WAR ZONE: A brave 8-year-old Ukrainian girl stands up for her country and confidently orders a Russian soldier to get out of her country!

BY RAJAN NARAYAN

AND a few stray thoughts for yet another Saturday. For a Saturday following the week when the Goa Pradesh Congress Committee (GPCC) President Girish Chodankar announced the party’s decision to challenge the dismissal of the disqualification petition in the Supreme Court. For a Saturday following the week when master political strategist Prashant Kishor claimed in an interview with The Wire that he was involved with the election in Goa. For a Saturday following the week when we discovered why Russia invaded Ukraine. For a Saturday following the week when we discovered on the authority of a reputed veterinarian that animals do not get infected by Covid. For a Saturday following the week when I became convinced that the bold and the beautiful and the rich and the powerful are only fair weather friends.

GIRISH CHALLENGE
AND a few stray thoughts on the GPCC deciding to challenge the decision of the Goa bench of the Bombay High Court on upholding the merger of the 10 Congress MLAs with the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP). It may be recalled that following the demise of the late Manohar Parrikar in 2019, the Goa Forward and the MGP withdrew support to the BJP government. It was Babush Monserrate who came to the rescue of the BJP by persuading 10 of the 15 Congress MLAs to merge with the BJP.
In addition, two of the three MGP MLAs also merged with the BJP. This ensured the survival of the BJP government under the chief ministership of Pramod Sawant. Leader of the Congress Legislative Party Digambar Kamat challenged the merger before the Speaker of the Legislative Assembly Rajesh Patnekar. The Speaker who belonged to the BJP delayed the hearing on the challenge to the merger of the Congress MLAs for over two years. It is only after the Supreme Court directed the Speaker to immediately dispose of the petition that, Patnekar held a hearing.
Even as the hearing proceeded at snail’s pace, GPCC chief Girish Chodankar moved the Goa Bench of the Bombay High Court against the merger of the 10 Congress MLAs with the BJP. Girish Chodankar had demanded the disqualification of all the 10 Congress MLAs who had defected, reducing the strength of the Congress in the Legislative Assembly to five MLAs. This is ironical as in the 2017 LA elections, the Congress had won 17 of the 40 seats in making it the largest single party.
Unfortunately, due to a tussle between Luizinho Faleiro, then president of the GPCC and former chief minister Digambar Kamat. The Goa Forward Chief Vijay Sardessai was willing to extend support to the Congress only if Digambar Kamat was nominated as the chief minister. This was not acceptable to Luizinho who wanted the “kodel” for himself.
In the meanwhile the BJP High Command parachuted Nitin Gadkari to Goa to persuade the Goa Forward and the MGP to extend support to the BJP which had won only 13 seats in the 40 member assembly. So overnight the picture changed and the largest single party, the Congress, was sidelined and the BJP formed the government courtesy backstabbing defections .
Goa Forward chief Vijay Sardessai and senior MGP leader Sudin Dhavlikar made it clear that their support was not to the BJP but to Manohar Parrikar. The late Manohar Parrikar probably knew that he had pancreatic cancer and could not do justice to his hiked up position of Defense Minister of India at the Centre.
In any case Parrikar missed his zitt-coddi and was desperate to return to Goa as chief minister. When to everyone’s surprise Pramod Sawant was made the CM on the demise of Manohar Parrikar, there was a revolt even within the BJP. Senior leaders expected that Laxmikant Parsekar, who was the chief minister when Parrikar moved to Delhi to take over as the defense minister. Not only was Parsekar ignored but the other senior BJP leader Rajendra Arlekar was transferred to Himachal Pradesh as governor.
Though nominally Pramod Sawant is the chief minister of Goa, everyone knows that the government is actually run by BJP’s organizing secretary Satish Dhond. According to the disqualification rules of the Election Commission, if two-thirds of the members of a legislative party merge with some other party, it is not an act of defection. It was on the basis of this clause that both the High Court and the speaker of the Goa LA dismissed the petitions filed by the Congress party seeking disqualification of the ten Congress MLAs.
According to Girish Chodankar, while the Speaker followed the letter of the law he violated the spirit of the law. Girish insists that the Speaker has no right to uphold the merger of two-thirds of the members of the Congress legislative party. It is for the Election Commission to decide whether the merger was justified or not.
Girish points out that when voters cast their vote for a particular party they are not only voting for the candidate, but also for the ideology of the party. When Goans voted for the Congress and made it the largest single party they were voting for secularism over fascism. The acceptance of the merger by the High Court and the Speaker made mockery of voters’ mandate.
If the voter had wanted to vote for the Hindutva BJP, they would not have voted for the candidates who later defected for penury gains. Chodankar pointed out how this kind of condoning opens the risk of industrialists like Adani and Ambani forming their own parties and just buying up successful electoral candidates. Girish is confident that the Supreme Court would overturn the decision of both the Goa Bench of the Bombay High Court and the Legislative Assembly of Goa.

