Goa: BJP buries Parrikar model, whips up hardline Hindutva

Far worse than the sweltering, muggy, humid heat is the open season on hate politics that the saffron lot has visited on the state in the past month. Heading a government that embarrassingly has more former Congressmen than BJP leaders, Chief Minister Pramod Sawant dismayed many but surprised few when he ratcheted up the Hindutva agenda in Goa shortly after government formation.

Observers reckon there are benefits on two counts here. It endears him with the central leadership that many believe is pursuing an aggressive Hindutva policy nationwide to shore up the 2024 campaign and finally aligns Goa with that agenda. In doing so, there are brownie points to be won, besides consolidating the top job in the cynical ecosystem of competitive divisiveness now playing out in India and Goa. With a poor governance record during his 2019-2022 term when he was nominated by central party leaders, Sawant's RSS roots have given him a key position and set him apart in a ministry full of more senior and experienced former Congressmen who switched to the BJP. On this ground, he also beat back the competition for the top post in rival Vishwajit Rane - a process that delayed government formation for weeks after the March 10 Assembly election result.

More than any Goa chief minister in the past, Sawant has now demonstrated a willingness to follow Nagpur and New Delhi's new agenda for the state. A series of statements from him have set the tone for divisive hardline communal polarisation in a state where the BJP had hitherto consciously steered away from such trends for strategic reasons, which it now feels no longer holds.

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The BJP under Manohar Parrikar began its governance innings in 2000 with attempts to polarise Christians and Hindus in the state - cancelling Good Friday and St Francis Xavier feast holidays, among other measures at the time. A pushback from society and a realisation after its 2007 electoral loss that Goa's electoral arithmetic would not permit the BJP to rise to power, simply on Hindutva polarisation, made Parrikar change tack.

A successful policy of fielding Christian candidates, dropping its hardline Hindutva stance in Goa (unlike the rest of the country), pointedly keeping beef politics and cultural rabble-rousers out of the Goa arena thus gave it its first majority government in 2012. RSS hardliners, who found it hard to stomach such strategies at the time, found themselves shunted to other states, as was current organising secretary Satish Dhond. The RSS in Goa split in 2016 on the issue of the Parrikar government continuing grants to Church-run English primary schools. That was then. Not to mention that its embrace of the centrist position in Goa ate into the Congress narrative and its vote base with minority Christians.

The policy of incorporating Christian politicians in the BJP may have worked well for it politically in 2012 and 2017 - but it faced a significant pushback and backlash from sections of its traditional voters in 2022. Not from Christians, who continued to vote for its candidates in the BJP, but from ideological Sangh supporters, possibly irate at the growing Christian legislator presence, both within the BJP and within politics, as a result, and an ouster from the Hindutva party.

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Attempting to blunt anti-incumbency and craft a win at any cost in 2022, the BJP had given tickets to several Congress defectors, overlooking loyalists, including Parrikar's son Utpal Parrikar. However, the election results soon made it clear to the BJP that its incorporation policy had evoked a strong pushback from core Sangh supporters and karyakartas. While in 2012 and 2017, it was able to convince its core Hindutva base of the need for incorporation and BJP's Christian candidates won massively, from a pooling of their own individual, Christian community and BJP's Hindu base votes, to give it a nearly 80-90 per cent strike-rate, but 2022 was a different story. Though the party fielded 12 Christian candidates, only 5 of them won. Where it tacitly supported three independents, two of them won.

It was observed that a strong undercurrent of the Sangh Parivar's campaign in several seats across Goa was aimed at a Hindu consolidation and against several of the BJP's Christian candidates while steering its traditional vote base towards any non-Christian candidate from any opposition party, likeliest to win - resulting in several of the BJP's Christian candidates losing, or where they did win, managing to do so with massively diminished margins. In Panjim, the campaign was most palpable in support of Utpal Parrikar against the BJP's official nominee, a Christian.

