Team Herald
PANJIM: The State unit of the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) blamed Congress for playing the role of spoilsport for the party at the Corporation of City of Panaji (CCP) polls resulting in the defeat of their candidates in certain wards by narrow margins.
“Congress has damaged (the BJP). We lost by a small margin in a few wards,” Panjim MLA Siddharth Kunkalienkar, who headed the poll campaign, said on Thursday.
The party lost three to four wards to St Cruz MLA Atanasio (Babush) Monserrate’s candidates, by narrow margins and attribute this to Congress candidates eating into their votes.
The closest margin was recorded in Ward 13 where Vishnu Naik lost by one vote to Monserrate’s Dinesh Salgaonkar. In Ward 22 Maya Talkar lost by six votes to BJP’s former loyalist Asmita Kerkar who joined the Monserrate camp and in Ward 8 BJP’s Manisha Jware lost to Reshma Karishetty by 17 votes.
State party president Vinay Tendulkar, however, said that the party has managed to step into Babush’s bastion of Taleigao where they won one seat – Ward 4 – and retained Ward 5, while in Panjim, they increased their total wards from the 10 they won in the 2011 polls to 11 in this election.
