Enter, Parrikar the politician - Herald

Enter, Parrikar the politician March 10, 2013 BY GLENN COSTA ant@herald-goa.com PANJIM: Chief Minister Manohar Parrikar has over his years in public life built for himself a reputation that even many of his critics concede is one of being an able administrator, a technocrat and a man not known for suffering fools gladly. As his second year in office begins, however, what seems to have has escaped popular attention is that in this latest stint as chief minister beginning March 2012, Parrikar has emerged as a politician par excellence too, showing himself amenable to rolling up his sleeves and getting involved in the nitty-gritty of realpolitik. The effect: His intra-party rivals have been outwitted and/or sidelined, effectively leaving him as not just the party’s tallest leader in Goa, which he has been over the past decade to be fair, but also effectively its only leader (though naturally, on paper at least, there are others). BJP’s second-rung leaders like Damodar Damu Naik and even Shripad Naik ~ both Bahujan Samaj faces, incidentally ~ are out of effective reckoning and the chief minister has managed to strengthen his hold over the party organization thereby affording him the necessary muscle to sideline perceived rivals while simultaneously quelling any murmurs of dissent among his legislators. An example, whether by fortune or design ~ and the the jury is still out on that ~ is of Shripad Naik’s son Siddhesh who lost the recent panchayat election and was effectively blindsided when it came to the election of the youth BJP wing chief. Earlier, Shripad effectively outmaneuvered himself out of coming into to local politics after his nominee Govind Parvatkar lost the Porvorim assembly seat to Rohan Khaunte a businessman with long-held political ambitions, who won as an independent. Then there was the rather public snub delivered by Parrikar to Shripad during the former's Jan Sampark Abhiyan in Panjim a couple of months ago forcing Shripad to offer a not-too-veiled riposte. For the state unit president's post, Parrikar managed to get his man Vinay Tendulkar re-elected after all the hype of the possibility of Damu being rehabilitated. Damu's political rehabilitation was in fact limited to being appointed head of the Margao Ravindra Bhawan, and his resentment is palpable to those who have interacted with him but he probably knows as a politician himself that Parrikar has upped the ante. The chief minister's hold over the organization~ that is run on a day-to-day basis by his trusted man who is described by a party insider as an “apparatchik who was often accused of being arrogant during the previous Parrikar innings and in the wilderness for a long time after that"~ is now at its strongest. And his man, unlike Damu, was rehabilitated before the last assembly poll, though, for what a Parrikar supporter termed his “intimate knowledge of the grassroots party infrastructure”. He is said to know party karyakartas (activists) in most villages by name. This political hold on both party and government has ensured that Parrikar could afford to resist the pressure on him put by a section of his MLAs in a bid to squeeze out concessions and sops and dare them to do their worst. On the Shripad issue, there is a proposal from a certain section of BJP sympathizers that Shripad be brought into local politics by giving him the San Andre ticket while the present San Andre MLA Vishnu Wagh be given a boost upwards and given the North Goa ticket. However, on the flip side, and given the presence of Wagh at so many functions along with the chief minister, there is an insiders' view that he is being projected as the alternative face of the Bahujan Samaj in the BJP vis-a-vis Damu and Shripad. There are indications that the latter scenario is more likely ~ after some initial hiccups for a short while after the 2012 assembly poll~ and that Wagh will be the likely counterweight to the Bahujan Samaj heft earlier wielded by the Shripad-Damu duo. In the last assembly, after the then Opposition leader Parrikar, the one who shone in debate as well in taking up issues was the youngish, articulate Damu who was being spoken of as the new GenNext leader of the BJP before he was abruptly brought down to ground after the decisive win registered against him by the Congress-turned-Independent candidate Vijai Sardessai. Damu’s supporters have been crying hoarse about various conspiracy theories including a pamphlet distributed among traditional BJP voters on voting “guidelines.” Parrikar’s growing political acumen ~and ruthlessness ~ is also evident in the way he strategically sought to discredit the Congress in its bastion, Salcete on the issues of corruption and family politics. So effective was his strategy that it forced the normally safe-bet Congress vote to rebel against status quo politics and vote out some very big names. In Salcete, the general mood was that the Congress was corrupt and this was fueled by a shrewd media campaign pushed by certain sections of the media sympathetic to the cause. Of course, the arrogance of veteran Congress politicians who had ruled the roost for long helped Parrikar too. This correspondent was witness to an exchange between a Congress MLA contestant and a resident when the latter asked the former openly "Where are you going to go? You people (referring to the dominant minority community) have no choice.” Parrikar the politician smelt an opportunity and the rest, as they say, is history. Today, Parrikar in his new avatar is portrayed as a “people's man” as opposed to his earlier technocrat-administrator-clean image persona. But politics is a funny business, especially when one starts thinking and acting like a politician qua politician. http://www.oheraldo.in/News/Main%20Page%20News/Enter-Parrikar-the-politician/71747.html