the goan I network
PANAJI
With just a day to go for closing of nominations for the March 22 Zilla Panchayat polls, the number of candidates who filed their papers for the 50 seats climbed to 178 with 88 more filed on Wednesday before the various returning officers across the State.
With the elections permitted to be fought on party lines, all the major political parties in the State were busy finalising their respective candidates even as the ruling Bharatiya Janata Party had delayed declaring its nominees in a handful of constituences where it was facing the prospect of rebellion.
For the Corlim seat in Tiswadi, BJP State president Sadanand Tanavade declared Siddesh Naik, the son of Union Ayush Minister Shripad Naik as the official party nominee after much internal fire-fighting.
Elsewhere in Colvale, where it brought in Congress MLA Nilkanth Halarnkar, Tanavade who is also a former legislator there withheld declaring the nominee on Wednesday as the BJP legislator from the previous Assembly term, Kiran Kandolkar has threatened to rebel if his wife is not nominated.In Cortalim constituency where former minister Alina Saldanha is the legislator too the party refrained from making public the name of the official candidate.
The Congress meanwhile announced some additional candidates including wife of outgoing ZP member from Aldona, Gokuldas Halarnkar, the political strongman from the populous Pomburpa-Olaulim panchayat.
Halarnkar was a supporter of Aldona BJP MLA, Glenn
Souza Ticlo, but the two have had a falling out recently following which the former quit the saffron party.
Meanwhile, the Aam Aadmi Party (AAP) got a major reprieve from the State Election Commissioner (SEC) after the latter ruled that the party’s ‘broom’ symbol will be reserved for candidates sponsored by the Arvind Kejriwal-led party.
After the SEC ruling, AAP’s Goa general secretary Pradeep Padgaonkar in a statement said, Goa needs the ‘broom’ to sweep the dirt of defection, corruption, communalisation and criminalisation of politics which has soiled the fabric of the State.
AAP had earlier written to the commission citing lack of instructions to returning officers about allocation of the party symbol.
The SEC, agreed to the Party’s claim that although it was a registered but unrecognized party in Goa, the Election Commission of India had allotted the ‘broom’ symbol to its candidates in the last assembly election.
The AAP has fielded Smita Shet (Aldona), Mario Cordeiro (Socoro), Manuel Cardoz (Calangute) Godfrey D’Lima ( Thivim) in North Goa and Hanzel Fernandes (Benaulim), Dinesh Borkar (Borim) Matilda Dsilva (Navelim) Brinda Silva (Curtorim), Pobres Vaz (Cortalim), Marcelina Colaco (Nuvem) and Rodolfina (Guirdolim) in South Goa, all of who filed their nominations before their respective returning officers on Wednesday. Padgaonkar said some more candidates will file their papers on Thursday.
