British Prime Minister Harold Wilson famously said in the mid-1960s that "a week is a long time in politics." In Goa, as we believe, that time frame is somewhere around 48 hours. We have a wildly kaleidoscopic mix of nonchalant politicians and unhinged politics.
The BJP government in Goa consists of more Congressmen than the MLAs from BJP's core cadre. Three of the twelve ministers are from the original BJP lineup. Dr. Pramod Sawant is back in the saddle after a prolonged code of conduct. He is a different man now with an evolved government. He has completed the strenuous journey from a selected CM to an elected CM. The BJP is aware of the fact that 67% of voters have chosen not to stand by them. However, the party has found solace in the arithmetic of the results. It has emerged as the single largest party falling just one seat short of the majority. But there is perceptible unease at the top and a certain sense of discontent.
The party believes to a large extent and rightly so that the minority population of the state has not voted for the BJP candidates. This includes Catholics as well as Muslims. The decision-makers have also concluded that they have barely held to their core vote share. The infusion of so many heavyweights from Congress and the MGP should have skyrocketed the party's vote share. However, it wandered around their previous performances.
Their takeaways are fairly simple. One - Focus on the Hindu population and their core voter base. Two - Give better representation to the cadre in the government. Three - Keep the opposition space divided. One of the striking announcements by the chief minister of Goa during his recently presented budget is the reconstruction of temples demolished during the Portuguese era. The BJP in Goa always paddled soft Hindutva and consciously and cautiously stayed away from making any hardline overtures. This was a deviation from that long-standing position.
Manohar Parrikar valiantly refused to ban beef import or consumption in the state when the rest of the BJP ruled states were overtly eager to jump on the 'ban-wagon.' The leadership of the party stretched itself beyond a point to woo minority voters. Although everyone in the party believed that it is incomprehensible for the BJP to establish any chemistry with the minority voters, riding high on the persona of Parrikar the party dispensation at least attempted to derive few tangible electoral concessions. That phase is now over.
Goa is synonymous with harmony, peace, and tranquillity. Goan Hindus cannot be polarised. Our upbringing is such that we despise hate. We are instinctively warm and welcoming. The land binds us. And precisely for this reason, BJP in Goa preferred to be dissimilar from the BJP in the rest of the country. This election has changed that. How? Our so-called opposition parties have multi-handedly ensured that the BJP remains in power. None of these political parties aspiring to take over the 'anti-BJP' space had any clue about what the people of Goa actually wanted. All of them declined to come together or simply exit the space when they realised, almost a month before the election, that they would not fare well.
Congress had lost all its credibility with almost all of its MLAs defecting post-2017; even their candidates defected after the declaration of their candidature a couple of months before the election. The party tried to put up a brave front by stating they are allocating tickets to fresh and credible faces. But most of the voters fundamentally believed that this 'change of heart' or 'change of strategy' originated from the desertions and not desire. The party could not even hold on to its traditional bastions and lost seat share as well as vote share to other parties like AAP. The leadership of the party, till the very last moments, convinced itself that the anti-incumbency would automatically benefit the Congress party and it would once again emerge as the single largest party. There lies the fallacy.
Although BJP was faced with enormous levels of anti-incumbency, voters were not prepared to trust the Congress party as a natural alternative. This can be predominantly witnessed from the voting pattern of the minority community in the state of Goa. The minority vote share was exhaustively split between the Congress party, the AAP, the TMC, and the surprise package of this election the Revolutionary Goans party (RGP) espousing the cause of regionalism and native identity. The RGP emerged as the third-largest party in terms of vote share in this election securing close to 10% votes.
The AAP couldn't capture the imagination of the voters despite tall promises of freebies and the TMC trespassed at the last moment on the scene and disrupted all chances of any consolidation in the anti-BJP space. Till the last moment, no one in Goa understood why the TMC did what it did.
This overcrowded fragmentation of the opposition also revealed the indisputable truth to the BJP. The minority voters aren't going to vote for the party and as long as the opposition space is consistently disillusioned with the Congress, the fragmentation shall prevail. Rather at the fag end of the campaigning phase, the BJP leadership was unfailingly endeavouring to emphasise that the Congress is the only opposition they have. The BJP's organisation strongly rooted on the ground had the perfect sense of the divided opposition space. Their campaign team devised a formula combining the strength of the party with the appeal of individual candidates imported from other parties, even at the last moment.
After the results the voting pattern also made the BJP realise that they no longer need to woo the minority voters to win an election in Goa. Probably and precisely because of the same reason the BJP is changing its shades in Goa. It is turning more saffron and more hardliner.
(Pramod Acharya is a senior journalist and columnist and the Editor of Prudent Media, Goa. He tweets at @PramodGoa)
