PANAJI: The Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) cannot accommodate any more leaders from other parties in Goa, state panchayat and transport minister Mauvin Godinho said on Thursday.
Godinho, a former Congressman who joined the BJP ahead of the 2017 assembly elections, said the party doesn’t have any more place to ‘accommodate’ leaders from other parties who wish to join the BJP.
“We do not want more, it creates confusion... we don’t have place. Where will you accommodate them? This is our situation,” Mauvin Godinho told reporters while speaking about the BJP’s prospects in the upcoming state polls early next year.
The ruling BJP has a strength of 27 MLAs in the 40-member house after it convinced 13 Congress MLAs as well as two MLAs from the Maharashtrawadi Gomantak Party to switch sides with the most recent being the ‘en masse’ switch over by 10 Congress MLAs in 2019. The Congress, which won 17 seats in the last elections, is down to 5.
The BJP has said it is confident of retaining a majority on its own with or without an alliance.
But the induction of leaders from rival parties has created its own set of problems, particularly since it had to reward the lawmakers who joined the party after the elections at the cost of the party stalwarts.
{{/usCountry}}But the induction of leaders from rival parties has created its own set of problems, particularly since it had to reward the lawmakers who joined the party after the elections at the cost of the party stalwarts.
{{/usCountry}}Several of these leaders, most prominently former chief minister Laxmikant Parsekar, have already staked their ‘rightful’ claim to the party’s ticket though the seat he once represented now being represented by his rival who won on the Congress ticket but is now in the BJP.
Rivalries between MLAs too has come to the fore with Godinho himself squaring up against his party colleagues Michael Lobo and Alina Saldanha over each other’s ‘performance’.