On December 19, 1961 Goa, Daman and Diu was liberated from the clutches of Portuguese colonial rule and a new chapter in the history of the union territory began thanks to the untiring efforts of freedom fighters who succeeded in freeing the union territory from the yoke of the Portuguese. After 451 years of Portuguese rule on India having assumed reins of power in Goa, Daman and Diu, a short tenure of military governorship of Lt Gen K P Candeth was installed followed by the leadership of Lt Gen T Sivasankar on June 8, 1962. The government of India introduced on March 12, 1962 in the Lok Sabha two Bills, one the Constitution Amendment (12th Amendment) to include Goa, Daman and Diu in Schedule I of the Constitution as a Union Territory which in future would have two elected representatives in Parliament and a Legislative Assembly consisting of 30 elected members including Daman and Diu. Speaking on the Bill to amend the Constitution, the late Prime Minister of India Jawaharlal Nehru in the course of the speech in the Lok Sabha on March 14, 1962 said “We have made it clear that we want Goa to maintain its separate identity, separate individuality, call it what you will, because in the course of more than 400 years, Goa has had a separate identity and the course of history has imparted it some. We have no intention of changing that or suppressing that identity. In fact some people have advised us to make another change in the Constitution and to recognize the Konkani language as one of the Official languages of India.” This statement formed the cornerstone of later developments which resulted in the decision of the Union government to allow the conduct of the Opinion Poll. The United Goans Party was formed in 1962-63 with the merger of the three local parties with Hand as the party symbol, centred around the brilliance of the physician-turned-politician Sequeira. Simultaneously, the Maharashtrawadi Gomantak Party was formed by Dayananad Bandodkar. These two parties formed had divergent views and had separate agendas. After much political activity in the Centre as well as the then Union territory, instead of a vote in the Assembly as was proposed by the MGP, under the tutelage of Sequeira the UGP managed to convince the Centre that an Opinion Poll be conducted to make Goa, Daman and Diu a separate entity or the Union territory be merged with Maharashtra. Thus the stage was set for the Opinion Poll which was decided by the Union Parliament on December 7, 1966. The MGP and the UGP galvanized support for their stands on the merger with Maharashtra under Dayanand B. Bandodkar with flower as its symbol and the United Goans Party under Sequeira has the two leaves as its symbol. A fierce campaign followed with both sides giving it all to win, the Opinion Poll which was conducted on January 16, 1967 amidst great expectations by both the sides. However, as is known the fluent rhetoric of the charismatic Sequeira prevailed and thus the majority people in Goa voted to remain a separate entity which later on led to Goa having achieved statehood on May 30, 1987. In the Opinion Poll majority voters in 19 of the 30 constituencies voted in favour of a separate identity, while the merger with Maharashtra attracted only 11 constituencies. The final tally of votes was: Total electorate: 3,88,392, Votes cast: 3,17,633, Valid votes: 3,10,361, Rejected votes: 7,272, Anti Merger: 1,72,191, Pro-merger votes: 1,38,170 and the margin of votes in favour of Anti merger was 34,021. The Opinion Poll in its run-up and later received wide publicity from all national and local newspapers. Sequeira emerged as the savoir of the Goan identity with his stellar ability to convince the electorate and thus Goa was saved from becoming just a backyard of Maharashtra and today after statehood we have 40 MLAs and two Lok Sabha MPs, as well as a Rajya Sabha MP. Amongst the UGP MLAs, here we have to mention the names of veteran UGP stalwarts John Teotonio Pereira, Advocate Alvaro Loyola Furtado, Enio Pimenta, J. M. D’Souza, Baburao Karekar, Baba Dhuri, Shrirang Narvekar, Ravindra Prabhu, Shrirang Dubashi, Dattaram Shinde, Yeshwant Sitaram Dessai and Vasudev Salgaonkar. Special mention has also to be made of Uday Bhembre, who was then editor of Rashtramat, an anti-merger Marathi newspaper.