TEAM HERALD
PANJIM: NCP Supremo Sharad Pawar stressed that the party has candidates within its ranks to contest the North Goa Lok Sabha seat.
Speaking to media persons, after an informal meeting with State party leaders during a private visit to the State, Pawar when questioned how the State NCP has always been borrowing candidates said that the State leadership would produce its own leader.
“This time there will be no need to import a candidate. We have candidates in our ranks,” Pawar said.
History has proved that the NCP has always secured the North Goa Lok Sabha seat as part of the seat-sharing arrangement with Congress which usually used to take South Goa.
The NCP candidate in the past had been ‘borrowed’ with a Congressman signing as a member of the NCP and then contesting on the ticket. This had led to disappointment among many candidate hopefuls that the ticket was given to an outsider.
With the trend continuing even at the Assembly elections, disgruntled NCP members, some of whom quit the party only to rejoin a couple of months later, have been demanding that the party select a candidate from within.
Speaking to reporters, chief spokesperson of the NCP Trajano D’Mello, said that their party president asked them to strengthen the party at the grassroot-level in both the constituencies.
“The party president has directed the State executive to strengthen the booth-level committees, the vidhan sabha committees and the district committees… and he asked us to strengthen them not only in North Goa as most of the executive expected, but also in South Goa,” D’Mello said.
“He said the talks about the seats will take place at the High Command level between the Congress and the NCP. Our job is to strengthen the party,” D’Mello said.
NCP leaders insisted that the meeting was an informal one with Pawar too saying that there was no fixed agenda.
The meeting was attended by the Sawantwadi MLA Deepak Kesarkar, NCP State president Nilkanth Halarnkar, former Revenue Minister Jose Philip D’Souza and other State leaders.
