The Goa Bharatiya Janata Party’s quest to pocket the two state parliamentary seats on offer – the North Goa and South Goa constituencies – and do its bit to reach the 400+ target, seems hamstrung by its dismal governance performance in the state.
Congress’s Francisco Sardinha currently holds the South Goa seat. The North Goa seat is held by the BJP’s five-term MP and current Union Minister of State for Tourism and Ports, Shipping and Waterways, Sripad Naik.
The BJP, though, is finding it tough to wrest both seats despite having a well-oiled, well-manned, well-funded election apparatus, overarching administrative control, and media footprint.
Despite a late announcement of its two candidates and an apparent paucity of funds and resources, the Congress and INDIA Alliance partners have, in the past two weeks, overtly presented a combined and united front. Their strategy to shift the Lok Sabha campaign spotlight onto the BJP’s Achilles’ heel – its poor governance record in Goa – has rattled the party.
Therefore, the BJP has sought to keep the spotlight largely on the prime minister, his promises and schemes – from ‘Viksit Bharat’, Ayushman Bharat, PM Garib Kalyan Anna Yojana to national infrastructure building, ‘zero tolerance for terrorism’ slogans – to portray the saffron party as building a ‘safe and secure India’. It seems the BJP hopes this would detract the people from the state government’s failures.
Election issues
Among these issues is the BJP government’s inability to restart iron ore mining – a core economic sector, with downstream and ancillary spinoffs, that has been largely shut since 2012. While the shutdown improved air quality, agricultural output, and village life, it also aggravated job retrenchments, and contractual losses in the trucking, barge, shipping, port handling, and allied sectors. Loan repayment bailout packages, strategically timed to release just before previous elections, had kept these hinterland areas and their ghost towns, within their voting influence. Now these have long dissipated. Rusting trucks, parked all across once bustling, but dusty, mining towns, are visible testimony of the underlying disenchantment and acute frustration with the system that cable news teams have been recording.
There were discernibly less takers for chief minister Pramod Sawant’s oft-repeated promises in March and April that mining would resume shortly. The Sawant government did attempt to manage the optics on this front. In March – despite the Model Code of Conduct being in force, as NGO Goa Foundation complained to the Election Commission – a Consent to Operate order was issued to the lone mining block and company, that has levelled up for resumption, after the 2022 and 2023 auctioning of the mining blocks. The move cut little ice, given that a vexed tussle over ore transportation routes from mine to jetty, had yet to be ironed out and is still being litigated in the high court in Goa.
It’s not surprising then that the Goa BJP’s feed on X (formerly Twitter), besides both its candidates – Sripad Naik, who retained the ticket to seek a sixth term, and Pallavi Dempo, from the Dempo Business House, who beat more experienced politicians to get the ticket, apparently thanks to the central BJP’s interest in testing the women’s quota initiative – has also squarely been putting Modi’s name in the combined messaging. Additionally, significant campaign efforts are being directed towards preparations for meetings to be addressed, on two separate days, by both Narendra Modi and Amit Shah.
The Congress/INDIA alliance has fielded veteran politician and former Union law minister, Ramakant Khalap, for North Goa and retired naval captain and Kargil war hero-turned activist, Viriato Fernandes, for South Goa. They have focussed on the BJP’s failures in tackling rising unemployment and inflation.
And there are many, given the widespread citizen disenchantment that is impossible to ignore, whether by media houses owned by BJP candidate Pallavi Dempo’s family (including two newspapers and a cable news channel run by the Dempo group, headed by her husband Shrinivas Dempo), or those operated by her relatives.
A smack in the middle of the election campaign that has added firepower to the Congress’s narrative has been the unexpected pre-monsoon showers on April 21 that flooded the capital city, Panjim, and disrupted the ongoing Smart City digging works. Roadblocks, delays, and dust pollution had already caused citizens to petition the high court for respite.
A few days later, false ceilings in the premier and heavily utilised cultural venue, Kala Academy, which also houses music and dance schools, came crashing down, leading to an additional media flurry.
