PANAJI
After standing shoulder to shoulder with Atanasio ‘Babush’ Monserrate through his rise in politics, former Panaji mayor Uday Madkaikar on Saturday offered to lend the Congress a helping hand to spectacularly pull down his former mentor.
In a blow-to-blow post-mortem of Monserrate’s political career, Madkaikar called the sitting Panaji MLA as a habitual defector and accused his family of imposing family raj in Tiswadi.
Madkaikar also said that the popular tide had turned so much against the Monserrate family, that it would meet the fate of those vanquished in the iconic battles at Panipat.
“His 20-year tenure (in politics) is ending. His family and their politics will meet their (Panipat). Their time has come. People have decided to finish family raj and end this worm which has infected us,” Madkaikar said shortly after joining the Congress at a function at the state Congress headquarters in Panaji.
“The family raj of this habitual defector should be finished,” Madkaikar also said.
The former Panaji mayor also said that he had followed Babush throughout his political career in the BJP, Congress, UGDP, etc, but added that he had formally not joined any political party.
“We were all Babush supporters. We worked with him for 19 years. We followed him as he joined one party after another, but we did not fill any (membership) form. I was a president of a party, United Goans, I have resigned. I have never joined the BJP. He joined Goa Forward, but we did not join him. He joined UGDP, we did not join either. We did not join anywhere,” Madkaikar said.
Madkaikar also said that Monserrate let the people of Panaji down on the promise of shifting casinos within 100 days, despite taking a public pledge at the city’s famous Maruti temple.
“People started a countdown to remove casinos. 90 days, 80 days, 70 days. But suddenly he joined the BJP without telling anyone. People only came to know that Babush had given the slip after they read the papers,” Monserrate said.
He also said that Monserrate had a penchant for merely “copy-pasting” online content to prepare his manifestos every other election.
“He also prepared a manifesto. He has been brandishing the same manifesto for the last 15 years. He used it for the municipal elections, for assembly polls. He uses Google to copy-paste stuff over and over again,” Madkaikar said.
