If 2018 marked Goa’s politics with shock due to the twin blows of a ban on mining imposed by the Supreme Court and within days of it the diagnosis of the then Chief Minister Manohar Parrikar with advance pancreatic cancer, this year hasn’t been any better. Parrikar succumbed in March and his passing has left politics fuzzy and in a state of limbo of sorts, not very different from what it also was in the nearly 13 months he clung on while recuperating.
But while Parrikar’s death in mid-March could easily top the charts of political developments in Goa during 2019, the start to the year witnessed the unthinkable - the French fighter jet ‘Rafale’ had a bomb dropped on Goa’s political landscape even before the first of the 36 planes India ordered could enter the country’s airspace.
It may not have claimed any victim but it did leave the political persona of Health Minister Vishwajit Rane badly bruised, perhaps costing him a shot at the top political position after Parrikar.
An audiotape in which Rane Jr tells an unidentified journalist that Parrikar in a cabinet meeting had revealed that he had the Rafale file here with him in his bedroom, got leaked and went viral. Timed as it was in the midst of the raging controversy in which Prime Minister Narendra Modi was being targeted for an alleged scam, the tape went viral and within hours rocked Parliament.
The controversy died and was buried in a heap of deft media management and political brinkmanship steered by current Home Minister Amit Shah, but it did seemingly come back to haunt the Young Turk from Sattari when Parrikar eventually died two months later and possibly marred his chances of becoming Chief Minister.
As a galaxy of top leaders, virtually the entire top brass of the BJP and the RSS descended in Goa to pay their last respects to Parrikar and attended his funeral, in the corridors of a five-star resort in Dona Paula hectic parleys were being held to decide on who will succeed the iconic politician in the top political post. It eventually was current Chief Minister Pramod Sawant who bagged the crown, but not before a whole day of confabulations put paid to Rane Jr’s claims.
Succession and filling of the void left by the passing away of Parrikar may have been sorted with Sawant taking oath and charge at the head of the essentially the same cabinet which Parrikar, had controversially formed and led since March 2017 when he gave up his Union Defence Ministry, but Goa’s politics and governance doesn’t seem to have found its own, yet.
More than nine months later, Goa continues to be tottering, saddled as it is with the persistent problems of mining, Mhadei and a depressive economy, even after all the party-hopping and political culling by Sawant left two former Deputy Chief Ministers - Sudin Dhavalikar and Vijai Sardesai - among others powerless and in no-man’s land.
Sawant is no match for the political skills and the sheer power of the larger-than-life persona that Parrikar wielded. But credit cannot be taken away from him for the deft political moves played out under his stewardship, of engineering defections of MLAs to leave the Opposition in disarray.
He first had two MLAs from ally Maharashtrawadi Gomantak Party (MGP) join the BJP and followed it up with a record 10-MLA group from the Congress joining the saffron party in July.
These two rounds of defections, so typical of power politics in Goa, left two heavyweight political leaders - Sudin Dhavalikar and Vijai Sardesai - out of power and in no-man’s land for the moment. It has also left the Opposition Congress weakened with its legislative strength depleted to five and the ruling party insulated from the constant threat of instability.
Beyond the numbers of political power play, however, Sawant faces his biggest challenge - steering policy and leading governance - where the former Ayurveda medic is yet to display his mettle, if he’s made up of any.
Starting with his own image of personal integrity mired of late with Opposition charges of acquiring some properties after he first got elected to the Goa legislative assembly in 2012. Although, the chief minister has put up a defence that land he had bought in Dodamarg, Maharashtra, was for personal use, for agriculture and medical purpose, there is no guarantee that the issue has found closure and may remain a source of constant nit-picking by the Opposition.
The BJP’s new political opponent in Maharashtra - the Shiv Sena - has caused the most damage, alleging a link between the demand from a section of locals for a merger of Dodamarg into Goa and the real estate interests of Sawant, which the latter has denied.
On the Mhadei issue too, Sawant’s government has earned more negative points and left himself open to Opposition fire that as Chief Minister he fails to earn the respect of his party’s Central leadership and government.
The reprieve he got from the letter of the Ministry of Environment, Forests and Climate Change (MoEF&CC), holding in abeyance another controversial letter from the ministry virtually giving Karnataka the go-ahead for its Kalasa-Bandhura dam, was short-lived.
Yet another letter has now emerged, which seemingly played with words and in a way restored what Karnataka can and cannot do at the dam site.
The intervention of the Governor Satya Pal Malik, by raking up the Mhadei dispute with Prime Minister Narendra Modi also stole Sawant’s thunder, coming as the Modi-Malik meeting took place just two days prior to MoEF&CC’s ‘abeyance letter’ to Karnataka.
On policy and governance, especially the state of the State’s finances, Sawant is yet to get cracking more than nine months into his innings. To be fair, much of the laggards in the administration stem from the era when Parrikar was out of action due to his illness and Sawant did effect major reshuffles in the bureaucratic cadre and gave the impression he indeed means business and wants the administration to shed his predecessor’s legacy by shuffling around some of the latter’s blue-eyed babus. It’s effect however is yet to be felt on the ground, though.
