Kamats all too familiar clarification: Was misquoted

Goa Chief Minister Digambar Kamat seems to be living constantly in a denial mode as he makes one controversial statement...

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Goa Chief Minister Digambar Kamat seems to be living constantly in a denial mode as he makes one controversial statement after another only to deny it to the party high command. A day after he reportedly sought to undermine the Womens Reservation Bill urging women not to join politics,he told the Central leadership of the party that he had been misquoted again.

I have spoken to him. He was misquoted, AICC general secretary in charge of Goa B K Hari Prasad told The Indian Express. At a public function on Saturday,the Chief Minister was reported to have stated,Dont fall for 33 percent reservation. Politics makes you go crazy. Women play an important role in transforming the society. We should look after our next generation. He,however,had a different story to tell when the AICC General Secretary called him up seeking explanation. The CM argued that he had actually urged women to join politics.

This came barely six weeks after he had earned the ire of the Congress high command for terming Gujarat Chief Minister Narendra Modi as his best friend. Asked at a press conference at his residence on April 8 whether he would visit Gujarat to participate in the Golden Jubilee celebrations,Kamat had reportedly said,If they have invited,I will go. Modi is my best friend. Confronted by the party high command,the CM was quick to deny it.

Kamat recently gave a clean chit to senior BJP leader Manohar Parrikar in a multi-crore scam relating to building infrastructure for the 2004 International Film Festival of India IFFI,which is being probed by the CBI. Speaking to reporters on April 18,Kamat,a minister in the BJP-led coalition government in 2004,had said,I was part of the core committee myself. I dont think any wrong decision was taken by the core committee which decided on infrastructure creation.

This provoked Congress MP Shantaram Naik to hold a press conference on May 11 to assert that crores of rupees had been misappropriated for creating infrastructure for the IFFI and the Goa Congress unit had documented the illegality in a fact-finding report in 2004. When Naik met the CM later,Kamat was learnt to have denied reports saying that he had not given any clean chit and had only stated that the core committee headed by Parrikar was not involved in any wrongdoing.

Although not many in the Congress are convinced by the CMs denials,party sources said they were constrained by coalition compulsions. With the government in Goa always on shaky ground due to pulls and pressures from coalition partners,any attempt to rein in the CM,who had joined the Congress after engineering the downfall of the BJP government in 2005,could further destabilise it.

The CM had reportedly sought to summarise the situation at an election rally on April 20 last year: The only reason the coalition government in Goa has survived is because of God.