PANAJI
It may be barely over a year since Bharatiya Janata Party’s (BJP) Siddharth Kuncalienkar won the Panaji assembly seat, extending a nearly three decade tradition of BJP’s control over the constituency, but a careful analysis of the voting figures in the 21 Panaji wards of the Corporation of the city of Panaji testifies that Atanasio “Babush” Monserrate managed to wrest more votes in Panaji than his BJP counterpart Siddharth Kuncalienkar.
While at the 2015 assembly hustings, Siddharth polled 9989 votes versus Surendra’s 4621 votes, in the CCP elections Babush managed to wrest 7243 votes while Siddharth managed only 6,951 votes.
In both the elections the total votes polled were in the range of 14,000.
It is important to note that the opposition vote share in Panaji in the assembly polls over the last three elections has been ranging between 4,500 and 5,000, but with the Babush factor at the CCP polls, it jumps up to 7,243 votes. On the other hand the BJP vote share is reduced to 6,951 from around 10,000. The BJP has polled 9989, 11,086 and 6004 votes in the polls of 2015, 2012 and 2007 respectively.
One might argue that the CCP polls and the assembly elections are an entirely different ball game, but one significant difference is the active involvement of the Taleigao strongman in the CCP polls.
For the assembly elections, Babush is known to stay away from Panaji and focus on Taleigao or Santa Cruz, the seats he has represented, while the Congress battled it out on its own in the capital city.
The Congress, on the other hand has a different reading of the situation, pointing to the fact that without being officially affiliated to the grand old party, the Taleigao strongman is considerably weaker winning a narrow majority with the help of narrow wins in at least three assembly constituencies besides also losing in two wards falling in Taleigao constituencies including to the wife of his main Taleigao rival Sheetal Naik.
In the CCP wards that fell in the Taleigao assembly constituency, Babush did manage to retain his majority by polling 4113 votes versus the BJP’s 2767 votes out of a total of 8015 votes polled. In the 2012 assembly polls Jennifer Monserrate polled 10,682 votes while Dattaprasad Naik polled 9531 votes in the Taleigao constituency. The Congress, which has been reduced to an ‘also-ran’ polling a paltry 6% of the vote.
