Goa Elections 2022: How BJP turned the anti-incumbency sentiment around, closer to elections

The party carefully built its line-up with winnable candidates, even rewarding defectors from other parties at the cost of angering its loyalists. (Photo by Pille Kirsi from Pexels)

Goa's  2022 verdict gave BJP 20 seats, that is, one short of a simple majority. But the saffron party will get a third term in office with three independents and one regional party, the Maharashtrawadi Gomantak Party, extending unconditional support.

The BJP's win upset exit-poll predictions but dovetails into Goa's political environment, where nothing succeeds like success, and power-seeking politicians with the wherewithal to swing elections, gravitate to the winning side, irrespective of ideology or colour. It worked for Congress in the past and is working for the BJP now.

Sensing the anti-incumbency sentiment brewing due to the party's poor performance during Covid, mining closure for over a decade, unemployment,  mismanaged pandemic-hit tourism and strained state finances --- the party sought to blunt this impact of a ten-year rule. It also sought to take pre-emptive moves to reduce further damage from Hindutva vote split, when the MGP indicated that it was going its own way. Several rounds of constituency-wise minute surveys to assess its legislator's winnability and overhaul poll strategy --a damage control exercise-- was initiated by the party's central leadership, especially Amit Shah, just ahead of polls.

Following this, the party ruthlessly dropped several of its loyal and organisational cadre, including ministers seen as having slim chances of winning and adopted a seat-by-seat winnability-above-all approach.

Read also: Will the pledges and affidavits stop defections?

Where candidates with the highest winnability indices were not already in the BJP, it poached winning candidates in every constituency from other parties, whether it was the Congress, the MGP or Goa Forward, and even from among independents. Five of the six candidates inducted in this manner, just before polls, won their seats.

Upsetting loyalists

Where surveys indicated that winners could be among the fifteen legislators that had defected from 2017-2022, BJP included them in the party's line-up at the risk of upsetting loyalists like former chief minister Laxmikant Parsekar and party totems like Utpal Parrikar, both of whom rebelled but lost at the hustings, despite the RSS backing Utpal against the BJP's official candidates. 

It gave tickets to 12 of the 15 cross-over MLAs, but only four won their seats--Atanasio Babush Monserrate, his wife Jennifer Monserrate, Subhash Shirodkar and Nilkanth Halarnkar--all formerly from the Congress. Seven defectors were rejected by voters.

The switch-over of the powerful Rane clan from the Congress to the BJP also gave the BJP a considerable edge. With former Congress Chief Minister Pratapsing Rane declining to contest for the Congress in favour of his daughter-in-law and son, health minister Viswajit Rane's shift-over to the BJP, the party was able to pocket both of the seats the family controls in the Sattari taluka. Before polling on February 14  the BJP government also made good on its promise to grant the senior Rane lifetime cabinet status, with all the attendant perks of ministerial office, though many have called the legality of the move into question.

Analysts pointed out that Congress defectors alone transferred over 60,000 votes to the BJP, bringing its vote share up marginally up from 32.5% in 2017 to 33.3 % in 2022. But while the vote share stayed in the same range, it was able to garner just 13 seats in 2017 but 20 seats in 2022, mainly due to fragmentation of votes and much smaller winning percentages required this time in the first-past-the-post system.

Splintering of opposition

A critical factor that worked in favour of the BJP was the splintering of opposition anti-BJP votes across several resource-rich parties --- all contesting in Goa's small assembly segments of 25,000-35,000 voters apiece. In previous years, Goa electoral contests saw a bipolarity between the Congress and BJP, with regional players such as the MGP and GFP as subordinates in the mix.

In contrast, the 2022 contest was remarkable for the high-octane but low-delivery entry of new political parties, like the Trinamool Congress (who drew a blank this poll) and  AAP, both prepping for a nationwide expansion and national stage positioning.  A new regional party, the Revolutionary Goans Party, turned out to be the surprise entrant as well, pulling in an average of a thousand votes in each of the 40 seats they contested. Resultantly, multi-cornered contests fragmented vote shares and saw wins with minuscule margins.

In the Ponda assembly seat, Congressman-turned-BJP candidate Ravi Naik slipped through by just 77 votes over the opposition MGP candidate. In the Priol segment, the former independent-turned-BJP candidate Govind Gaude won by a slim 213 votes. Chief Minister Pramod Sawant won by a narrow margin of 666 votes himself, over his Congress rival Dharmesh Saglani, and sustained several scares during counting.

In the Catholic-dominated, Congress stronghold of Navelim, multi-cornered fights between Christian candidates of the Congress, AAP, TMC, NCP and RG, saw the BJP's Ulhas Tuenkar pocket the seat due to a mutichannel vote-split.

AAP's incursions on the Congress strongholds of Salcete also brought down the opposition tally. The Congress won six seats in Salcete in 2017 but was only able to win four in 2022.

In a state where pre-poll positioning of sought-after linchpin politicians normally dictates outcomes, the retention and gravitation of politicians such as Vishwajit Rane, Atanasio Monserrate,  Mauvin Godinho and Rohan Khaunte in and to the BJP had already set the score before a single vote was cast. The Congress was able to add to the prowess of Digambar Kamat and Vijai Sardessai, by taking Michael Lobo from the BJP into the party fold on eve of polls, but it did not prove enough, with the former two unable to convert any influence beyond their constituencies.

The BJP's 2017 aggressive display of forming a government, despite losing the poll (it got 13 to the Congress' 17), and effectively managing Raj Bhavan, is the sort of can-do optics that weighs with politicians counting to be on the winning side.

By micro-managing its seat-by-seat winnability strategies, the party was able to overcome an anti-incumbency sentiment brewing in the state. Candidates it picked, like Atanasio Babush Monserrate were able to deliver on two seats, despite opposition within the BJP and RSS, who backed rebel Utpal Parrikar to the hilt. Coming out of the contest with a reduced margin of 716 votes, Monserrate said "I feel the BJP cadre has not accepted me in the party. I was not expecting such a low margin. I fought the unofficial candidate of the BJP as well as the Congress. I won because of my own supporters. The BJP leadership here did not manage to do damage control". Two of his aides who contested on a BJP ticket were also defeated in the polls.

In fielding 12 Catholic candidates in 2022, the BJP continued its 2012 and 2017 strategies that worked for it well earlier. A push-back from its traditional voters though seems to have resulted in just five wins this time around.

Saffron vote splitting

If the party was worried about a split of its Hindutva vote between the saffron regional MG party and itself, it was able to overcome this with winnable inductions from the Congress, which had closed its doors to defectors from its party and went with mainly new faces. It had also poached two of the MGP's winning candidates before the poll. 

The MGP which had spurned a tie-up with the BJP and opted for an alliance with the TMC was faced with an aggressive campaign from the BJP that targeted it for aligning with a party like the TMC, which the BJP painted as "pro-Muslim". In all its campaign speeches, the BJP dwelt on this.

Additionally, Sawant attempted to consolidate Hindutva votes in its favour by raising the issue of rebuilding Hindu temples razed by erstwhile Portuguese colonists in the sixteenth century. At the end of counting, the MGP, who expected to increase its tally of three seats and a vote share of 11 % in 2017, saw its seats reduced to 2 and vote share to 7.6 %.