As the ruling Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) goes to the Goa Assembly polls on February 14 for the first time bereft of the late Manohar Parrikar’s skillful leadership, the stakes for the Panaji constituency, which was held by him for nearly 25 years, have never been higher for the saffron party.
The tiny constituency, with its 23,000-odd voters, has become a microcosm of the party’s strategy and dilemmas as it contests all 40 seats for the first time on its own.
The BJP, which claims to be carrying forward Manohar Parrikar’s legacy, had calculatedly denied the Panaji ticket to Parrikar’s son Utpal Parrikar (41), fielding sitting MLA Atanasio ‘Babush’ Monserrate instead.
This led a frustrated Utpal to rebel and contest as an Independent while hitting out at the BJP’s choice as Mr. Monserrate faces a rash of serious criminal charges from raping a teenager to inciting a mob to attack a police station in Panaji.
The saffron party’s rationale was that Mr. Utpal lacked voter connect and had tried to accommodate him by offering two other seats which he refused to accept. Again, it could hardly afford to lose Mr. Monserrate, who has not only influenced the candidate selection but is expected to win at least four seats (including Panaji and Taleigo, where his wife Jennifer is the incumbent MLA) for the party.
Mr. Utpal has made the Panaji contest into a ‘prestige fight’, repeatedly stating that his purpose behind contesting was not to seek any post but to stand up for the values that were steadily eroding in the present BJP set-up.
Bright, affable and unfailingly courteous, Mr. Utpal, a graduate of Michigan State University who left Silicon Valley to start his own business in the coastal State, spoke of putting his “political career on the line” in the upcoming contest.
His rebellion, which quickly caught the fancy of national channels, has emerged as the symbol of a “BJP gone wrong” under its current leadership besides garnering him overt and covert support from the non-BJP Opposition including the Shiv Sena which withdrew its candidate, and the Congress which has put an allegedly ‘weak’ candidate in the form of Elvis Gomes.
More significantly, Mr. Utpal’s decision to jump into the rough and tumble of the Goan politics has divided the BJP in Panaji, with some of Mr. Monserrate’s ‘allies’ now ostensibly supporting him.
According to sources, former Panaji Mayor Uday Madkaikar, a one-time Monserrate loyalist, is believed to be backing Mr. Utpal along with former Panaji councillor Menino Da Cruz, who left the BJP and joined the Congress in April last year.
Yet, while it is likely that Mr. Utpal will carry a core BJP vote with him, he faces an uphill task in supplanting Mr. Monserrate, an adroit navigator in the murky waters of Goan politics and a three-term MLA (twice on a United Goans Democratic Party ticket and once on a Congress ticket).
For all of Mr. Utpal’s disdain towards Mr. Monserrate and the BJP allegedly having lost its ‘values’, it was Manohar Parrikar who had made ‘Babush’ a Minister of Town and Country Planning in the early 2000s.
In 2005, Mr. Monserrate’s resignation (along with two other Ministers) had triggered the fall of the BJP government. In 2007, Mr. Monserrate, after winning the Taleigao seat, served as a Minister in the Digambar Kamat-led Congress government.
He is considered to be the key player who engineered the defection of 10 Congress MLAs (including himself and his wife Jennifer) into the BJP in July 2019, thus giving a major jolt to the Congress.
Since 2002, the Panaji seat results indicate that a contest between two strong candidates has always been a humdinger, with the difference in votes between the winner and the runner-up being barely 1,500-1,800 votes.
To his advantage, Mr. Monserrate is up against two political neophytes — Mr. Utpal and Aam Aadmi Party’s Valmiki Naik. He also has the Panaji civic body machinery, his son Rohit Monserrate is the Mayor, under his control.
On his part, Mr. Utpal has issued a cri de couer to clean Panaji’s political Augean stables of the alleged corruption of the Monserrate clan. It remains to be seen whether the electorate continues to remain in thrall of Mr. Monserrate or whether the ‘Parrikar’ factor retains its magic.
