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THE STATES
Fragile fabric
THE Congress, propped up by its pre-poll alliance with the Nationalist Congress Party (NCP), may have managed to retain power in Goa with additional help from two independent legislators and a regional party that is self-confessedly bereft of ideology. But ever since the election results started coming in, all indications are that India's smallest State (with a population of just over 1.4 million) is headed for continued political instability.
The Congress has the support of 23 legislators in the 40-member House. Winning the June 2 Assembly elections was crucial for the party after the reverses it had suffered in Uttar Pradesh, Punjab and Uttarakhand. The Assembly elections scheduled for later in the year in Gujarat and the forthcoming byelection in one of Goa's two parliamentary seats made it all the more important.
The party's general secretary in charge of Goa, Margaret Alva, acknowledged Goa's importance to the Congress and said that the alliance with the NCP had been decisive for the party in winning as many seats as it did. However, eight ministerial berths are still to be filled, and it remains to be seen how the coalition works out.
The pressures of making the coalition tick have already been felt. The Congress, it is said, would have preferred to have as Chief Minister either the previous incumbent, Pratapsinh Rane, or Pradesh Congress Committee president Ravi Naik. However, the Maharashtrawadi Gomantak Paksh (MGP), one of its coalition partners, reportedly forced it to "elect" a consensus candidate, Digambar Kamat, for the post. Publicly, the MGP has pledged unconditional support to the Congress.
But it is widely believed that the party did not want Ravi Naik as Chief Minister because his support base overlaps that of the two MGP legislators.
Ravi Naik, a powerful Bhandari leader who had emerged as the favoured choice of most Congress legislators, was understandably upset. Some of his supporters raised slogans and even gheraoed Alva and the Congress high command's emissaries to Goa, R.K. Dhawan and Sushil Kumar Shinde.
Speaking to Frontline minutes before the ceremony in which Kamat was sworn in as Chief Minister and he himself as a Minister, a visibly upset Ravi Naik said, "I don't know why they [the MGP] are controlling our party [the Congress]." But he added that he did not want to blame anyone: "I have to cooperate because of the public and our voters. We [the Congress] have promised to give a good government and stability."
The electorate returned 16 legislators of the Congress to the Assembly; 14 of the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP); three of the NCP; two each of the MGP and the newly formed Save Goa Front (SGF); one of the United Goan Democratic Party (UGDP); and two independent candidates.
Goan politics is known for desertions and splits: the State has had 17 Chief Ministers since it attained full-fledged statehood in May 1987. In that context, the composition of the new House raises fears of political instability in the event of the coalition failing to accommodate diverse aspirations.
One of the MGP legislators, Ramakrishna Dhavalikar, has already been sworn in as a Minister. Both the independents have asked for their pounds of flesh. Vishwajit Rane, son of Pratapsinh Rane, successfully contested the interior and backward constituency of Valpoi in North Goa as an independent candidate after the Congress refused him nomination. (The party, however, did not contest the seat.)
As a condition for his support to the government, he reportedly insisted that either his father should be retained as Chief Minister or, at worst, Ravi Naik should be kept out of the hot seat.
The senior Rane, who rubbished accusations that he had lost the confidence of the Congress high command and his fellow legislators because of his son's alleged land deals, told Frontline: "Viswajit, in fact, helped four Congress legislators win their seats."
Mine owner Anil Salgaonkar won the Sanvordem seat as an independent candidate. He told Frontline that he was not looking to become a Minister but declared that he wanted to play kingmaker: "I will run the government by remote control."
The Congress' ally, the NCP, which contested six seats and has already had one of its legislators, Jose Philip D'Souza (who wrested the Vasco da Gama seat from the BJP) sworn in as a Minister, also has its demands. It wants a fair share of the ministerial berths and the post of Deputy Chief Minister.
The defeat of NCP strongman Wilfred D'Souza at Saligao may have taken away some of the party's bargaining power, but its Francisco Pacheco, who won the Benaulim seat, may be expected to rock the boat as he has done many times in the past. He was conspicuous by his absence at the oath-taking ceremony.
Desertions and loyalty switches have not been the preserve of regional parties and independents in Goa. Even the national parties, the Congress and the BJP, have suffered the humiliation of having members turn hostile on the slightest of pretexts. The trend of toppled governments was not checked even with the 2003 introduction of tougher anti-defection laws, which invalidated splits and made it mandatory for any dissident political group to make up two-thirds of the parent party's strength in the legislature to be able to merge with another party. Once Goan legislators have fallen out with their party, they would rather resign their seats and seek re-election than patch up. In 2005, five legislators, including Kamat, resigned their seats and toppled the Manohar Parrikar-led BJP government.
