A ‘false’ campaign accusing the BJP in Goa of communalism could be hurting the party’s poll campaign in Goa, its spokesperson told reporters in Panaji on Thursday.
Addressing mediapersons, BJP spokesperson Pramod Sawant, however, said that the “false accusation of the party being communal” would not be heeded by the electorate and the BJP would sail through.
“There are the false accusations about communalism which are being made. But people will see through it,” Sawant said when asked which were some of the critical issues which the party needed to look into ahead of polls.
Sawant also said that the party would start a blitzkrieg on ground, where party’s Catholic MlAs would speak to the electorate about how the BJP was secular and not communal.
With barely ten days to go before the State goes to the polls, and with the influential Catholic Church in Goa already exhorting the faithful to ‘vote secular’, the party had begun to get jittery especially about the South Goa lok Sabha seat, which is minority dominated.
The fact that at the national level the party is going gung ho about its controversial chest thumping prime ministerial candidate Narendra Modi whose image of being antagonistic towards minorities is persistent.
The BJP has been in a tizzy after deputy Chief Minister Francis D’Souza, one of the BJP’s senior most Christian legislators, told a Press conference last week that minorities have apprehensions against Modi and will continue to harbour them in the future.
“Minorities will have an apprehension. It will always be there,” D’Souza, the deputy CM, said in response to queries if minority communities would accept BJP’s prime ministerial candidate Modi, who in the past has been accused of hard-line right wing politics.
D’Souza, has been with the Bharatiya Janata Party in Goa for more than a decade and has himself said that he would not be party to a party that was ‘communal’.He was one of the few party leaders who had expressed apprehension after Modi’s nomination as the party’s campaign chief during the national executive held in Goa last year.
Goa population consists of nearly 27% Catholics bundled with around 11% Muslims distributed across the state. Goa chief minister Manohar Parrikar has been shying away from answering queries about Modi and whether the BJP in Goa had been unable to convince the Christian electorate to vote for the Gujarat chief minister as PM. “There is no apprehension among the minorities,” Parrikar said, even as he refused to comment on his deputy’s statement. The state sends two Members of Parliament to the lok Sabha.