Dissenters and admirers
The creeping dissatisfaction in the ranks must certainly be cause for heartburn within the Goa BJP and to Chief Minister Manohar Parrikar’s image managers. The outspoken Calangute MLA Michael Lobo and the irrepressible Vishnu Wagh are not the only ones giving the party and the chief minister and his close coterie, some anxious moments. Wagh, who represents Santo Andre, a constituency that has a substantial Catholic vote that swung the BJP way in last year’s election, is hardly a politician in the saffron mould. A one-time journalist and Marathi playwright, the MLA who heads the Kala Academy has never masked his political ambitions. Which is why, perhaps, in true Goan political fashion, he felt the need to move from the Maharashtrawadi Gomantak Party to the Congress, and last year to the BJP, when it became apparent he was not in the running for a Congress ticket.
Whatever his self-serving political ambitions, Vishnu Wagh is forthright and upfront about them. He makes no bones about the fact that he wants to be in the Cabinet and that he’s been weighing several other options outside of the BJP if his ambitions are stymied within the lotus pool. These are of course mild threats meant to make the chief minister uncomfortable. Nonetheless, there is something almost refreshing about Wagh’s very public dissent, since it emanates from a camp that has been used to being dictated to by a single authoritarian figure and the RSS coterie around him.
The Goa BJP is learning to its discomfort that there is a price to be paid for expanding its base “culturally” in Goa, and dissent and inclusiveness are a part of the tradeoff it will have to learn to accommodate and work around, if it wants to stay in power for longer than this term. Nonetheless, as events unfolded last week, some of the disenchantment is now percolating to the party’s grassroots, with murmurs brewing in the BJP’s Tivim block unit over the selection of candidates for government jobs. What is particularly disconcerting about these revelations is that they concern recruitments to crucial sub-inspector posts in the Goa police.
The corrosion of the police force in India is largely the result of it being controlled and manipulated by a corrupt political class. Unlike the Indian Police Service, State police recruitment is known to be determined by political connections and bribes running into lakhs of rupees for what one might imagine is just the humble post of a constable, or the very coveted police sub-inspector (PSI). The BJP Tivim unit is unhappy that none of its six nominees for PSI posts—all BJP workers—found favour with the government. Whichever candidates do make the cut, once can rest assured professionalism and objectivity would have already been compromised at the very threshold of careers by the underlying political allegiance.
Ironically, though Manohar Parrikar faces mounting resentment against his style of running government at home, he has managed to make an impression in the national media and has a growing set of admirers among movers and shakers outside the State. This perhaps has more to do with the study in contrast he provides with the polarising Narendra Modi. Here are two BJP chief ministers of States that could not have been more different, both politically and culturally. And to his credit, despite his more junior status—compared to the Arun Jaitleys and Sushma Swarajs of the BJP—Parrikar has gone before the cameras, and attempted an explanation for Modi’s handling of the 2002 Gujarat riots. Few of us might agree with his assessment of Modi. But the Goa chief minister dared to publicly confront an issue that will always haunt the BJP, when all other voices in his party have quite simply fallen silent in the looming shadow of the anointed leader.
