MAPUSA
Contesting for the first time, the Revolutionary Goans Party (RGP) has put up a brave performance in Bardez.
No billboards and high-octane campaigns or even big-ticket assurances or tall national leaders to back them, yet, the regional party appears to have won the hearts of the electorate.
Even their candidates were hardly known amongst the voters.
In four constituencies out of the five they contested in the taluka, RGP’s candidates came third outperforming even the Aam Aadmi Party (AAP) and Trinamool Congress (TMC).
RGP did not field candidates in Aldona and Porvorim constituencies.
The chief of the party, Tukaram (Manoj) Parab did exceedingly well by polling nearly 5000 votes in Tivim destroying the prospects of Kavita Kandolkar of the TMC who was the frontrunner in the constituency.
The Congress and AAP candidates were relegated to distant fourth and fifth place respectively.
Similarly, RGP’s Siolim candidate Gauresh Mandrekar got 3,188 votes which may have cooked BJP candidate Dayanand Mandrekar’s goose in the constituency.
He did much better than the more fancied candidates like Vishnu Naik (AAP), Anjuna Sarpanch, Patrick Savio Almeida (Independent), Leo Dias (TMC) and former MLA Vinoda Paliencar (Independent) in Siolim.
It was the same story in Calangute where the RGP's candidate, Marcelino Francisco Gonsalves who was a virtual non-entity in the constituency polled a decent 2,500 odd votes displacing the much-fancied AAP candidate to the fourth spot.
In Saligao too, Rohan Kalangutkar of the RGP polled 1,864 votes while the better known AAP candidate Mario Cordeiro could manage just 815 votes.
Only Mapusa was an exception where the RGP candidate, Rohan Salgaonkar came fifth by polling around 900 odd votes.
For a new party with hardly any resources and leaders to back them, this was a stupendous performance by the RGP.
