The municipality chairpersons, deputies and councillors may have taken their positions on Thursday, but the narratives in Margao and Mapusa have triggered political undercurrents that could have repercussions on the larger electoral framework.
In Margao, the question doing the round is why senior partner of the alliance and Margao MLA Digambar Kamat conceded the chairmanship to Vijai Sardesai's group which enjoyed only a slender one-seat margin. Senior member Ganashyam Shirodkar spewed venom on the Margao MLA that the interests of the city haven't been taken care of and charged him with meekly surrendering to the demands of the Fatorda MLA. Mind you, the Goa Forward panel had ruled over the municipality for a major part of the previous term while the Kamat panel played second fiddle.
Sardesai may have hung on to a fine technicality of numbers, but with Kamat playing the big brother in the alliance, the grouse is that he should have pushed harder. The underlying message here is that Kamat failed to make a political statement, while Sardesai showed he is the boss. If Kamat has not taken his senior teammates into confidence and meekly allowed Sardesai to have his way, then there is another issue here.
The crux of the matter is that parties are looking at the larger assembly elections through the prism of municipalities. With the alliance managing to thrash BJP out of contention in Margao, it has also brightened Goa Forward prospects of brokering a partnership deal at the forthcoming assembly elections. If civic elections were the semi-final, then Sardesai will make this score count while aligning with Congress.
The insistence over chairmanship only means that Sardesai was in no mood to reconcile or accommodate Kamat’s claims if at all he had put forth. If this equation is super-imposed on the assembly template, it appears that Goa Forward would not prefer to go with seniority and would rather stick to numbers, a situation seen during the erstwhile BJP regime. The question here is whether this development will caution the Congress leadership as it begins to get cosy with Goa Forward and whether Sardesai’s opponents in the Congress camp will amplify this to stall his moves.
As much as Kamat's bargain for the chairperson's post would have raised his leadership a few notches, Sardesai's move to concede the post could have helped in the larger scheme of rapprochement, looking at the fact that chairmanship is agreed to be on a rotational basis.
In Mapusa, the split engineered within Mapshekarancho Ekvott and Shubangi Vaigankar rewarded with the chairperson's seat has once again proved that political defections are here to stay. People's mandate will be flouted time and again in the name of development and elected representatives will continue to pursue selfish agendas.
The Mapusa municipality saga has exposed hollow the sincerity of political units that vouch for clean governance. Mapshekarancho Ekvott has not only been a classic case of disunity but will, to a large extent cast a shadow over emerging groups that sing tunes of secularism and anti-corruption in fighting the BJP.
