QUIT: On Monday September 27, Luizinho Faleiro resigned as member of Congress Legislative Party and as primary member of the Indian National Congress
By Rajan Narayan
The resignation of Luizinho Faleiro is a win win situation for both the Congress and the Trinamool Congress. The TMC is fighting the Goa elections as it is part of a campaign to be recognized as a national party. The Congress on the other hand is happy that it can now contest the upcoming Legislative Assembly elections in unity in 2022.
THE resignation of Luizinho Faleiro from the Congress is a win win situation for both the Congress and the Trinamool Congress (TMC) which has decided to contest in the upcoming Legislative Assembly elections in Goa. As far as the Congress is concerned, an obstacle has been removed from its path. The constant fights between the Navelim MLA (former chief minister) Luizinho Faleiro and Margao MLA Digambar Kamat, had virtually paralysed the functioning of the Congress in Goa.
Both Faleiro and Kamat have been accusing each other of sabotaging chances of forming the government after the 2017 elections, when the Congress emerged as the largest single party with 17 seats and enjoyed the support of the three-member Goa Forward group led by Vijai Sardesai.
LUIZINHO COMPLAINT
IT is history now whether the Congress High Command Digvijay Singh refused to permit the then GPCC President, Luizinho Faleiro, to stake his claim, or Vijai Sardesai insisted that his support would be conditional on Digambar Kamat being the chief minister. The fact remains that Luizinho is no longer with the Congress party, though at the recent press conference on September 27, he confused the I-PAC team and everybody else in the media by claiming that he was still a Congressman and would continue to be one! Clearly, Luizinho does not want to antagonise his long term patron, the national president of the Congress, Sonia Gandhi.
Luizinho’s spin on joining the Trinamool Congress is that it was part of the Congress family and that Mamata Banarjee was the best leader to liberate Goa from the saffron Talibanisation of the BJP. As Prashant Kishor has pointed out in an interview it is not the role of a political party to tell you what to wear, what to eat and what to think — as the BJP has been doing.
On Wednesday, September 29, Luizinho Faleiro along with nine others were formally admitted to the Trinamool Congress in the presence of West Bengal Chief Minister Mamata Banerjee. Contrary to the fears of the Congress party that he might lead the Trinamool in the LA elections in Goa, Luizinho was not given a TMC ticket for that. The ticket is for his son Rabindranath Faleiro, a former vice-president of the Youth Congress. Father wanted his son to get a TMC ticket for the upcoming elections.
Rabindranath will probably contest from Navelim from where Luizinho Faleiro himself was elected seven times. Luizinho lost to Churchill Alemao in 2007 but returned to the Goa Legislative Assembly in the 2017 election after spending five years in the North-East.
LUIZINHO FOR RAJYA SABHA
IT IS expected that Luizinho Faleiro be gifted with a Rajya Sabha seat courtesy the Trinamool Congress. He will look after the five states of the North-East, namely, Manipur, Mizoram, Nagaland, Meghalaya and Arunachal Pradesh. Luizinho’s immediate challenge is the Manipur election which is scheduled for March 2022.
This is good news for the Congress in Goa as during the critical election month of February 2022, Luizinho will be busy in Manipur trying to get the Trinamool Congress to replace the BJP government in the state.
Despite the claims of Mamata Banerjee and Luizinho Faleiro about ushering “a new dawn in Goa” clearly the objective of the TMC is to secure recognition as a national party. As of now the Trinamool Congress is only a regional party. As a regional party, it can put up candidates only in West Bengal and not in other states in the country.
The Election Commission rules specify that to be given the status of a national party, a state party has to secure at least 6% of the votes in a minimum of four states. Goa is the first of the four states where the Trinamool is trying its luck again. On the last two occasions, when Dr Wilfred D’Souza contested 20 seats on TMC ticket and Churchill Alemao contested the Lok Sabha seats, the TMC got only 6% of the votes.
This time around the TMC with the assistance of “King Maker” Prashant Kishor and his I-PAC team, it hopes not only to get the 6% vote share but to win at least ten seats in the state. If the TMC with the help of Luizinho Faleiro is able to win even three of the five North-East states it would be entitled to call itself the All India Trinamool Congress.
Amongst those who have joined the TMC in the presence of Mamata Banerjee in Kolkata is leading writer N Shivdas, who has been fighting for temple entry for non-Brahmins for a long time. Shivdas is also a Sahitya Kala Academy-winner
GETTING IT WRONG!
IN TMC’S anxiety to achieve a major presence in Goa, they goofed up in their cloth banners strung up in various parts of Goa – in Konkani it promises a new government. Either it was a mistake of the painter or some sneaky BJP sabotage, the banner had mis-spelt word – “Gonychi” instead of “Goenchi.” The miss-spelt word was promptly picked by cable TV news network channels in Goa and flashed everywhere.
Fortunately, I-PAC team in charge of the TMC’s Goa campaign, was quick to put up a fresh lot of posters with the corrected spelling. Konkani writer N Shivdas also released a YouTube video where he reiterated that didi of Sonar Bengal has great respect for “Sunaparant” or “Golden Goa.”
Mamata Banerjee promised full support and said she would walk with the Congress workers to campaign for the liberation of Goa from the BJP! Mamata- didi is the only leader who inflicted a crushing defeat on the BJP despite the saffron party poaching several of its MLAs, including founder member of the Trinamol, Mukul Roy.
The victory was more commendable as we say both Narendra Modi and Amit Shah addressing more than 200 rallies in West Bengal. The accusation is that Modi and Shah were so obsessed with winning the West Bengal elections that they forgot to take steps to prevent the second wave of the Covid-19 pandemic.
DIDI WANTS TO BE PM!
MAMATA’s ambition is to challenge Narendra Modi in the 2024 Parliamentary elections. In view of her defeating the BJP in the West Bengal elections, other opposition parties are also likely to support her to challenge the BJP. Indeed, NCP leader Sharad Pawar has already taken the initiative for a Rashtriya Gadbandhan (National Alliance) which will include all the opposition parties, including the Indian National Congress led by Sonia Gandhi, the Janata Dal led by Nitish Kumar, YSR Reddy party which rules Andhra Pradesh and the AIDMK which won the election under the leadership of K Stalin with the help of the I-PAC team. In the run up to the 2024 Parliamentary elections, the objective of the I-PAC is to help displace the BJP from the 16 states going to polls before 2024.