PANAJI
Finally, and for once, a cryptic media report on Wednesday suggesting that a senior Congress leader, an ex-CM, was quitting the party to join the ruling BJP, turned out to be a rumour.
Wednesday began as a day like many others for the Congress party, which has lost as many as 13 elected MLAs to the BJP since the 2017 state assembly polls after a local media platform claimed that a former Congress chief minister and a sitting MLA was likely to quit the Opposition party and join the BJP.
While state BJP president Sadanand Shet Tanavade described the news report as a "100 per cent falsehood", the man on whom the cameras and the journalistic queries were instinctively trained towards, two-time Chief Minister Ravi Naik, questioned the mental stability of those who started and circulated the "rumour".
"The person who has uploaded this has gone mad. The person should have contacted the person and filed the news. A reporter should not do this. He has lost his mind. Perhaps, he is not mentally right. I have no idea about it," Naik told media persons, outright rejecting the speculative media report.
In quintessential Ravi Naik style, the former Chief Minister whose sons Ritesh and Roy joined the BJP last year, termed the rumours as "faltugiri".
The Congress currently has four former chief ministers in its five-member legislative party, Pratapsingh Rane, Luizinho Faleiro, Digambar Kamat and Ravi himself.
Naik also said that the reputation of journalists was being slandered with misleading reports, like the one which surfaced on Wednesday suggesting that one of the four ex-CMs were joining the BJP.
The Ponda MLA in his brief, but outraged interaction with reporters at his MLA office in Ponda, however, also dropped one line which could leave his association with the Congress party open-ended.
"I will tell you what I will do. My term is still left. If I am leaving or what I am going to do, I will say so. I do not get scared," Naik told reporters.
In Panaji, state BJP president Sadanand Shet Tanavade also dismissed the report of a former Congress Chief Minister joining the BJP as a complete falsehood, arguing that such a decision would have been run by him.
"I don't know why these kinds of rumours are spread. There is no truth to this. I am the state president. If someone needs to be taken into the party, the discussion should have happened with me. I know nothing about this issue. It is meaningless. Someone may have started this rumour. There is no truth to this. It is a 100 per cent falsehood," Tanavade said.
