PANAJI
Election after election over the last two decades, the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) has often displayed the prowess and the clockwork of its ground organisation down to the booth level here in Goa.
This time around, the party’s Shripad Naik may have retained the North Goa seat for the record sixth consecutive time by a handsome one-lakh-plus votes margin, but their fabled booth level apparatus was either not visible or lacked the ‘josh’, especially in assembly constituencies represented by the neo-saffronites - the MLAs who defected from the Congress in September 2022.
In fact, in almost all of the five constituencies of North Goa represented by the turncoats, campaigning for this parliamentary election often was fraught by clashes among their workers and supporters and those of the original BJP leaders.
While these rumblings may not have sabotaged the election of Naik, they have now spilled into the open and may have to be dealt with by the party leadership to control the damage for the future.
On Wednesday, Calangute MLA Michael Lobo publicly blamed some BJP leaders for the party failing to get big leads for Naik in some of the assembly segments at the Lok Sabha elections.
In Lobo’s own Calangute, Naik trailed behind Congress’s Ramakant Khalap by over 2,000 votes, and it is unclear whether he was taking aim at Calangute Sarpanch Joseph Sequeira, who was the BJP’s official nominee at the 2022 hustings.
Lobo, who was a two-term BJP MLA and a cabinet minister, had sprung a surprise when he overnight quit and joined the Congress to win Calangute for a third time in 2022. He went on to become the Opposition Leader but did a ‘Ghar Wapasi’, heading a group of eight MLAs back to the saffron fold.
Lobo could also be taking aim at senior BJP leader Dayanand Mandrekar, who is known to be at loggerheads with the former’s wife Delilah.
Delilah is the BJP MLA in Siolim after she took the same route as her husband ” from BJP to Congress and back to the saffron fold.
Lobo said that some of the ‘tall’ BJP leaders failed to get big leads at the Lok Sabha elections because they were disconnected from the people and claimed that he had informed the party about too many leaders in each segment will lead to confusion in the campaign.
Elsewhere, the contradictions within the saffron party following the entry of the turncoats hampered the campaign and reflected on the vote tallies in two other assembly segments represented by turncoats ” St Cruz and Cumbharjua.
