MAPUSA
Former tourism minister and ex-Tivim MLA Nilkant Halarnkar has decided to say goodbye to the Nationalist Congress Party (NCP) and join Indian National Congress along with his workers on Saturday.
A former Congressman, Halarnkar joined NCP to contest from Tivim constituency in 2002 after the seat was allotted to NCP as part of the alliance seat-sharing deal with Congress. Since then, he contested three times from Tivim on the NCP ticket.
For more than a year, he was the president of NCP, Goa, but later quit from the position and preferred to be an ordinary member of the party. He was later nominated as senior vice-president of NCP.
“As per the wishes of my supporters and voters, I am joining the Congress party on Saturday, May 14,” Halarnkar said.
He said after quitting as the president of the NCP, he never stepped into the office again.
“I have come to realise that nobody is interested in organising the Nationalist Congress Party in Goa. There’s no confidence in the rank and file of the party to help it grow,” Halarnkar said.
He said he has always been a Congressman and all his workers were once upon a time Congress workers.
On whether he has been promised an assembly ticket for the forthcoming assembly elections, he said, his first priority was to join the Congress.
Halarnkar was sworn as tourism minister in 2010 after his colleague and then tourism minister Mickky Pacheco had to resign following a controversy surrounding the death of his “family friend”, Nadia Torrado.
Halarnkar was first elected to the Goa assembly in 2007 on the NCP ticket, defeating his nearest rival, Sadanand Tanavde of the BJP. In 2012, he lost to BJP’s Kiran Kandolkar.
