Goa: BJP, AAP Have an Edge, While Cong Battles With Graft Charges

Both BJP and AAP have an edge in Goa where a 20 percent margin may decide the winner, writes David Devadas.

The fact that half-a-dozen serious candidates are contesting most of Goa’s 40 constituencies has made a multitude of permutations and combinations possible. Even sophisticated computers would find it tough to make a credible prediction about the next government- even if millions of bits of data were processed from across the state.

No wonder most Goans are convinced that no party will win a majority, and that the next assembly will be unstable – if not hung. That is quite possible.

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Minor Shifts Could Tilt Balance

However, it is in precisely such a scattered and multi-party race that the first-past-the-post system of elections is designed to throw up a majority. This system picks up even relatively minor trends that might change voting patterns by a couple of percent – as long as such a trend holds across many constituencies.

So, in Goa, it is possible that a single party might garner enough votes to slip through in a large number of constituencies. After all, victory margins could be small – and, in a field in which half-a-dozen candidates could each take about ten percent of the vote or more, a winner may need no more than 15 or 20 percent.

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Small Constituencies

What makes this contest even more unpredictable is the fact that the number of voters in each constituency is very small by Indian standards – just five percent the number in most of Uttar Pradesh’s constituencies. Since each constituency in Goa has, on an average, only about 25,000 voters, a winner may get through with just three or four thousand votes – even less if the turnout is poor.

Goans are not used to a dozen candidates in a single constituency – as is the case in these elections. But if a large number of candidates of any one party do happen get through, bringing a majority or near-majority, it will most likely either be the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) or the Aam Aadmi Party (AAP).

If it is the BJP, it will owe its victory to inertia and familiarity – the fact that anti-incumbency is far less than last time. Only an AAP victory would represent a vote of hope – although the general sentiment of AAP backers is that it might just be worth trying out a new alternative.

Corrupt Image Dogs Congress

The Congress, the third party that is contesting a large number of seats, seems less likely to achieve that. For one thing, the image of reckless, unrestrained corruption which brought it down last time, still lingers. Second, it suffers a leadership crisis both at the national and the state levels.

Broadly speaking, the Goa electorate is uninspired by the ruling BJP government a week before polling for a new assembly. But they also remain by and large disgusted by the apparently unending trail of corruption that the Congress had brought before that. So only a few candidates of these two parties that dominated Goa politics for several decades have positive local backing in their respective constituencies.

This general ennui within the two stalwart parties has brought several other parties into serious play – and that is why, for the first time, half-a-dozen parties are in the fray in a large number of constituencies. For the past few decades, the Congress and the BJP have dominated the state’s politics.

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Smaller Parties in the Fray

Last time, two of the more significant other parties were allied with each of them. The Nationalist Congress Party (NCP) had allied with the Congress, and the Maharashtrawadi Gomantak Party (MGP) formed a coalition with the BJP.

State-based parties such as the Goa Vikas Party, Su-raj Party, and Goa Forward, too have a significant presence in a few constituencies. In addition, some of the independents in the fray too have strong local backing in their respective pockets. In such a fractured scenario, anyone could scrape through to victory with even about 20 percent of the vote.

(A journalist with expertise on politics and geopolitics, the writer has been a visiting professor and has written books on Kashmir. He can be reached @david_devadas. This is an opinion piece and the views expressed above are the author’s own. The Quint neither endorses nor is responsible for the same.)

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