PANJIM: In a scene straight out of Ripley’s Believe it or Not, Manohar Parrikar’s strongest critic Vijai Sardesai turned from bête noire to bedfellow and gave a letter of support to the BJP government, helping it stake claim to form a government with only 13 MLAs.
Defence Minister Manohar Parrikar will now be the next Chief Minister of Goa. After a day of drama, with twists and turns that would rival a Bollywood flick, the Bharatiya Janata Party government led by Parrikar is likely to be sworn in this week.
Parrikar claims to have the strength of 13 BJP MLAs, three MGP MLAs, three Goa Forward MLAs and two Independent MLAs. All 21 of them met Governor Mridula Sinha on Sunday evening with manhar Parrikar.
For Parrikar and BJP it was akin to pulling off a victory from the jaws of defeat. Throughout the day, while the BJP was hectically finalising the alliance with other parties, Congress was struggling to arrive at a consensus on their legislative party leader. While Congress was hoping for the support of the Goa Forward Party which won three seats, BJP went ahead and grabbed the debutant party keeping the Congress at bay.
Besides 13 BJP MLAs and Parrikar, MGP’s Ramkrishna (Sudin) Dhavalikar, Manohar (Babu) Azgaonkar, Dipak Pauskar, Goa Forward’s Vijai Sardesai, Vinod Palyekar, Jayesh Salgaoncar, independents Rohan Khaunte and Govind Gawde met the Governor at Raj Bhavan with letters of support to stake claim to form the government.
