The spat involving Calangute MLA Michael Lobo and his one time buddy Francis D’Souza, the former deputy CM and MLA of Mapusa, is as baffling as it is surprising. One really isn’t sure what prompted Lobo to lay into his party colleague and many years his senior when it seems like only yesterday when Lobo was rooting for D’Souza to be made chief minister when Chief Minister Manohar Parrikar was to be elevated as the country’s defence minister in the autumn of 2014.
The outburst and reaction is wrong at several levels. Even if true, as public functionaries, the duo are supposed to solve problems and not complain about them. If Lobo really believes that Mapusa has lacked development, his job is to ensure that something is done about it -- and by development we hope Lobo doesn’t mean conversion of large tracts of low-lying agricultural land around Mapusa that Lobo as NGPDA chairman wants to convert at a higher special FAR into residential and commercial zones. On the other hand, if what Francis says is true that drugs are being sold openly and that prostitution is rampant in the constituency represented by Lobo, it is his bounden duty to bring this to the notice of competent authorities.
Even the party’s diktat to resolve the issue through mediation between the two leaders has not seemed to get the duo to stop publicly speaking about it.
Development should ideally mean public infrastructure and facilities that the town lacks.
Make no mistake, the allegations flung back and forth between Souza and Lobo are of serious nature as it is a commonly held impression that Calangute constituency is a drug haven and that Mapusa has lacked development.
Anything else will only serve to trivialise serious issues at the altar of political bickering and neither issue or constituency will get the treatment it deserves.
It is also a mistaken notion that the elected MLAs are responsible for the development or law enforcement in their constituencies. Legislators are elected to legislate and strictly speaking, not to oversee the completion of projects which is the job of the bureaucracy which is tasked with implementing the government’s policy. But by accusing each other as being responsible for the problems, the duo have only succeeded in showing the government as well as the party in poor light.
Solving the matter by bringing Lobo and Souza to the table to discuss issues will only stitch the wound, but the underlying problem will remain.
By attempting to hold the elected MLA responsible for the situation when in fact the entire government should be held responsible, it only propagates the existing misconceptions and helps officials take it easy because the local MLA will be blamed for project delays.
