the goan I network
PANAJI
Goa’s political drama was on Sunday confined to the precincts of Panaji’s business hotel Fidalgo where the three BJP’s Central Observers - General Secretaries Ram Lal and B L Santhosh and Goa in-charge Vijay Puranik - made the venue of their confabulations with party leaders, MLAs and coalition partners.
No sooner they arrived in the afternoon the three observers, all drawn from the BJP’s ideological parent, the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS), got down to business holding a meeting with Goa BJP president Vinay Tendulkar and some other party office-bearers, including General Secretary Sadanand Tanavade and Vice-President Dutta Kholkar.
They then broke for lunch before commencing their one-to-one confabulations with legislators of the BJP, starting with Aldona MLA, Glen Ticlo at around 3 pm.
BJP MLAs then began arriving at the hotel individually. All 10 MLAs of the principal ruling party met the central observers in a suite on the first floor of the hotel.
Chief Minister Manohar Parrikar who is undergoing treatment at AIIMS, Delhi, Pandurang Madkaikar who is immobile following the stroke he suffered in June, Francis D’Souza who is being treated at New York’s Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Centre and the partially paralysed Carlos Almeida, were the only four members of the BJP legislator party who did not meet the Central Observers.
Even the Speaker of the Goa legislative assembly, Dr Pramod Sawant, who is being talked of as an option for the leadership mantle after Parrikar, met with the observers.
Union Ayush Minister Shripad Naik, another leader in serious contention to fill the leadership vaccume in Goa, made it a point to meet the observers.
Naik told The Goan however that his meeting with the three Central leaders was only a “courtesy call”.
“I’ve just come to meet them and say hello. I have no role in the issues being tackled by them,” Naik said.
Almost every MLA who walked in to meet the Central observers were however confronted by the press corps who had virtually camped at the entrance of the Hotel. One legislator, however, managed to give the media entourage the slip -- Mayem MLA, Pravin Zantye.
Zantye, who owns the Hotel Ashok adjacent to the Fidalgo Hotel, slipped in through a side entrance of the hotel and headed straight to the suite occupied by the three Central observers, successfully avoiding the press.
Deputy Speaker, Michael Lobo, was unusually subdued. Known to be outspoken and liberal with his interactions with the media, the Calangute MLA somehow had nothing much to offer to the journalists. He declined to make any comments on the agenda for the day.
