Eyeing sixth term in Parliament
PANAJI
For a five successive term MP, possibly on his way to break his and former union minister Eduardo Faleiro's record and bag a sixth term in Parliament, one would have thought Shripad Naik would be a muscled, "dabang" politician.
Hardly. Close associates, contemporaries and even adversaries are unanimous that Naik, who has been nominated by the ruling Bharatiya Janata Party to contest the North Goa seat for the sixth time, is as humble and accessible as he was when he made his debut in electoral politics.
That was way back in 1984, not the 1990s when he first contested the 1991 Lok Sabha election, albeit unsuccessfully, from the Mormugao (South Goa) seat or or few years later when he became a giant killer defeating Ravi Naik from Marcaim in 1994 to enter the Goa legislative assembly.
In fact, Naik made his debut in electoral politics at the lowest rung of politics -- the humble village panchayat back in the early 1980s when the panchayat system in Goa was still single-tier. He was elected panch and soon sarpanch of Dhurbat panchayat in 1984, sitting on that seat for nearly a decade, before he catapulted to the State level with the 1994 assembly victory in Marcaim over Ravi Naik.
His State politics' inning didn't last long as he was defeated in the next election held in 1999 from the same Marcaim seat by current Power Minister Ramkrishna (Sudin) Dhavlikar but it ironically opened up his spectacular run in national politics with him winning the first of his five Lok Sabha elections held a few months later.
Naik's record at Lok Sabha elections has been an enviable one, winning the North Goa seat with relative ease, save that one time in 2009 when his margin of victory was a miniscule under-5,000 votes.
In his first election in 1999, he defeated former union minister Ramakant Khalap of the Congress by a 35,000 vote margin, increasing the margin to about 56,000 votes in 2004 over Dr Wilfred de Souza of the NCP before the scare of 2009 when he managed to scrape through by defeating Jitendra Deshprabhu of NCP by just 4,000-odd votes.
In retrospect, save for that one time against Deshprabhu in 2009, Naik hasn't been really tested by his main rivals since, indicative in the results statistics of the Election Commission of India. In the next husting in 2014, Naik came back strongly, perhaps aided by the fact that it was a BJP wave election, to defeat Ravi Naik of the Congress by a whopping 1-lakh plus votes margin.
And the last time around in 2019, he won the seat again by a staggering margin of 80,000-plus votes over Girish Chodankar of the Congress.
History may be on his side having scored five successive wins, all but one of them by massive leads over his nearest rivals. Yet the election to be held on May 7 still needs to be fought travessing the length and breath of the constituency through the heat and humidity of the harshest month of April and a bit of May.
At 72 years of age now, Naik has already termed it his last election. Whether or not he bows out on a sweet or bitter note will be known only in early June, when the results are out.