The party was only able to reach the number of 20 legislators by the skin of its teeth, primarily due to a successful strategy of keeping the opposition divided and splintering of opposition and specifically Christian votes, across five parties, resulting in very low vote percentages to score wins (as low as 23 per cent in one segment).

Taking cognisance of these voting trends, the BJP in Goa seems to be now back-peddling to its 2000-2005 playbook of polarisation and consolidation of majority vote bases or attempting to give off this impression and placate its traditional ideological supporters. Chief Minister Pramod Sawant announced a Rs 20 cr budgetary allotment to ostensibly rebuild temples destroyed by the Portuguese in the sixteenth century. He has made repeated statements, timed during the Christian holy week of Good Friday and Easter, that religious conversion would not be tolerated in Goa, while it was pointed out that no specific instances had been identified. Ram Navami related incidents took place in one isolated incident, marring Goa's unblemished record of communal harmony.

But while the party may have intended to keep the polarisation tendencies against the state's 26 per cent Christian population in control mode, limited to statements and on a slow burn, saffron hardliners seem intent on testing the government's intent. They are pushing the envelope by ratcheting up the divisive rhetoric.

Former RSS chief Subhash Velingkar, now heading an outfit called the Hindu Raksha Mahasangh (after failing badly in the political electoral arena on his own) along with the Sanatan Saunsta's Hindu Janajagruti Samiti (HJS), has waded into the field with a more emotive, offensive game. Playing on the Kashmir Files, whose screening the Goa government facilitated with tax breaks, Velingkar has got back in the limelight and is to launch what they have termed the Goa Files - delving into the sixteenth-century Portuguese conquest of Goa, the imposition of the Inquisition on neo-Christians at the time and Portuguese territorial skirmishes with the neighbouring Marathas of that era - to question the belief systems around Spanish priest-turned saint, Francis Xavier, whose devotees span religious communities in Goa and whose relics lie in the region's most sacred Catholic church here.

While there is nothing new about Velingkar and the HJS's recent invective and travelling exhibitions about any of these issues that have been doing the rounds for years, what is new, is the publicity it garnered this time on the back of the overtly divisive politics now unleashed in the past month in Goa, that commentators see as linked to the 2024 general elections. Goa holds just two Lok Sabha seats - North Goa, currently held by the BJP's Sripad Naik, while the South Goa seat by the Congress's Francisco Sardinha. Calculating that it lost the South Goa seat in 2019 due to its break with the regional saffron entity, the Maharashtrawadi Gomantak Party, at that time - the BJP's central leadership has bent over backwards to now mend its fences with the MGP in the recent government formation. The BJP central leadership ignored both Sawant's and the local BJP's wishes to have MGP leader Ramkrishna Sudin Dhavlikar included in the Goa 2022 cabinet, despite the latter's election-time diatribe against both the BJP and Sawant and MGP's tie-up with the Trinamool Congress, that it lost no time in junking post-polls.

The Inquisition/'my-saint-is-superior-to-your-saint' tropes also serve the political purpose of putting not just the state's confident Christians on the defensive but keeping the BJP's Christian legislators on leash. Velingkar - who never hid his opposition to Parrikar's policy on Christian matters in Goa - once even raised a rebellion in the RSS on this count - may well be pushing the envelope beyond what the BJP currently desires at the moment. Sawant has maintained silence on the St Xavier issue, though Sripad Naik and power minister Nilesh Cabral have said Velingkar's views do not reflect the government's stance.

The BJP may have picked up 20 seats but is well aware that it won by just 33 per cent of the vote share, with a strong anti-incumbency sentiment driving the remaining 67 per cent vote share in the 2022 poll. High petrol prices, imminent power tariff hikes, power outages, water shortages, both to industry and domestic consumers, poor road and public transportation conditions, besides failure to restart mining and a stalled foreign charter tourism season - brought back all the pre-election voter angst when the public realised it was landed with the same old wine in an old bottle, that moreover took a month to fix the contours of its own house. As videos dissing the new government began circulating, the damage control mechanism of distraction, diversion, and division seems to have been moved into play.

(Pamela D'Mello is a journalist based in Goa.)