PANAJI
Will the Congress ally with the Nationalist Congress Party for the 2022 assembly polls?
The answer is still up for grabs, especially with senior Congress observer for the Goa polls, P Chidambaram refusing to commit to an answer on the issue, days after NCP national general secretary Praful Patel set a 15-day deadline for the Congress to come clear on the alliance.
“We are not discussing anything except restructuring of the party. For the next month or month and a half we will only discuss restructuring the party, its revival, expansion of the base and enrolling new members. That is all that we are discussing,” Chidambaram told reporters at the state Congress headquarters, where earlier he met top officials of several state-level committees formed by the Goa Pradesh Congress Committee in its bid to prepare for the upcoming elections.
“I have no mandate to discuss something else, you have a mandate you can discuss,” Chidambaram also said in response to persistent queries from media persons, who quizzed him for a reaction to Patel’s statement.
Patel during a media interaction on Thursday had urged the Congress to decide the fate of the alliance between the two national parties, while also wielding the threat of going with other regional political parties like the Goa Forward instead.
“We have spoken to the Congress informally and we have indicated that we have been in alliance in the past in Goa and it would be better and in the interest of the overall politics in Goa that all like-minded parties like Congress, NCP should work together and have an alliance like in the past,” Patel had said.
“Nobody is helpless. I have met leaders of other parties also... There are a good number of people who are willing to explore other options. If there is no decision (from the Congress). You clap with two hands, not with one hand,” the NCP leader had further warned.
To another question, vis a vis the possibility of re-inducting the 10 Congress MLAs who split the party in 2019 and joined the ruling Bharatiya Janata Party, the former Union Finance Minister said: “You are out of your mind if you keep on asking the same question.”
State Congress president Girish Chodankar has repeatedly insisted that the party would have no truck with the “defector” MLAs in the upcoming state assembly polls.
