Cong relying on RGP to eat into BJP votes
PANAJI
The voting turnouts in the three assembly segments of the hinterland Sattari taluka where two of the saffron party’s most powerful leaders – Chief Minister Pramod Sawant and the number two in his cabinet, Vishwajit Rane – hail from has been massive in Tuesday’s polling for the North Goa Lok Sabha constituency.
The taluka has three assembly segments – Poriem, Sanquelim and Valpoi. Sawant represents Sanquelim, Rane is the Valpoi MLA and the latter’s wife Dr Deviya, represents Poriem formerly the bastion of her father-in-law Pratapsing Rane for over fifty years.
All these three segments rank top three in terms of voter turnout among all of Goa’s 40 segments in Tuesday’s polling. While Sawant’s Sanquelim logged a 87% turnout with 24,560 votes polled, Vishwajit’s Valpoi had 27,323 voters turning up to notch a 84.53% turnout. In Poriem, which incidentally has the largest voter strength of 33,911, the turnout was a record 88.62% translating to 30,051 votes polled on Tuesday.
Without going into what the ground-level political headwinds were in the region and the three individual assembly segments, the exceptionally high voter turnout is seemingly a booster for the saffron party’s Shripad Naik, who is seeking a record sixth straight term as North Goa MP.
Almost every pundit is counting Naik to score huge leads over his main rival Ramakant Khalap of the Congress in the Poriem-Sanquelim-Valpoi segments much as it was expected in the run-up to this election, what with the Sawant-Rane duo hailing from this sub-district.
The record in 2019 also backs Naik in this region he had scored a massive 24,000-plus lead over his Congress rival Girish Chodankar collectively in these three assembly segments – Sanquelim (7,081), Poriem (9,019) and Valpoi (8,185) – even with Rane Sr, then being a Congress legislator.
With higher voting percentages this year which incidentally also translate to approximately 8,000 votes polled in excess of the 2019 tally, the Sattari scenario does not augur too well for the overall chances in North Goa for Naik’s challenger Khalap.
However there is one difference in the Shripad vs Khalap battle now than what it was in the Shripad vs Girish Chodankar battle of 2019 – the seemingly robust presence (at least in this region) of RGP’s Manoj Parab – in the North Goa Lok Sabha battle.
Parab, it should be noted, had contested against Vishwajit from Valpoi and had polled a respectable 6,000 votes. It is also the region where he cut his political teeth by being one of the core organisers of the agitation against the government’s move to locate the IIT-Goa campus at Melauli, because of which the latter abandoned the plan.
Political observers say, Parab is expected to poll a respectable number of votes in this Sattari region but whether the quantum of his vote tally in the contiguous Poriem-Sanquelim-Valpoi will be such that it will contain Shripad’s lead to impact the overall outcome of North Goa is a question that will throw up an answer only on June 4.
