Team Herald
PONDA: The ultimate aim of any political party is to gain power. In the 2007 elections, the like-minded parties, MGP and BJP realised that power eluded them due to the division of votes which helped the Congress get elected.
Realising their mistake in 2007, MGP and BJP formed an alliance in 2012. This alliance saw MGP win three of the eight they contested and BJP winning 21 seats.
In case of Ponda the alliance’s target was to defeat the Congress heavyweight and former chief Minister Ravi Naik. They succeeded in their mission by getting an overwhelming majority. The same alliance helped them to win the municipality polls held soon after the Assembly polls, defeating the Ravi-led faction in the hustings.
This alliance team later laid the foundation stone for Renovation of Kranti Maidan in December 2013 along with Traffic Management Plan at hands of then Chief Minister Manohar Parrikar in presence of then PWD Minister Sudin Dhavalikar and Ponda MLA Lavoo Mamledar. Till then it was all peace and no fights in the alliance.
The cracks in the alliance surfaced in 2014 when the Council, led by BJP-MGP, hiked the sopo tax and awarded the tender to a contractor who was opposed by the market vendors, who claimed they were charged exorbitant rates and started an agitation for the hike in sopo.
Ponda MLA Lavoo Mamledar supported the agitation claiming corruption and demanded reduction in the sopo. Lavoo even complained to the then CM Parrikar, but the investigation was not even started as the Council was headed by the BJP stalwarts. BJP-backed chairperson Kishore Naik then claimed that the CM had reduced the sopo to Rs 12 from Rs 20 and Rs 6 from Rs 10. Naik claimed that despite the reduction, the MGP MLA was instigating the vendors not to pay the sopo to gain political mileage.
After this, the cracks appeared to widen in the alliance as both the MLA and the Council began blaming each other for the issue, which is yet to be solved.
With the sopo issue not resolved, the next problem surfaced when Parrikar laid the foundation stone for the Kranti Maidan with the Council filing a complaint with the police claiming the work was not according the NOC granted for the project.
In December last, Sudin and Lavoo again launched a scatting attack on the BJP government for siphoning off money into GSIDC. The climax came when Sudin announced their party would not support if BJP projected Laxmikant Parsekar as the chief ministerial candidate.
