PANAJI
The Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) which rules with a dominant two-thirds majority in the House got a wake-up call of sorts from the electorate in Goa, handed a convincing defeat in South Goa, while it retained the North Goa Lok Sabha seat with a significantly reduced vote-share, although the margin was over one-lakh votes.
In the North Goa seat, BJP's Shripad Naik won again for a record sixth time in a row, defeating the Congress' Ramakant Khalap by a 1.1 lakh vote margin. While Naik bagged 2,50,799 votes Khalap managed to poll 1,39,446.
The third candidate in the fray, Revolutionary Goans Party (RGP) president, Tukaram (Manoj) Parab, bagged a respectable 45,744 votes.
Down South, the seat was won by Congress’s Captain Viriato Fernandes defeating the BJP's Pallavi Dempo by a margin of 14,703 votes. Fernandes polled 2,15,672 votes while Dempo's tally was 2,00,969. Rubert Pereira of RGP managed to poll 18679 votes.
On the ground, the BJP leadership -- Chief Minister Pramod Sawant and State president Sadanand Shet Tanavade -- congratulated and celebrated Naik's sixth consecutive win in North Goa at the party headquarters in Panaji.
On the defeat of Dempo in South Goa, Tanavade said, they "accept the people's verdict" although he said the interference of religious leaders in the election cost them the seat.
Sawant-led BJP had made a concerted effort to ensure the win of Dempo in South Goa, playing the 'woman candidate' card. It failed to make the cut, largely owing to a massive thumbs-up for Captain Viriato in Salcete where he gained a 60,000-plus lead in the eight constituencies.
Even in Salcete's Margao assembly segment, where former chief minister Digambar Kamat has been ruling the roost for three decades, Fernandes managed to restrict Dempo's lead to just 1,323 votes. Viriato led in all seven other segments of Salcete scoring handsome margins over her.
In Mormugao too, which is Fernandes' home taluka, again dominated by the BJP with three MLAs and one Independent supporting the saffron party, the latter's lead narrowed down to just 5,000-odd votes.
In North Goa on the other hand, Naik won largely riding on massive leads in the Sattari-Bicholim belt from where both Sawant and the second most powerful BJP leader Vishwajit Rane hail. In Sawant's Sanquelim, Naik got a massive 13,000-plus lead over Khalap and in Rane's Valpoi, it was 10,000-plus lead. Also, Khalap was unable to turn the tables on Naik in his home taluka of Pernem, where in both the seats of Mandrem and Pernem, the latter had leads though reduced to a mere 6,000-odd votes from the 20,000-plus lead he had secured over the Congress candidate in the 2019 election.
Although the Lok Sabha election is essentially national in character, it is inevitable that the results will have some impact on the dynamics of State politics and is also viewed as a test of Sawant's leadership and the performance of his government, now in its third year in office.
Meanwhile, Naik who is now the only politician from Goa to win a Lok Sabha seat six consecutive times said his victory was a foregone conclusion.
“We all knew that BJP would win North Goa. BJP will also win at the Centre. The drop in seats however could be because of the anti-incumbency factor.
In South Goa, Fernandes called it a victory of the people and a moral defeat for Prime Minister Narendra Modi who he said had addressed a rally in the constituency.
"It's a defeat of PM Narendra Modi who campaigned in Cortalim. Congress got a lead of 3,000 votes. It is a moral defeat for PM Modi,” Fernandes said.
