PANAJI
The Congress on Saturday once again launched a scathing attack on the government, this time because of the “insensitive” way in which Chief Minister Manohar Parrikar was being treated.
In the wake of the three pictures that the CM’s office had released of the CM chairing the Investment Promotion Board meet, and the cabinet meet earlier this week, the Opposition party stated that the CM looked like a “gulacha ganapathi” in the pictures. (“Gulacha Ganapathi” roughly translated is an idiom that refers to a lifeless or practically useless person, or a scarecrow of sorts.)
“The CM chaired those meetings only in name,” said Congress spokesperson Jitendra Deshprabhu, addressing media persons in the Congress House, here. “What is the point? The ministers who attended said he didn’t make any contributions, and could hardly even utter a word,” said Deshprabhu, even as he said that the Congress would challenge the decisions that were taken at both the meetings in court.
Deshprabhu also alleged that the BJP was now using Parrikar to get the “sympathy vote” of the people whenever they thought the time was right. “This is a deceitful continuance of governance. The BJP has to ask the peoples’ forgiveness, since they had promised Parrikar would come to work by November, but there’s no sign of him,” said the ex-legislator, while stressing that the party was undermining all institutions, including that of the Governor and the Chief Minister.
The Congress also revealed that many secretaries in the government were returning files cleared by the CM, saying that the signature on the file was not that of the CM.
Meanwhile, Deshprabhu also reminded of the replacements of Ministers Francis D’Souza and Pandurang Madkaikar who he claimed were in better health than the Chief Minister. Saying that these replacements weren’t surprising because the two were from the Catholic and ST communities respectively, Deshprabhu said, “Minorities and SC/ST/OBC communities don’t concern the BJP.”
Referring to his previous statement of “Show the CM or perform Shraadh”, Deshprabhu said that even though the BJP had shown pictures of “a semblance of a CM”, it was as good as having done shraadh.
