Fish curry over butter chicken: How Goa Forward scored with a back pass to BJP

Even the choice of his election symbol is aptly Goan: coconuts, one full, and another half. “Your Goan fish curry is incomplete without it,” he joked to a television presenter. But if his entire poll plank was backed by one agenda it was “Oust BJP from Goa”, they are “anti-Goans”.

Hours after the results were announced, Sardesai, 47, whose party won three of four constituencies it contested, became the state’s most talked-about man. On Sunday — at a press conference with Manohar Parrikar — the reference was complete. Parrikar — a reluctant defence minister and called the “weekend Chief Minister”, whose famous remark of preferring fish curry to butter chicken was seen as indication of him wanting to return to Panaji — desperately needed those coconuts to return to power.

Sardesai did just that. He gave the coconuts to the saffron party.

Taking the microphone from Parrikar, Sardesai himself corrected, “I might be the most odd man out today.”

Political commentators had predicted that Sudin Dhavalikar of Maharashtrawadi Gomantak Party to lend support to any formation most likely to form the government. “They have been the kingmakers in every term, except the last,” a senior police officer on duty said. What he, and the Goans in general, did not anticipate was the seats Goa Forward was adding to its tally.

With a fractured mandate for the House of 40 members, Sardesai had the magic three seats. By Sunday 3 am, he had decided – and gone with the BJP.

In a tiny state like Goa, where, Parrikar had said during campaigning, “everyone knows everyone”, the WhatsApp windows and television panels have not stopped talking about the defection. By Sunday evening, a Facebook post by Francisco Colaco, a cardiologist by profession, Sardesai’s biggest supporter and a mentor, had gone viral, with adjectives like “devil” for Sardesai.

For Goans — and especially Fatorda, where Sardesai defeated BJP’s Damu Naik by 1,334 votes — the irony couldn’t be worse. Locals who have seen his rise say it goes back to 2012, when he was denied a seat by the Congress. Having climbed the ladder, first as the Youth Congress president and later as general secretary for the party’s state unit, he never forgot what he repeatedly calls “humiliation” by the Congress at all his public campaigns.

But as an MLA — he won as an Independent from Fatorda in 2012 — he attacked the BJP.

Throughout the campaign in Fatorda this year, and at his public rallies in Saligao, Siolim, and Velim – the three other seats Goa Forward seats put up candidates, winning the first two, alongside Sardesai’s Fatorda — his speeches were punctuated with anti-BJP remarks. Towards the end of the campaign, he even said, “I am in no hurry for power. If needed, I will sit in the opposition. My principal opponent has been BJP…”
But his late-night visit to meet Nitin Gadkari took even his party president, Prabhakar Timble, by surprise.

Timble was the first to put in his papers — and accept moral responsibility for the defection. “I just decided I wanted to be away as the face of the party. The move was abrupt and abrasive. The BJP cannot be our first choice; our entire poll plank was styled as an opponent to them. Saffron cannot be Goankarpann (Goanness)” said Timble, a former state election commissioner.

Timble confirmed that talks were open with both parties. “I kept telling him (Sardesai) that we should first look at our options with the Congress. I agree it was frankly becoming difficult as Congress was delaying the matter. I told him, ‘let’s openly tell Goans the status and then take a call on BJP’. But he just walked out by morning,” he said.

In one of Sardesai’s most-viewed TV interviews done by ‘Janta Ka Reporter’, a multimedia news website, he explained why he hates BJP. Stating that most parties use the term U-turn for the BJP’s last five years in Goa, he said, “U-turn in Goa was coined by me.”

On Tuesday, from the moment he takes oath as a minister in the BJP government, Sardesai’s will be the biggest U-turn he will have to explain, Timble reminded.