The Charles Correa-designed riverbank venue that serves IFFI has been at the centre of a controversy as well. It has been put out of use for two years, with opaque and overly delayed repair work, by a nominated contractor, appointed without following due tendering processes. In 2023, adding to the ministerial department’s notoriety, a concrete slab of its outdoor auditorium had collapsed.
On more serious issues such as Karnataka’s proposed diversion of feeder rivulets of the Mhadei/Mandovi river – the perception that the Goa government’s response has been found wanting – has been foregrounded by the opposition alliance. Sawant, for his part, has denied this, accusing the Opposition of playing politics on the issue.
The government’s achievements in highway mega infrastructure (built with approximately Rs 25,000 crore in central funds, again fast-tracked from 2012 ) that cuts travel time between its cities and commissioning of the GMR-run Mopa Manohar Airport, figure high on its electoral roster of successes.
The repercussions, including the displacement of villages for highway expansion, unusually high road accident fatalities, pothole-ridden city and village roads endangering local residents who feel marginalised, and fears over South Goa’s Dabolim airport run by the Airport Authority of India losing business to Mopa, have cast their shadow on these successes. These issues provide fodder for the combined Opposition campaign.
A mismatch in resources is apparent in the unequal electoral battle. Currently, the legislative Opposition in Goa has only six MLAs, including members of the INDIA Alliance like the Congress, Aam Aadmi Party and Goa Forward Party. The BJP poached eight of the 11 elected Congress legislators in September 2022 – a move analysts believe was aimed at weakening the Congress in its stronghold South Goa Lok Sabha seat.
However, jostling and insecurities over cabinet berths and positions within the 33 MLA-strong ruling side (20 + 8 BJP and 5 additional members), has damaged both the BJP’s performance and perception. Corruption in government departments and village administration is perceived to be at an all-time high, with both new and old recruits giving citizens the run-around until bribes are paid.
With mining at a standstill, the crowded tourism and restaurant sector performing indifferently due to high numbers of low-paying budget sectors, which negatively impacts infrastructure and social structures, and agriculture feeling the pressure of rising land prices, shutdown of a sugarcane factory, and overall marginaliaation of the sector, the only boom the state is experiencing is in second/holiday home construction, speculative realty, and haphazard urbanisation. Much of this development has been perceptibly fast-tracked since the BJP returned to power here in 2012.
Here, the negative repercussions — such as rising crime, challenges with garbage disposal and waterlogging, deforestation, conversion of orchard and agricultural land, questionable land zoning changes, marginalization and displacement of local populations, and demographic shifts — are a harsh awakening for multi-generational citizens accustomed to better conditions. These issues have sparked citizen protests multiple times in the past two years, with the Congress candidate Viriato Fernandes himself emerging from such a movement.
Aware that the emotive issue of local displacement and deforestation by out-of-state real estate developers could harm the BJP, Sawant, in a recent extensive interview, attempted damage control by promising to halt the conversion of orchard and agricultural land to preserve Goa’s identity. The umbrella NGO Goa Bachao Andolan renewed its agitation against corruption-linked zoning conversions in March. This week, civic departments denied it permission to use a popular protest venue, indicating the government’s unease with such optics in the lead-up to polling.
Several contentious Centre-State issues have stirred emotions, with the state government under Sawant perceived as lacking assertiveness. These include the declaration of six rivers and a canal as national waterways in August 2019, notably following the passing of BJP chief minister Manohar Parrikar. Another issue is the conversion of the Mormugao Port Trust (MPT) into the Mormugao Port Authority (MPA) in February 2022, which has led to the superseding of state government authority and the granting of MPA jurisdiction over larger areas of riverine land.
There have also been sustained citizen protests against coal supply chains passing through residential towns and villages from three coal/coke berths/terminals operated under PPP agreements by Jindal South West’s South West Port Pvt Ltd (SWPL) and Adani Mormugao Port Terminal Pvt Ltd (AMPTPL). Additionally, the South Western Railway’s Hospet-Hubli-Tinaighat-Vasco double tracking project is viewed by protesters in Goa as primarily a coal supply chain project, further fueling discontent.
The opposition has ratcheted up the heat on all of these issues, while the local BJP is still banking on the Modi card to see it through.
