PANAJI
In his relatively short tenure as Chief Minister since March 2019, Pramod Sawant has come a long way. But, in stark contrast, he also appears to have suffered the ignominy of going back and forth, vis a vis key issues which have landed on the chief ministerial desk.
Sawant's hasty pullback in his position on the Goa Bhumiputra Adhikarini Bill 2021, a legislation which was also hastily pushed through during last week's state assembly session, is the latest flip-flop, in what is emerging as an increasingly long list of policy reversals, especially when he has been in the hot seat for only 29 months.
The list of chronicled reversals by his government, range across sectors like environment, education, electoral politics, Covid and the latest the 'sons of soil' fiasco, raises questions not just about personal decision-making ability, but also about the philosophy of collective wisdom, which governments bank on while arriving at broad policies.
Take the case of the decision of the state government to insist on Shel-Melauli as a site for the Indian Institute of Technology campus.
Despite obvious angst among the local population about the manner in which large tracts of land were hastily cornered for setting up of the campus, the government chose to plough through with the belief that the brute might of the state would be enough to seal the deal.
The BJP-led coalition government suffered the righteous ire of the local population and became a sorry spectacle in the mainstream and social media.
Then came the Covid storm followed by the oxygen shortage issue. The government was caught in an embarrassing when its own health ministry decided to take matter in its own hands.
Later with regards to the mysterious policy of the Health Ministry to recommend ivermectin tablets worth crores of rupees -- and advocating the use of the drug for prophylactic treatment -- was eventually never endorsed by Sawant. The Union Health and Family Welfare Ministry subsequently decided to drop the drug altogether from its official roster of medicines for Covid treatment, leading to the scrapping of the drug from the state's Covid prophylactic protocol.
The Health Ministry alone appears to have consistently bled Sawant's reputation as an administrator and whittled away at its boss's leadership mettle.
The Sawant government’s decision-making when it comes to other critical issues like the delay in imposition of strict restrictions ahead of the second Covid wave led to an avalanche of cases in the state, which eventually led to severe pressure on the health infrastructure and escalated the number of virus-related deaths.
Sawant may have grudgingly imposed the lockdown, but by then the damage had been done and Goa had been transformed from a green zone to a bloody crimson territory.
In April this year, the BJP may have won the battle for Goa's municipalities, but its hasty and shoddy reservation of wards, led to severe strictures from the Bombay High Court, forcing the state government to the correct course on its legal and moral compass. Amid the flurry of reversals, one could only easily forget the bull-headed insistence of the state government to hold Zilla Panchayat elections in March last year, when the tide of Covid appeared to be looming overhead.
It isn't the case that Sawant alone has been guilty of flip-flops as Chief Minister. The regimes of his predecessors late Chief Minister Manohar Parrikar, as well as the current Opposition Leader, were also plagued by reversals -- a Parrikar-led administration was also branded by the Supreme Court as one marked by chaos, anarchy and "infantile wisdom" while hearing a case related to the PG entrance exam in 2013.
But the sheer pace of the flip-flops under Sawant's regime makes it stand out in contrast.
