PANAJI
The odds are stacked against the Congress in the North Goa Parliamentary seat won five successive times for the ruling Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) by the incumbent Shripad Naik, who is re-nominated for the May 7 election.
Yet, the 'grand old party' cannot be written off and doing well in Tiswadi, where it has retained its electoral shine despite the series of successive desertions by its MLAs from here since 2012, could be crucial to its dwindling hopes of remaining in the hunt for the North Goa seat.
The central taluka accounts for a fifth of the North Goa seat having five assembly segments -- Panaji, Taleigao, St Cruz, St Andre and Cumbharjua. Currently, the Congress holds none of these five seats, the BJP has four MLAs and St Andre is represented by Viresh Borkar of the nascent Revolutionary Goans Party.
This BJP four, RGP one and Congress nil scenario in Tiswadi, however, is aided by the September 2022 defections of two Congress MLAs -- Rudolf Fernandes (St Cruz) and Rajesh Faldesai (Cumbharjua) -- into the BJP. Just six months prior to this defection the Tiswadi score card at the 2022 assembly elections in March that year read: Congress two, BJP two and RGP 1.
Even in its worst outing in 2012, the Congress had emerged electorally ahead of the BJP in Tiswadi winning three of the five seats -- Atanasio Monserrate (St Cruz), Jennifer Monserrate (Taleigao) and Pandurang Madkaikar (Cumbharjua). The BJP had won the other two with the late Manohar Parrikar winning Panaji and the late Vishnu Wagh bagging St Andre.
Five years later in 2017, the Congress again emerged ahead of the BJP in Tiswadi winning Taleigao (Jennifer), St Cruz (Antonio Fernandes) and St Andre (Francis Silveira).
Voting patterns in parliamentary elections indeed differ from those in Assembly elections but Tiswadi as a whole has been the pocket of the North Goa seat that has been happy ground for the Congress even in the national elections.
In fact in the 2009 Lok Sabha elections, the closest the Congress or its ally came to clinching the seat, Tiswadi's electorate ended up giving their candidate Jitendra Deshprabhu a nearly 8,000-vote lead. Naik had ended up winning that election by a slender 4000-odd vote lead.
The ensuing Lok Sabha election on May 7 could be no different. The Congress may have still not overcome its candidate selection pangs. But when it does, the candidate and the INDIA alliance strategists will have no choice but to strive to score extremely well in Tiswadi if they hope to convert their slim chances of scoring an upset win in North Goa.
