PANAJI
Tweaking his Cabinet team is one option Chief Minister Pramod Sawant is seriously considering taking in the coming week to tone up his government's and party's image ahead of the 2022 polls amidst internal dissent and the allegations of a sex scandal allegedly involving an unnamed minister.
A top BJP source said Sawant could replace at least two ministers in his team of 12 with the axe possibly falling on the publicly rebellious Ports Minister Michael Lobo and the still unidentified minister linked to the alleged sex scandal.
New entrant and former Saligao MLA Jayesh Salgaonkar and former chief minister Ravi Naik, who is widely speculated to be joining the saffron camp soon are expected to make the cut to fill the two berths.
Salgaonkar had quit as member of the legislative assembly last Friday and switched loyalties from the Goa Forward Party (GFP) to the BJP formally joining at the party's State headquarters the following day.
Naik on the other hand is also slated to quit as MLA and switch loyalties from the Congress to the BJP most likely on Tuesday.
Both Naik and Salgaonkar are Bhandari Samaj leaders. Their inclusion in the Cabinet, BJP strategists believe, will bode well for the party going into the elections particularly at a time when the electorally crucial caste grouping has of late seen to be flirting with the Aam Aadmi Party (AAP) which has publicly declared that its Chief Ministerial face will be from the community.
Sawant and the BJP leadership both in Goa and Delhi, meanwhile, have for several weeks been battling Lobo's rather vociferous display of public dissent, an unusual happening in the saffron ranks.
Lobo has been publicly playing along with the political ambitions of his sarpanch-wife Delilah who has set eyes on contesting the assembly elections from Siolim where another BJP veteran Dayanand Mandrekar is a front-runner for the party ticket.
Lobo has also publicly voiced support for acolyte Sudhir Kandolkar for Mapusa raising the hackles of the current MLA Joshua D'Souza. D'Souza had defeated Kandolkar who was put up by the Congress in the 2019 bye-poll necessitated by the death of Joshua's father Francis D'Souza.
Several interventions, including by the party's Central leaders to discipline Lobo in the recent past have yielded no results with the latter continuing to blow hot and cold.
