CONGRESS IN NEW MODE: At a press conference newly appointed Congress Goa Desk in Charge Dinesh Gundu Rao spoke at length about how the BJP has failed on every front. Flanking him are Opposition leader and former chief minister of Goa Digambar Kamat, Congress president Girish Chodankar and other Congress leaders. (inset) Observed Mr Gundu Rao, India is no longer a democracy but an oligarchy of loot and scoot politics!

By Our Special Correspondent

Clean up the languishing Congress stables from which the horses have fled or so speak?

WITH election in the air once again various political parties old and new are getting into the act of revamping themselves. Not to be left behind is the Congress party which at a press conference on Saturday, October 24, 2020, introduced their new Congress Goa Desk in Charge Dinesh Gundu Rao. Goa Congress president Girish Chodankar did the honors of introducing him as someone coming up from the lower rungs and who knows the party from the inside out.
Dinesh Gundu Rao comes across as a soft spoken man well clued up about what ails the Congress cadres from top to bottom or bottom to up. Perhaps he is aware how the Congress party has become much like a huge white elephant for he indicated that he hopes to do the job of say being a headmaster assigned to sort out the problems of the young generation with the Congress party. Speaking on the occasion he said, “I’m here to strengthen the party. I’m not here to fool the people. We will concentrate on fighting for all 40 seats in the next elections…” From the sound of it, it is going to be a mammoth bottom-up restructuring with the old guard very much there to play a role.
Addressing media people at length he said he should have been in Goa earlier but for the fact that he was laid low by Covid-19; however, he is fine now and would be able to pin-point what keeps the Congress from taking the upper hand in Goa’s political drama of political defection and never ending infighting or so to speak. He is conscious of how the Congress was defeated on idiotic grounds at the last elections and there is the large scale defections which took place and which will be resolved in court one of these days.
The party is taking a higher moral grounds, hoping to win the public’s trust in the long run. He has been speaking to Goa’s party leaders Pratapsingh Rane, Luizinho Falaeiro, Reginaldo Lourenco, Ramakant Khalap, Francisco Sardinha as also the ever-present and amiable former chief minister of Goa, Digambar Kamat, the Mahila wing and social media team. He has obtained an idea of the pulse of the party and wants everyone to work as a team and unite for the common purpose of alleviating people’s grievances in these troubled times when the government is busy selling the country to the private sector, including the railways, “The BJP government is about loot and scoot!”
In the last six years, he noted, the BJP government has spent hundreds of crore to topple state governments, so much so we’re “not a democracy but an oligarchy, the government is now a private limited company!” The new appointee of the High Command from Delhi has been assigned the task of rejuvenating and revitalizing Congress upper and especially lower cadres at district block levels where the real power is and infuse fresh confidence in the public to win a much deserved victory the next time around, “I am confident we’ll work as a team and go the people and win a majority in next government.” As far as he could see the BJP government has failed on every front and the Congress stands good chance of victory in the 2022 State Assembly elections if it stays on the straight and narrow of good politics. He is aware of how in the 2017 elections the mandate to form the party was wrested away through trickery and money power. He observed to a query, “My vision is very simple. Every block and district committee has to be strong. We are building ourselves in all 40 seats. We had got single largest number of seats last time…when we are strong enough on our own, where is the question of aligning with other parties?” Asked about electoral malpractices which play such a huge role in elections nowadays, he said he was quite conversant with all that the party will be alert and wiser this time around.
Mr Dinesh Gundu Rao expressed the opinion that Goa and Goans should fight for the issues which threaten the wellbeing and quality of their life first. Goa comes first for the Congress party and decisions like the Mhadei dispute which is still being deliberated before the Mahadayi (Mhadei) Water disputes Tribunal and Supreme Court t deserves sensitive handling, so also the double tracking for transportation of coal and various other issues.