The long drawn agitation of the locals in Cansaulim and Velsao and their ongoing confrontation with the Railway officials and pliant local authorities took a flummoxing twist earlier this week with the sudden entry of the local MLA, Antonio Vas.
Vas, who hitherto had kept his distance and stayed aloof from the imbroglio, made a sudden visit to the site where he gathered locals and officials, ostensibly to resolve the issue. At the end of the exercise, he made a sweeping statement that the issue has been resolved with the railway authorities assuring him that no houses will be affected with the track doubling work as they had agreed to realign the second track.
Wizardry of a politician is all we can say to describe the legislator’s alacrity at ‘resolving’ a conundrum that has had the affected residents and almost the entire twin villages of Cansaulim and Velsao on tenterhooks for years. Except that the locals and the panchayat-level politicians aren’t convinced either with Vas’ politics, poli-tricks or the assurance from railway officials that they are willing to re-align the second track.
In fact a day later, Velsao Sarpanch Diana Gouveia, whose team won the panchayat polls last year on the cusp of a belligerent anti-double tracking agitation, threw the gauntlet at Vas and urged him to instead join their agitational ranks against the doubling of tracks.
Vas has read the pulse but is not giving up on this poli-trick he has embarked on to score a brownie point over the anti-double tracking ecosystem of Cansaulim-Velsao known to be politically antagonistic to him. He got the Chief Minister Pramod Sawant to inspect the Cansaulim-Velsao stretch along the tracks and repeat his assurances to the public there.
Only time will tell whether or not the anti-double tracking lot in Cansaulim and Velsao have a reason to follow Sawant’s oft-repeated advice of ‘bhivpachi garaz na’.