WHERE IS PRASHANT?
AND a few stray thoughts on master political strategist Prashant Kishor claiming that neither he nor I-PAC were involved in the Goa assembly elections. The entry of Prashant Kishor and the TMC is similar to the analogy of the Adanis and the Ambanis taking over Goa. The strangest part of the just concluded assembly election is that not one outside party but two outside parties have campaigned to take over power in Goa. While the TMC under the provocation of Prashant Kishor was doing it for the first time, the Aam Aadmi Party (AAP) of Arvind Kejriwal was doing it for the second time. Never mind that AAP did not get a single seat in the 2017 elections.
The reason why the Trinamool Congress (TMC) of West Bengal Chief Minister Mamata Banerjee wants to spread to other states is because it wants to secure the status of a national party. The story goes that the former editor of the paper O Heraldo, that I built with my blood, sweat, toil and tears, approached Rahul Gandhi. Raul Fernandes, the Heraldo’s owner met Rahul Gandhi on the instigation of Navelim MLA Luizinho Faleiro. Raul was reportedly furious that Rahul Gandhi treated him with contempt and did not even give him an appointment. Raul, who has a Bengali editorial advisor in Sujoy Gupta, walked straight into the waiting arms of Prashant Kishor.
The master strategist who helped strategize the BJP into power now wants Mamata Banerjee as the prime minister instead of Narendra Modi. To make this happen, the TMC which is a regional party, has to achieve the status of a national party. According to Election Commission rules, a regional party has to win 6% of the total votes polled in at least four states, to qualify for the status of a national party.
Prashant Kishor was quick to realize that if he managed to get Luizinho Faleiro to join the TMC, he would achieve the objective of making Mamta’s party a national party. The deal was that in exchange for being given a Rajya Sabha seat on the Trinamool quota, Luizinho would help the TMC not only to form the government in Goa but also secure 6% of the votes in the five states of the North East. This was because Luizinho, as general secretary of the Congress party under Sonia Gandhi, was put in charge of the North East states which are predominantly Christian.
Luizinho used the Christian card very effectively and installed the Congress in power in all the North East states. Within weeks of Luizinho Faleiro being appointed the Vice-President of the AITMC and swore him as a TMC Rajya Sabha member, Mukul Sangma and half of the MLAs of Meghalaya shifted to the TMC.
Let’s say Prashant Kishor had no idea of how complicated Goa is. He did not know that Luizinho is a spent force and could not even win in his own constituency of Navelim. Having no knowledge of Goa, I-PAC which was cash rich, recruited petty Goan leaders by the dozen or the hundreds.
I recall their media boss Hardeep Dugal approaching me three months before the election asking for names of potential candidates. I had virtually become their Goa consultant. However, I cut off ties with the TMC when they took the most corrupt MLA Luizinho Faleiro to lead the party in Goa. It was virtually a Kharedi Yatara. Prashant Kishor and team literally bought second rank leaders and candidates denied tickets by the Congress.
To the shock of some of the most respectable advocates like Yatish Naik and Clovis De Costa (president of the South Goa Advocates Association). This despite the fact that they joined the TMC at a public rally in Calcutta in the presence of Mamata Banerjee. The I-PAC was very active even on polling day, sending Whatsapp and Facebook messages with images of their candidates casting their votes.
But after the elections, the I-PAC team which had reportedly paid even volunteers Rs18,000 per month for three months, vanished. All I-PAC offices have closed and their media chief is back to her hometown Patiala. Maybe it is the fear that the TMC candidates will lose their deposits that has provoked Prashant Kishor to disown Goa. After all he claims to have got the BJP and Modi elected in 2014 and 2019; likewise in the case of the chief ministers of five states including Delhi, Andhra Pradesh and Tamil Nadu, and he cannot now be seen as a failure in tiny Goa.

RUSSIA V/S UKRAINE
AND a few stray thoughts on why Russia invaded Ukraine. The bread basket of the former Soviet Union, Ukraine, is also a highly industrialized country. It is a large country as big as Australia. Ukraine accounts for 40% of the petroleum and natural gas reserves of the former Soviet Union. Most importantly Ukraine has larger reserves of uranium which is a key element for making nuclear bombs. Russia does not mind Ukraine maintaining its status as an independent country like other former Soviet republics of Kazakhstan and Uzbekistan. But Russia strongly objects to Ukraine’s plan to join the European Economic Community.
This would further imply that Ukraine would become part of the North Atlantic Treaty Organisation (NATO). This is the armed wing of the EEC which has the close support of the United States. This would mean that all the talks of uranium and petroleum and natural gas would go to the EEC and not Russia.
Vladimir Putin is ten times worse than Narendra Modi. He is hell-bent on preventing Ukraine from joining the EEC and NATO. The United States on the other hand is very reluctant to come to the armed defense of Ukraine. Both the EEC and United States have limited themselves to imposing financial sanctions against Russia. The people of the USA are tired of Americans fighting and getting killed in other people’s wars such as Vietnam and more recently, Afghanistan. It is under Joe Biden as president that the last US troops in Afghanistan withdrew, a disastrous move for it was promptly taken over by the Taliban.

COVID ISOLATION
AND a last stray thought for yet another Saturday. The worst part of being infected with any variation of Covid-19 infection is the isolation. Those who reported positive have to be either hospitalized or home-isolate themselves. Home-isolation implies that you do not come into physical contact with other members of the family. Whether it is your parents if you are a child, or children if you are the parents. The protocol is that the patient uses his or her own exclusive utensils and linen during the period of quarantine or isolation.
This is a little like the old Hindu tradition which still persists with some orthodox families – of women being told to stay out of the way when they are in menstrual period. The home-isolated become untouchables in their own home. Do they have any other options for diverting their mind apart from smartphones?
Yes, there is an option, they can keep their pets – dogs, cats, for company in their room of isolation. This is because according to a senior vet, dogs and cats do not get infected by covid. However, you have to disinfect the pet’s collar, leash and fur, which comes into contact with the patient and this can transmit the infection to others in the family.