much for governance in the State. Admittedly, compared to the previous government led by Manohar Parrikar where nothing worked for over a year during his illness, the Sawant dispensation did move forward, but the issues weighed him down, considerably slowing the pace of work. A year later, the back and forth between Goa, Karnataka and the Centre on the Mhadei is churning the waters with no end in sight, while those who are seeking a restart to mining operations have been only kept silent with promises. The minor victory where mining is concerned was permission to transport ore on which royalty has been paid.
The past year may have been an experience for Sawant of discovering what is governance, as he did admit having learnt ‘many things’, but now with just another two years before the State goes to the polls again, there is little time for learning, and all of the coming months have to be devoted to action. It is not just that there is much at stake for the BJP, which will face the next election without its master strategist Parrikar, but Goa needs a firm hand at the tiller that will take the State to achieve what it has so far not been able to meet. Can Sawant prove that it will be his hand that does it?
The State has plodded along with a large number of issues remaining unsolved. If the Mhadei and mining are the first that spring to mind, there are various other issues that linger on without a solution. Goa has not finalised its Coastal Zone Management Plan and without this a number of other development projects remain uncleared. A herculean task for the Chief Minister will be balancing the account books. He inheirited a treasury that was not healthy, and the State has periodically borrowed to keep the wheels of administration moving. The current economic slowdown will further deplete the treasury, and more loans or sale bonds will be required.
Sawant has mountains to climb before he can claim to have been a successful chief minister. Each of these will bring their own peculiar challenges. A year at the helm of a State is too brief a period to judge a chief minister by, so he will have to prove himself in the two years that remain in the current term. It is his performance that will tell whether the accidental CM was the best choice.
