Pamela D’mello
By noon Tuesday, it was clear that things were not going the ruling party way, as far as the municipal elections went. Cuncolim, Valpoi and Quepem had clearly gone to opposition non BJP panels, while panels the party backed were elected in Sanguem and Bicholim.
The all-important battle royale in Margao, where it had staked so much, went to panels backed by former Congress Chief Minister Digambar Kamat and Vijai Sardessai. The atmosphere in Margao had got particularly high voltage, against the backdrop of the ruling party seeking Kamat’s arrest in the Louis Berger case. For the former CM, the civic polls became a battle to vindicate his position in more ways than one. Joined by young independent Sardessai’s Fatorda Forward, the combine took on a different political hue. Sardessai used the civic poll to make a larger statement against what he calls the larger intolerance that he says the BJP has injected into the body politic.
Among the two important aspects that Tuesday’s results threw up, is that firstly, the ruling party was not able to make the clean sweep and win all eleven municipal councils that its party president said it would make, just days earlier. The chief minister was more circumspect, saying the major towns of Mapusa and Curchorem would fall its way. At the end of counting, its overall position of “winning” six councils, to the opposition’s four, with one council throwing up a “hung” result, may not be as good as it expected. Or did it? Certainly, it would seem that with all the negative energies swirling around the party, three and a half years into its assembly win, there was expected to be a bigger dip in its popularity.
Coming at the time it did, the civic polls were seen as some kind of test on the ruling party’s position, before the next big contest of the March 2017 assembly polls. If compared to their position in 2012, they have reason to believe that the trends that first showed up in the Zilla Panchayat polls, have carried on to the civic polls. Voters can be unforgiving and arrogance in politics can be a fatal drawback.
The other recurrent trend in Goan politics is the personality driven nature of electoral contests. Provincial leaders have managed to hold sway over their politically nurtured areas, despite the shifting fortunes of their party and often transcending their party affiliation. Without the direct presence of the Congress, Vishwajit Rane has secured his supremacy in Valpoi, the same goes with Babu Kavlekar in Quepem, Digamber Kamat in Margao and Joaquim Alemao in Cuncolim. The same could be said for Vijay Pai Khot in Canacona, who found himself left behind when the BJP decided to field current sports minister Ramesh Tawadkar in the amalgamated constituency in 2012. Khot was able to show his strength in the just concluded polls.
The BJP can afford considerable consolation from its performance in Pernem, Bicholim and Mapusa. More so in Mormugao. The backing of GCCI President, Narayan Bandekar to the Vasco Development Front set in opposition to the BJP backed panel, went largely in favour of the latter. Mormugao’s 25 wards saw multiple contests between 144 candidates, some wards throwing up as many as five and giving the area reportedly among the most heated contests that the port area had seen, with many personal reputations at stake.
While it may have justified its decision to bring in its central ministers into the municipal polls arena, the downside of such a move is that it makes the party’s losses even more problematic.
What should concern citizens though is the outright power play that had come to mark the polls for what is basically a contest to elect people who will help run our towns better. The BJP’s decision to make it a political contest, as it did the Zilla polls has brought the divisiveness of party positions to civic matters. There were 685 candidates over 159 wards and most ground reports suggest a marked vitiating of the atmosphere. Accusations over delimitations, reservations of wards for women, SC, ST, conducted to suit some quarters and some candidates hit the election process.
Given that municipal polls elect city fathers who will help make daily living easier, the direct power play of party politics is best kept to a minimum. Co-operation is a far more efficient system to run a municipal council with. Councilors can be more responsive to the city as a whole, minus the baggage of party affiliations and civic bodies would function better without political overlordship.
Civic bodies where councilors work holistically for the city, instead of merely processing the needs of their wards, may seem like a farfetched unattainable goal, but they are the way civic bodies work in some parts of the world. Maybe someday we will get there.
Pamela D’mello is an independent journalist
