On Friday morning, Goa Chief Minister Pramod Sawant quite happily announced that the much awaited Zuari bridge was being inaugurated on December 26th with a simple function in the presence of Union Minister of Road Transport and Highways Nitin Gadkari.
This he said, was being done in a bid to ease the traffic congestion ahead of the new year.
However, by evening, Sawant quickly back tracked and said that the inauguration was being postponed by three days as Gadkari wasn't available on Boxing Day and, traffic issues notwithstanding, the inauguration would have to wait until January 29 when Gadkari is available.
The flip-flop is reminiscent of a similar one back when the original Zuari bridge was being inaugurated, eloquently narrated by the BJP's very own "bhakt" who went on to do a stint as Governor of Puducherry.
Former top cop Kiran Bedi, who was once the darling of Goa's liberal elites for reportedly towing the car of former prime minister Indira Gandhi, was a cop in Goa at the time when the now 'old bridge' was being readied to be inaugurated. At her lecture during the DD Kosambi festival of ideas a few years ago, Bedi spoke of how an SP traffic inaugurated the Zuari bridge.
“The bridge even though ready, was not open to traffic as Prime Minister Indira Gandhi had thrice postponed her visit to inaugurate it.
"Looking at the long queues waiting in line for the ferry and a wide open bridge, I decided it was time to inaugurate the bridge and drove my jeep across it beckoning others to follow,” she said.
“Hence today this bridge is still called Zuari Bridge or else it would have been named after some Gandhi or the other,” she had said in her typical style.
Life indeed comes full circle and we wonder if the cop-turned-BJP politician will ever return to Goa to critic or defend the decision of Sawant and Gadkari to keep Goa waiting in peak tourism season until they are "available" to inaugurate the new Zuari bridge.
Goa's '2' to '3' syndrome
The news that one half (four lanes) of the new under-construction bridge over the Zuari is ready for use and will be inaugurated on December 29 has come as a relief to many daily commuters between the North and South of Goa indeed.
We will leave the discussion on how much the new bridge will alleviate the traffic snarls which have now become the norm for another day and rather point out the alteration that a quaint syndrome of Goa vis-a-vis bridges over its major rivers is undergoing.
The syndrome of 'two' is now becoming 'three'.
For decades in the not too distant past, Goa suffered from this unique syndrome of being unsatisfied with one and building two of a kind. Until 2019, for over two decades, two road bridges adorned the Mandovi. Ditto has been the case with the Zuari, although one of the two was a railway bridge. In a third case, again across the Zuari, there existed two bridges at Borim, although the older one was weak and frail until it was shut for use.
With the inauguaration of the beleagured Atal Setu in 2019, Mandovi's two bridges has now become three. It will three again over the Zuari when Union Minister Nitin Gadkari inaugurates it on December 29.
Move over to the skies. Goa only recently caught up with the 'two' syndrome and now has two airports after Prime Minister Narendra Modi inauguarted the Manohar Internationl Airport at Mopa to give company to the one at Dabolim.
Question is, will airports also catch up with the bridges and Goa will have a third airport in the future as Transport Minister Mauvin Godinho seems to suggest?
'Dance bar': The Michael-Joseph foxtrot
Of late, we have seen the unlikely duo of a rather restrained Calangute MLA Michael Lobo and an effervescent Sarpanch of the beach village, Joseph Sequeira, together on a couple of occasions.
The two in company make a nice picture.
But have the two leaders buried the hatchet and come together for the sake of Calangute?
Nah, not so easy, if birdies in both the camps and flying around a dance bar along the popular coastal belt are to be believed. They are seen together but the two cannot see into each other’s eyes -- they avoid eye contact.
The two Calangute strongmen have had a love-hate relationship even since they had joined hands on the political pitch to give Michael Lobo a leg-up in the 2012 assembly polls against a third strongman from the belt -- Agnel Fernandes. The rest is history.
Lobo has been re-elected for the third time in a row as the MLA, while Sequeira lost one panchayat election and is now back in the saddle as the village chieftain.
There are many who want the two to come together for the sake of the beach village. For now, they can only take solace in the cause of the battle against the dance bars bringing the two to fox-trot with each other.
How long this bonhomie will last is anyone’s guess.
Opposition unity
Punctured in numbers after the mid-September desertion by eight of his partymen, Opposition Leader Yuri Alemao has finally embraced the imperative -- Opposition unity -- ahead of the 4-day winter session of the Goa Legislative Assembly which the government has called to begin on January 16.
But the youthful, first-time legislator from the Alemao clan's GenX, will have a task at hand to walk the talk given the uneasy chemistry between his Congress party and the three other political parties that occupy all of just seven spots in the Opposition benches.
Vijai Sardesai of the Goa Forward Party (GFP) is perhaps the only non-Congress member of the Opposition whose disposition, as of today, appears to be amiable to Alemao's proposition. The question, remains, whether the seasoned Fatorda will yield the floor to the Opposition Leader and curtail his own penchant to dominate the Opposition space in the House.
The two other entities in the Opposition -- Aam Aadmi Party (AAP) and the Revolutionary Goans Party (RGP) -- are seemingly uninterested in waltzing to the beat of the Congress, apparently in deference to inherent political compulsions and existential imperatives of their respective political formations.
Monday, December 26 will be first acid test of the junior Alemao's skills in forging floor coordination as Opposition Leader. He has claimed that all seven legislators from the Opposition will attend the meeting he has called and has individually spoken to all of them.
"Hum Saat Saath Hai, Rahenge," Alemao has tweeted referring to the seven Opposition MLAs.
Let's wait and see.
