PANAJI
The results of the election to the Corporation of the City of Panaji on Monday reinstated the grip Panaji MLA, Atanasio (Babush) Monserrate and the ruling Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) has on the civic politics of Panaji-Taleigao with their joint panel winning 25 of the 30 seats.
The winner indeed takes it all and this ‘spectacular’ victory at the hustings is the fourth consecutive such win in the CCP for Monserrate. But hidden in this verdict is an ominous political signal for the neo-BJP entrant: a slender 52-48 per-cent margin in the aggregate popular vote across the 30 wards which cover the whole of Panaji and a significant part of Taleigao assembly segments.
Monserrate and his wife Jennifer represent the two seats in the current Goa legislative assembly and the duo were part of the 10-MLA strong group which split from the Congress and merged into the BJP in July 2019.
In a largely two-way contest across the 30 wards, candidates of the Monserrate-BJP side won in aggregate 12,029 votes of the total 22,517 votes polled in the CCP election.
Although political math does not always follow the laws of arithmetic, the ominous sign in the popular vote numbers is unlikely to be ignored by both the BJP-Monserrate camp as well as opposing political outfits and formations with the general assembly election less than a year away.
