Congress bets on young faces to regain Goa

After suffering two successive defeats in the 2017 and 2022 Goa assembly elections, the Congress has brought in the next generation of leaders to regain the coastal state. Writes Amit Agnihotri.

New Delhi: After suffering two successive defeats in the 2017 and 2022 Goa assembly elections, the Congress party has brought in the next generation of leaders to regain the coastal state. Amit Patkar, 36 will be the new Goa unit chief while Yuri Alemao, 46 will be the working president. Patkar lost the Curucherum seat to the BJP by merely 600 votes while Alemao is a lawmaker.

Michael Lobo has been made the new Congress Legislature Party leader in the Goa Assembly, while Sankalp Amonkar will be deputy CLP leader and Carlos Ferreira will act as the chief whip. Patkar replaced Girish Chodankar, who had been deployed by Rahul Gandhi to strengthen the party in the coastal state. Before that, he was an AICC Secretary. “This is a young team. I will be around and guide them,” Chodankar told ETV Bharat.

The Congress had emerged as the single largest party in 2017 but the BJP tied up with regional parties and formed a government. Later, the Congress lost 10 MLAs to the saffron party.

As the 2022 elections approached, former chief minister Digambar Kamat was the sole MLA and became the face of Congress. Kamat has now been made a permanent invitee to the Congress Working Committee, which takes key decisions. The party has also appointed Savio D’Silva as the president of the south district and Viren Shirodkar the head of the north district to prepare for the 2024 national elections.

Party insiders said Congress lost around 10 seats by a margin of 3,000 votes and much of this damage happened because of the splitting of traditional Christian votes.

This time only 25 percent of the Christians voted for Congress while the remaining went either to the AAP or the TMC. Further, a new outfit Revolutionary Goans played up the “Goa for Goans” card and was backed by the BJP. This too dented the Congress vote bank. As a result, the Congress vote share came down from 28 percent in 2017 to 25 percent while the BJP maintained its vote share of 33 percent between the two elections. Most of all, the alleged mistrust for the grand old party among the voters dented its chances.

“A whisper campaign was run against us that Congress MLA would join the BJP,” a senior Congress leader said. “The fact is that while we went up from 1 to 11 lawmakers, the BJP came down from 32 to 20 MLAs,” he added.

The Congress had asked former finance minister P Chidambaram to prepare the state unit for the 2022 polls but it seems much of the strategies did not work on the ground.