Team Herald
PANJIM: Five Congress MLAs left Goa for the weekend. They returned on Sunday evening. And yet the party could not come together to issue one comprehensive statement that was the official line of the party. Much like the manner in which the proverbial left hand doesn’t know what the right hand is doing.
GPCC President Amit Patkar had the temerity to say that just those 5 MLAs left Goa to “relax” which was ratified by his working president Yuri Alemao.
After a “relaxing” weekend working president Yuri Alemao told reporters after landing at Dabolim airport, "The party president (Amit Patkar) has clarified and we had gone to Chennai because we had a break in the Assembly session. Why should we fear anything when all 11 MLAs are all together? There may have been an attempt in the past to split the CLP, but it is not there now. We are all coordinating as a team.”
But the AICC desk in charge Dinesh Gundu Rao at least had a semblance of honesty in his remark when he said, “The 5 MLAs had gone to Chennai voluntarily to avoid the incessant attempts, continuous calls, pressure tactics and threats being made by Pramod Sawant and BJP to engineer a split in the party.”
But the list of excuses didn’t end. “One MLA’s wife is celebrating her birthday today, maybe they went for that,” said Patkar earlier. It was Aldona MLA Carlos Alvares Ferreira’s wife Natasha’s birthday on Sunday.
The real reason was clear. Fearing the possibility of cross-voting, the Congress Party shifted five of the nine MLAs to an unknown destination in view of the Presidential election scheduled on Monday. Sankalp Amonkar, Yuri Alemao, Altone D'Costa, Rudolf Fernandes and Carlos Alvares Ferreira left town suddenly.
However, six other MLAs including Aleixo Sequeira, Rajesh Faldessai, Delilah Lobo and Kedar Naik are not part of the group.