TEAM HERALD
PANJIM: With just a few hours to go before the State Legislative Assembly’s budget session commences, the main opposition Congress legislature party seems split wide open, with three out of its nine legislators skipping the crucial meeting Monday, scheduled to chalk out plan for the month-long session, beginning Tuesday.
The CLP which met under the leadership of Pratapsing Rane Monday evening to discuss the strategy for the assembly session saw the absence of MLAs Atanasio Monserrate, his wife Jennifer and Mauvin Godinho. Digambar Kamat, Vishwajit Rane, Aleixo Reginaldo Lourenco, Chandrakant Kavalekar and Pandurang Madkaikar were present at the meeting.
Monserrate and Godinho had openly criticized Rane for being a weak Opposition leader and had even publicly denounced to support the party during the recently held Lok Sabha elections. Interestingly, despite this outrage, they were left untouched by the Congress disciplinary committee, which recently issued show cause notices to four leaders for anti-party activities.
Monserrate and his wife were both unavailable for comments.
The CLP has resolved to take up issues such as mining resumption, Sri Ram Sene Chief Pramod Muthalik’s entry into Goa, power crisis, failure of law and order and failure to promulgate the regional which figure on its list as priority.
CLP is of the opinion that government needs to reply on its various promises it had made during its two-year governance, especially regarding resumption of mining activities and deteriorating law and order situation in the state.
Speaking to media persons after the meeting, Rane said that the meeting discussed about the various issues that would be raised in the Assembly by the party. He said that government will have to reply as to why it failed to fulfill the promises it made to the people.
“We feel that the government is not making enough efforts to restart mining. Issues of power crisis, and regional plan would also be taken up,” he said. When asked, Rane said that the Pradesh Congress committee has not submitted any ‘charge-sheet’ to him, to be submitted to the Speaker of Legislative Assembly.
