TEAM HERALD
PANJIM: As the dust settled on the penultimate week of the Assembly proceeding, many issues were indeed debated. Some important and some not so important, many issues were raised by the Opposition, by Independents and even by the ruling MLAs. But one thing was clear – though the Opposition did raise issues, most MLAs did it about their own constituencies. And though there were major arguments on topics as trivial as whether it was a bus stop or a bus stand, one thing was made clear, nay even underlined. That the Opposition was not working as a team but as a group of individuals forced to sit together and probably tagged together as part of a loose coalition of politicians that came together only during elections.
In many cases where there were issues of importance for the State, there was only one man fighting – the person who asked the question. And this was easily handled by the Chief Minister Manohar Parrikar or some of his MLAs were let loose to hassle the questioner who was literally hounded and made to look like as if he was asking irrelevant questions.
As the House moves on to the last leg of a reasonably long session and discussions of issues like the mining policy, one thing is clear from the session till date – that the government has kept a very firm grip on the opposition and even the outspoken independent MLAs are basically forced to get into shouting matches to get their point across and there is no unity among those sitting on the Opposition benches.
In fact there have been instances where the Leader of Opposition himself had come to the help of the Chief Minister – where wittingly or unwittingly is the million dollar question.
