VASCO
A day after being slammed by Tamil Nadu Finance Minister Palanivel Thiagarajan, Panchayat Minister Mauvin Godinho on Monday hit back and said he had not said anything offensive to him but was only pleading for his small state of Goa.
Godinho insisted that the Tamil Nadu finance minister must accept what he did was wrong, retract and close the matter without ego issues as it happened in the spur of the moment at the GST Council meet via a video conference on Friday.
“I want to remind him that this is not an empty vessel no matter what he thinks. He must clarify what he exactly wants to say because he seems to be a confused person. On one hand, he says what I said was not worth discussing and on the other side, he offered a two-page clarification and maybe he is deeply disturbed by his own utterances," said Godinho.
"I reiterate that I have never said anything offensive to him. All I was doing was pleading for my small state of Goa. As per his own statement, he is trying to strike at the very architecture of the GST Council, where his vote should have more value because he is from a larger state with more population.”
“He is boasting about the size of his state and his budget of Rs 3 lakh crore for his population of 8 crore citizens. Does any council or any body functions on the number of people living in a state or country?”
Stating that he had forgiven Thiagarajan and not taken it as an offence, Godinho added: “let us treat the chapter as closed but if you want to carry it forward, you will land in more trouble. Let us work for the country and GST Council," said Godinho.
Both Rajan and Godinho represent their respective states in the council and were involved in a tiff at the council meet, which took place through video conferencing, over the issue of equal representation and voting rights to all states, irrespective of their population.
On Sunday, Thiagarajan had claimed that Godinho’s statements at the GST council meeting were “highly repetitive, largely vacuous, hectoring, mostly redundant to others; inputs, supercilious, and devoid of the basic courtesy of assuming good faith in the comments of other states’ ministers”.
