PANAJI: Belying expectations, the much anticipated meeting between several ministers and the ailing Goa Chief Minister Manohar Parrikar at the All India Institute of Medical Sciences in Delhi turned out to be a damp squib.
No actionable decision came out of the meet that could tangibly pull the coalition government out of the current, politically damaging functional and political paralysis plaguing it. Parrikar only conveyed to his cabinet colleagues, whom he met individually that he would continue to retain the administratively crucial Home, Finance and GAD portfolios and only distribute the other lesser ministries only after Dusshera (October 19), one of the attendees told The Goan.
Parrikar met at least six ministers but one-on-one and not as a group. The meetings with the ministers followed a nearly hour-long discussion the Chief Minister had with members of the saffron party's core committee - Ayush Minister Shripad Naik, President Vinay Tendulkar, South Goa MP Narendra Sawaikar and treasurer Sanjiv Desai.
Sources said, the core committee was insistent that Parrikar continue to hold the weighty portfolios and at any cost and does not allocate any of them to members of the coalition partners.
According to Goa Forward Party Supremo Vijai Sardesai, the Chief Minister conveyed his decision to retain the major portfolios and only distribute several of the other ministries among other cabinet members after Dussehra.
A news agency report quoted Sardesai, who is said to have remained passive through the tete-a-tete, as saying that retaining or allocating portfolios to cabinet colleagues was the "Chief Minsiter's prerogative" and he cannot complain about it.
Apart from Sardesai, the other ministers who met Parrikar in Delhi on Friday include
PWD Minister, Ramkrishna (Sudin) Dhavlikar, Health Minister Vishwajit Rane, Panchayat Minister Mauvin Godinho, Revenue Minister Rohan Khaunte and Art and Culture Minister Govind Gaude.
Parrikar also assured the ministers who complained of slow movement of files that he would take steps to activate the Chief Minister's Officer by which movement of files referred by ministers gets streamlined. Chief Secretary Dharmendra Sharma and the CM's principal secretary P Krishnamurthy were privy to all the one-to-one meetings between the CM and the ministers.
The mining issue also figured in the discussions between Parrikar and Dhavlikar, who pleaded for early resumption of iron ore mining. The Union cabinet's Group of Ministers (GOM) on mining is slated to meet on Saturday and Parrikar called up Union Minister Nitin Gadkari to press for a decision on Goa's demand for tweaking the MMDR Act.
Although the meetings at AIIMS on Thursday were expressly arranged to ricochet growing criticism from the Opposition Congress and other quarters, Parrikar's inertia to overcome his coalition government's functional paralysis has baffled many, his cabinet colleagues included.