Local leaders have considerable bases in their fiefdoms, irrespective of their party affiliations. Senior Congressman and former Chief Minister Churchill Alemao, who deserted the Congress, resigned his seat in Parliament and formed the SGF, was able to win two seats for his party in the Catholic-dominated Salcete taluk. Congress candidates and former Chief Ministers Luizinho Faleiro and Francisco Sardinha were defeated in Navelim and Curtorim constituencies, respectively.
Goa's small electorate (10.10 lakhs) and small constituencies (the biggest is Ponda, with 37,055 voters, and the smallest is Panaji, with 14,936 voters) have meant that election results are never easy to predict: a large family, leave alone a section of a village, might swing the political fortunes of a candidate. In the June elections, nine of 40 successful candidates won by margins of under 800 votes. The BJP candidate in the State's southernmost constituency of Poinguinim, who was locked in a straight fight with his Congress rival, won by only 200 votes.
The voters clearly rejected the BJP, especially its politics of communalism, in a State where 30 per cent of the population is Catholic. The sitting BJP candidates were defeated in Sanvordem and Curchorem, constituencies where the party tried to polarise voters along communal lines. These were also constituencies which in 2006 witnessed Goa's first communal clashes in recent times. In Sanvordem, where just 16,483 votes were cast, BJP candidate Vinay Tendulkar's tally fell short of what he polled in the 2002 elections by 4,413 votes.
Yet, the Congress was not really able to consolidate the non-BJP, Muslim and Catholic votes. Votes that should have gone to the Congress were captured by smaller parties such as the SGF and the independents, most of whom were Congress rebels.
Former Prime Minister H.D. Deve Gowda led an aggressive campaign for the Janata Dal (Secular), targeting the Kannada migrants' votes; but the 12 candidates of his party lost miserably. The JD(S) polled barely 1 per cent of the vote. The Shiv Sena also drew a blank: in a State where the Konkani identity itself is under threat from migrants, the electorate was in no mood to pay heed to appeals emanating from other States.
There is also little doubt that inducements, both financial and material, played a part in these elections. Gifts ranging from footballs, cell phones and motorcycles to fully paid travel arrangements to pilgrim centres were liberally on offer.
But this was also a path-breaking round of elections. The officiating Chief Electoral Officer of Goa, Ramesh Negi, said that it was the first election in the country that was conducted without posters, banners and hoardings and without high-decibel shouting. "All we did was to invoke the existing Goa Prevention of Defacement of Property Act. This prevented the defacement of both public and private property," he said.
The campaign, which was quite vitriolic, was conducted through newspapers, with paid advertisements masquerading as front-page and leader articles serving to lampoon opponents and question their commitment to saving Goa, from communalism or corruption or both.
Curiously, the controversial, unpopular and now shelved Regional Plan 2011, which envisaged the opening up of large tracts of private forests, paddy fields, orchards and community lands for settlements and was approved by the Rane government in August 2006, did not affect the Congress's prospects significantly.
The BJP's decision to make the issue its main election plank did not fetch many votes; nor did the campaign line "Goa for sale. We won't let it happen".
The chief architect of the plan, former Town and Country Planning Minister Atanasio Monserrate, who resigned from the Congress minutes before the closing of nominations because the party would not give his wife the ticket, won from the Taligao constituency as a UGDP candidate. So, too, did others like Viswajit Rane and Dayanand Narvekar, who wanted to convert the heritage Goa Medical College building into a shopping mall.
According to political pundits, voters ended up largely electing candidates who they thought would perform. Regional parties, whose vote share has been consistently falling, from a heady 84 per cent in 1972 to below 20 per cent in 2002, have also picked up the gauntlet. While the MGP got 9 per cent, the nascent SGF picked up 8 per cent, and the UGDP managed 5 per cent. Others, including independents, cornered 10 per cent of the vote share.
recently in Panaji
The Congress cobbles together a majority in Goa, but the composition of the government is proof of its instability.
Congress and NCP supporters celebrate the combine's election victory, in Panaji on June 5.
Ravi Naik, who has been sworn in as a Minister. He had been widely believed to be the favourite for the post of Chief Minister.
The previous Chief Minister, Pratapsinh Rane, won from his Poriem constituency but lost out to the consensus candidate for Chief Minister, Digambar Kamat.