PANAJI
The far eastern belt of Bicholim-Sattari has always been a stronghold of Shripad Naik and the BJP in North Goa in the context of Lok Sabha elections.
It rooted for him again this time too, with both Chief Minister Pramod Sawant and the number two in his cabinet, Vishwajit Rane conjuring up a sterling voteshare in their respective assembly segments.
The twin Bicholim-Sattari talukas encompass five of the 20 assembly segments of North Goa -- Bicholim, Mayem, Sanquelim, Poriem and Valpoi -- and massive leads for Naik in all of them virtually knocked out the Congress' veteran Ramakant Khalap out of the competition.
In 2019, Naik had scored a lead of a little under 42,000 votes in these five segments collectively. On Tuesday when counting ended, this lead soared by nearly 20,000 to a whopping 60,000-plus votes.
In Sawant's Sanquelim, Naik got a lead of a massive 15,000-plus votes over Khalap, quite a spectacular feat by the CM who incidentally was made to sweat for his own win by a narrow margin of a few hundres votes in the Assembly elections just two years ago.
As for Rane's Valpoi assembly segment, Naik's lead over Khalap, was again a massive 13,000-odd votes.
Both Sawant and Rane, several observers say, are in a leadership contest of sorts to impress the BJP's Central leadership about their individual political stewardship. This intra-party tug-of-war had peaked in the leadership race post the 2022 assembly polls which forced the party High Command to delay the new government inauguration by nearly a month.
Sawant had eventually won that round but analysts say it is visibly certain that it has not ended the leadership contest.
Meanwhile, in Poriem, where Rane's wife is MLA, Naik scored an even bigger lead over Khalap, of nearly 20,000 votes, the highest among all 20 segments in the North.
In the fourth segment of the region Mayem, where the BJP's Premendra Shet is MLA, Naik's lead over Khalap was 10,000-plus.
The fifth segment of Bicholim is represented by Dr Chandrakant Shetye, an Independent who supports the BJP and shares power in the Sawant government heading a state-owned Corporation. Here too Shripad led over Khalap by a little under 10,000 votes.
Collectively, therefore, the Bicholim-Sattari region gave Naik a collective lead of a massive 68,000-odd votes a knockout punch which despite a decent performance in the rest of the North Goa constituency, Congress’s Khalap had no hope of recovering from.
