PANAJI
With half-a-dozen legislators quitting to shift loyalties to diametrically opposing political party and a seventh bizarrely claiming he has ‘merged’ the legislative wing of his NCP into the regional Trinamool Congress (TMC) has skewed the debate from political and governance agendas to personalities in these crucial weeks going into the 2022 assembly elections.
On Tuesday, the two-term Vasco MLA of the ruling Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) Carlos Almeida was the last of as many as six MLAs who have quit their membership of the legislature to defect to the Congress.
A day earlier, the Congress’ three-term Curtorim MLA, Aleixo Reginaldo Lourenco, stunned many by resigning as legislator from the party and joining the TMC of West Bengal Chief Minister Mamata Banerjee.
This week’s political party-hopping was preceded by four other MLAs -- Luizinho Faleiro, Jayesh Salgaonkar, Ravi Naik and Alina Saldanha -- also resigning their membership of the legislature and their respective parties only to join ideologically discordant political parties in the six weeks since October end.
While Faleiro switched from the Congress, he was associated with for four decades, to the TMC, Jayesh and Ravi Naik joined the ruling BJP and Saldanha embraced the Aam Aadmi Party (AAP) of Delhi Chief Minister Arvind Kejriwal.
Intermittent to these lateral political movements by sitting legislators was the bizarre claim of multiple-term legislator Churchill Alemao that he has merged the one-man legislative wing of his Nationalist Congress Party (NCP) into the non-existent in the Goa House, TMC.
All these developments mark an intense but indecipherable frenzy in Goa’s political conundrum, wherein politicians are switching parties and changing allegiances with elan, apparently driven by the anxiety of facing the 2022 election amid a not too enamoured electorate in the face of an ongoing pandemic and arguably the abysmal outing of the current Assembly’s five-year term.
Caught in this politicos-driven melee, meanwhile, is the media including the potent social media space and civil society, who are also seemingly drifting the political discourse at this crucial pre-election period further away from the issues and agendas that matter to the electorate and confront the State.
And it’s not over yet. There is more party-hopping in store in a House of a reduced strength of 34. This brazen party-hopping trend, political analysts are unanimous, will end only when the process for filing and withdrawing nominations ends as per the yet-to-be finalised and announced election schedule of the Election Commission of India.
Evidently, political democracy in Goa is urgently crying for course corrections but sadly there are no signs of any, unless if in the end the collective wisdom of the electorate when their time comes in polling booths works to throw up hope in the election results.
