Already floundering in its role as the principal Opposition party, the Congress in Goa may have just dug a deeper hole for itself, with severe rifts appearing in the party’s ranks, with the Young Turks and senior leaders trading charges against each other over inclusion of tainted party veterans in the party poll committee.
Reduced to unprecedented single digits — the party has nine legislators in the 40 member Goa legislative Assembly – in the 2012 State legislative Assembly elections, the Congress has already expelled one legislator Atanasio Monserrate for anti-party activities, while another Mauvin Godinho has been rubbing shoulders with the BJP for the last couple of years, while openly critiquing his own party.
In light of its shoddy legacy of the recent past, the current squabble between the young and the old ranks of the party, especially with less than a year to go for the State Assembly poll, may only help the party sink further in a morass of its own making.
“Sadly the State leaders do not seem to have learned a lesson from the drubbing the party received at the 2012 Assembly elections as many of these faces, which were rejected outright by the people of Goa, are being resurrected in the committees. Except for a token representation for the youth which is overwhelmingly outnumbered, both the committees’ have a preponderance of preponderance leaders who do not have any following among the younger voters, especially the first-time voters,” says a letter written by young Congress leaders Durgadas Kamat, a secretary with the Pradesh Congress Committee and Tanvir Khatib addressed to All India Congress Committee general secretary in charge of Goa Digvijaya Singh.
The letter to Singh, protests the appointment of senior Congress leaders namely former chief minister Ravi Naik, former State president Subhash Shirodkar and several other senior leaders, many of them tainted, to the party’s co-ordination and election committees.
While Naik has been indicted in a State legislative committee report of being allegedly linked to drug trade, Shirdokar has been linked to illegal mining in the State. Both leaders, who lost in the 2012 State Assembly elections have rejected the allegations, on several occasions in the recent past.
Kamat claims that apart from the two tainted leaders, there is hardly any youth leader on the committees, which are expected to play a critical role in allotment of tickets ahead of the 2017 State Assembly elections.
“Is there no space for the youthIJ None of these leaders have been at the forefront of the protests against misgovernance of the BJP-led coalition Government. So why are they on the list,” Kamat has asked.
The Congress which was stunned at the rebellion against the party’s senior leadership, has however hit back at the young members, claiming that washing dirty linen in public was unbecoming.
“Is this the way these young Congressmen should speak or behave. They should have consulted the State party leadership before going to the media…. You just cannot write off the senior leaders of the party. Mature leaders are important in a party,” Congress spokesperson Jitendra Deshprabhu told The Pioneer.
However, in a bid to offer an olive branch to the young Congress leaders, state party president luizinho Faleiro said that youth was the future of the party and that the list had been cleared by Digvijaya Singh and the AICC. “I only wish they had consulted me before forming the committee. I have always maintained that the Congress will give 50 per cent of the tickets to our young leaders,” Faleiro said.