With 85 councillors backed by the BJP winning the 105 municipal council seats up for grabs, our party has swept the polls to six municipal councils and one municipal corporation, state Bharatiya Janata Party president Sadanand Shet Tanavade said on Friday.
Tanavade also said that BJP-backed candidates had won the Valpoi, Bicholim, Pernem, Curchorem and Canacona municipal councils and swept the elections to the Corporation of the City of Panaji, Goa's only municipal corporation winning 25 out of the 30 seats in the state's largest civic body.
The Congress has claimed victory in the elections to the Cuncolim Municipal Council polls.
The one major blip in BJP's success story in the municipal polls, results for which were declared on Monday, occurred in the lone bypoll to the Sanquelim Municipal Council, the legislative turf of Chief Minister Pramod Sawant's Sanquelim constituency, in which the BJP-backed candidate lost to a Congress-back candidate in a narrow contest.
"People have given a good mandate to BJP backed candidates. Out of 105 councillors, we have won 85 councillors. We will examine why we lost the Cuncolim municipal polls," Tanavade told reporters. The elections were not held on party lines and mainstream political parties had either backed individual candidates or panels of candidates for the municipal polls.
Asked about the loss in the Sanquelim municipal bypoll, Tanavade said: "We lost by 16 votes. In fact, a BJP candidate has never won that particular ward from 1999".
Reacting to the poll results, Leader of Opposition Digambar Kamat hinted that the BJP had appropriated winning candidates and claimed that the BJP had not performed well at all.
"We have managed to win the Cuncolim Municipal Council. In most places, independent candidates had also performed well. I have been saying this. The beginning of the end of the BJP in Goa is near," Kamat said.