In Goa Assembly polls, in Panaji, it is Utpal’s ‘pride’ versus BJP’s prejudice  

Panaji seat promises to be a humdinger of a contest as Goa goes to polls on February 14

@the_news_21

Mumbai: It is a day of reckoning for the ruling Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) as it braces for the Goa Assembly polls on February 14. It will be for the first time bereft of the late Manohar Parrikar’s skillful leadership. The stakes for the Panaji constituency, which was held by the late Parrikar for nearly 25 years, have never been so high for the saffron party. 

The tiny constituency, with its 23,000-odd voters, has become a focal point of the saffron party’s strategy and dilemmas as it contests all the 40 seats to the Goa Assembly for the first time on its own strength.   

The BJP, which claims to be carrying forward Manohar Parrikar’s legacy, had calculatedly denied the Panaji ticket to late Parrikar’s son, the 41-year-old Utpal Parrikar, fielding the incumbent MLA Atanasio ‘Babush’ Monserrate in his stead.  

It led to a frustrated Utpal to rebel and contest as an Independent, while hitting out at the BJP’s choice of Babush Monserrate – who faces a rash of alleged serious criminal charges from raping a teenager to inciting a mob to attack a police station in Panaji. 

The saffron party’s argument was that Utpal lacked voter connect and had tried to accommodate him by offering two other seats which were turned down by Parrikar junior. Furthermore, it can hardly afford to lose Babush 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 incumbent MLA) for the party. 

Parrikar junior has turned 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-day BJP set-up. 

Known to be bright, affable, unfailingly courteous, Utpal Parrikar, a graduate of Michigan State University who left Silicon Valley to start his own business in his native Goa, has staked his “political career on the line” in the upcoming contest.  

His rebellion, which caught the imagination of national private television 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, Utpal Parrikar’s decision to jump into the rough and tumble of Goan politics has divided the BJP in Panaji, with some of Babush Monserrate’s ‘allies’ now ostensibly supporting Parrikar junior. 

According to political observers, former Panaji mayor Uday Madkaikar, a one-time Monserrate loyalist is believed to be backing Utpal along with former Panaji councilor Menino Da Cruz, who left the BJP and joined Congress in April last year. 

While it is quite likely that Utpal will carry along core BJP vote with him, he faces an uphill task in supplanting Babush Monserrate, 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). 

Notwithstanding Utpal’s disdain towards Babush Monserrate and the present BJP allegedly having lost its ‘values’, it was his father, late Manohar Parrikar, who had made ‘Babush’ a Minister of Town and Country Planning in the early 2000s. 

In 2005, it was Monserrate’s resignation (along with two other ministers) that had triggered the fall of the BJP government in the State. In 2007, Babush Monserrate, after winning the Taleigao seat, later served as a Minister in the Digambar Kamat-led Congress government. 

Monserrate 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 cliffhanger of sorts, with the difference in votes between the winner and the runner-up being barely 1,500 to 1,800 votes.  

To his advantage, Babush Monserrate is up against two political greenhorns, Utpal Parrikar and the Aam Aadmi Party’s (AAP) Valmiki Naik. He also has the Panaji civic body machinery under his control, where his son Rohit Monserrate is currently the mayor. 

On his part, Utpal Parrikar has issued a ‘war cry’ to clean Panaji’s political Augean stables of the alleged corruption of the Monserrate clan. It remains to be seen whether the Panaji electorate continue to remain in trance of Babush Monserrate or whether the ‘Parrikar’ factor still retains its magic.