PANAJI
Goa Forward Fatorda MLA Vijai Sardesai on Tuesday made it very clear that he will not backstab BJP and go with the Congress, even if the Congress offers him the chief minister’s position.
When asked if the Congress had offered him to become the chief minister, he said, “They may have offered me anything. But I am a person of word. I made Manohar Parrikar resign as the defence minister of the country. I don’t go and negotiate after making him resign, come here and then backstab him. I am not that type of a person. The Congress also knows this. So there is no question of supporting anybody else.”
When asked about what went wrong between Goa Forward and the Congress, he said, “Everything is going wrong in the Congress. I had asked the Congress for a pre-poll alliance, which they dumped. They betrayed me at the eleventh hour. Furthermore, they went ahead and supported a candidate who was an aspirant of two parties in the same constituency. Later, in the interlude between the elections and the results, the Congress Party president declared that he would rather have an alliance with the MGP-GSM, but not with us, which means we were not wanted. They didn’t want us to win.”
“So we decided that we will not go with such a party which is into backstabbing and overloaded with aspirants who are former CMs and who are unable to manage things. So, for the sake of development and getting support from the Centre, we called on the defence minister to leave the centre and come back here,” he said.
When asked about his priorities, he said, “Everything that we promised in the manifesto, ended up with us making a statement that we will work towards formation of a Goemkarwadi sarkar. I think Manohar Parrikar’s first statement as a chief minister that he is going forward to sink the declassification of the coconut tree under the tree act is a good beginning.”
