PANAJI
Maharashtrawadi Gomantak Party (MGP) leader and Power Minister Ramkrishna (Sudin) Dhavalikar on Sunday hit out at the Congress saying the grand old party will be extinct in Goa and the upcoming Lok Sabha elections may be its last electoral fight.
"The Congress tried to finish us by importing our leaders. But today, they face the same fate as their leaders are joining the BJP," Dhavalikar said, citing the number of defections of MGP MLAs to the Congress in the 1990s decade and later.
Dhavalikar who addressed a press conference at the MGP office in Panaji on Sunday said even the remaining three Congress MLAs will join some other parties.
"I am not saying they will join us but will join some other parties," Dhavalikar, who heads the two-member MGP in the House and whose brother Deepak Dhavalikar, is its president said.
In the past, both the Dhavalikar brothers have been party of Congress-led governments and the MGP also fought the 2022 assembly elections against the BJP after he was unceremoniously dropped by Chief Minister Pramod Sawant and two of his party MLAs -- Manohar (Babu) Ajgaonkar and Deepak Pauskar -- defected to the BJP in 2019.
Post the 2022 elections, the MGP which won two seats, Marcaim and Mandrem, joined the BJP-led government.
Dhavalikar made the comments against the Congress in the context of the September 2022 defection of eight of the eleven MLAs into the BJP just six months after the assembly election result.
Meanwhile, on the ensuing Lok Sabha polls Dhavalikar said the MGP is "fully supporting" the BJP candidates in both North and South Goa seats.
"We are fully supporting both the BJP candidates. We will hold meetings in 24 constituencies where MGP has voter base," Dhavalikar said, adding that his party has a voter support of approximately one-lakh across Goa.
He said, candidates of the MGP who lost their seats narrowly in the 2022 assembly elections will work hard for the BJP candidates at the Lok Sabha election.
The MGP's Dr Ketan Bhatikar had lost to Agriculture Minister Ravi Naik in Ponda by just a 70-odd vote margin and its Bicholim candidate, Naresh Sawal, also lost by just 300-odd votes to Independent MLA, Dr Chandrakant Shetye.
However, Sawal had quit the MGP at the beginning of this year and announced his intention to contest the Lok Sabha polls. However, the plan has not yet been put up by his team as to when he intends to jump into the fray, if at all.
