PANAJI
Lok Sabha elections haven't been very happy hunting grounds for Goa's regional parties for nearly three decades and these polls in 1996 was their last stand when current Congress (INDIA bloc) candidate Ramakant Khalap won the North Goa seat as an MGP candidate and the South Goa seat was won by Churchill Alemao humbling five-time winner of the Congress Eduardo Faleiro, as a candidate of the now defunct United Goans Democratic Party (UGDP).
It is in this context that political observers and the other political parties will be keenly watching for the outcome of the May 7 election when results are declared on June 4 to see if the latest, fledgling regional party, Revolutionary Goans Party (RGP) which has fielded candidates in both the seats still has the political spark to sustain its footprint on Goa's political landscape.
Goan regional parties clearly dominated the Lok Sabha electoral battleground for the first two decades after Liberation and began fading away from 1980. However, in the 1996 Lok Sabha elections, the regional parties bounced back with the MGP winning North Goa and United Goans Democratic Party winning the South Goa seat.
But after that 1996 election, no regional party has made any impact until now.
In the first Lok Sabha election post Goa's Liberation held in 1963, the MGP dominated winning both the seats. In the north, the Praja Socialist Party candidate Peter Alvaris, who was supported by MGP won while in the South, MGP's Mukund Shinkre emerged the winner. It was the only time the MGP managed to win the South Goa seat.
Four years later in 1967, while MGP managed to hold the north Goa seat with Janardhan Shinkre as its candidate, it lost the South to Dr Jack de Sequeira's United Goans Party (UGP). The candidate was Dr Sequeira's son, Erasmo.
The next general Lok Sabha election in 1971, interestingly, was the first time that the Congress made a mark with its candidate Purushottam Kakodkar winning the North Goa seat. In South Goa however, Erasmo de Sequeira retained the seat comfortably.
In the post Emergency 1977 Lok Sabha elections, MGP made a comeback grabbing the North Goa seat again with Amrit Kasar as its candidate, but contrary to the national trend where the Congress got decimated, it won the South Goa seat with Eduardo Faleiro marking the first of his five wins. However, it had much to do with the split in the UGP and a dominant faction of it merging into the Congress.
In 1980, the comeback election of the late Indira Gandhi, MGP still dominated the North holding the seat with Samyogita Rane winning it while the Congress won in the South again with Faleiro.
Faleiro went on to win three more elections in the South in 1984, 1989 and in 1991. However in the North Goa seat, Congress won in the 1984 election with Shantaram Naik as its candidate but MGP wrested it back in 1989 when Gopalrao Mayekar won.
From then on, MGP managed to win the North Goa seat just once, when Khalap won it in 1996 and in the South, Alemao pulled off a surprise victory over Faleiro, making it the last Lok Sabha election in Goa where regional parties dominated in both the constituencies.
Both Khalap and Alemao recontested the election held in 1998 after the I K Gujral government at the Centre collapsed, but both of them ended up in the third position with the Congress wresting both the seats -- Ravi Naik in the North and Francisco Sardinha in the South -- and the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) taking the runner-up position.
Some other regional parties like the Goa Vikas Party and Goa Swarajya Party also contested Lok Sabha elections intermittently but they hardly made any impact.
However, now with the RGP pitting its President Manoj Parab in the North and Rubert Pereira in the South, their performance could give political analysts and strategists in other political parties a fair idea of the extent to which regional sentiments can impact the State's electoral landscape in future. The results on June 4 will tell.
