Congress ceding Opposition space in poll-bound Goa
Congress leader Rahul Gandhi finally found time to inspect the ruins of his party unit in Goa that goes to the polls along with four other bigger states in as many months. For reasons best known to him, he never gave Goa the attention it deserved even during his tenure as national head of the party. Despite Congress emerging as the single-largest party though short of majority in the 2017 polls, it failed to stake its claim to form the government due to infighting. That left the door ajar for the BJP to quickly rustle up a coalition and make Manohar Parrikar the chief minister.
It’s not that the Congress is inactive on the ground. Far from it. But the state unit is badly fractured and the high command has not shown the inclination to clean up the mess. Goa is a largely urban state with small constituencies where the margin of victory can be slim. Regional parties with seats in single digits aspire to be chief ministers or at least kingmakers in coalitions, exercising clout disproportionate to their size in the Assembly. Dealing with such aspirations requires a quick response, but the Congress under Rahul has remained leaden-footed.
If the BJP captured Goa’s political space left unattended by the Congress in 2017 after the polls, the Trinamool Congress became the early bird this time around, months before the state’s elections. The spoiler now is spurned-political manager-on-hire Prashant Kishor, whose I-PAC is splurging and feasting on the Congress leftovers on behalf of Mamata Banerjee, plastering Goa with Didi’s posters and creating a media buzz matching that of the BJP in the run-up to the polls in Bengal. The Trinamool justified its western advance, hitting the nail on the head saying it cannot wait endlessly for the Congress to muster the willpower to lead a unified opposition. The AAP is the only other party that is trying to expand its footprint in Goa. Had Rahul given Panaji a fraction of the time he spent on attending to Punjab, the grand old party would have been in a much better place, exploiting anti-incumbency and the allegations of corruption within the BJP administration. Politics needs the pace of a panther, not the gait of an elephant.