Both of them contested the elections and lost the seat to Jit Arolkar of the Maharashtrawadi Gomantak Party (MGP). Former Goa chief minister Laxmikant Parsekar, who has represented Mandrem, the North Goa coastal constituency, for three consecutive terms, left the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) in 2022 after the party chose to field Dayanand Sopte from the seat.
The Maharashtrawadi Gomantak Party gave Goa its first chief minister in 1963 after its integration with India in December 1961. In the 1994 elections, the BJP won four seats – the first time that the party won an assembly constituency — largely supported by the MGP’s voter base. It aligned with the BJP between 2000 and 2005, with the Congress between 2007 and 2012, and then with the BJP since then. Across this period, the only pre-poll alliance with the BJP was in 2012 when the two parties came together to defeat the Congress. In 2019, despite being part of the ruling alliance, the MGP fielded candidates against the BJP in that year’s by-polls.
This time, Parsekar and his former rival Sopte have set aside years of bitter political feud to unite against Arolkar to reclaim Mandrem. In doing so, they are setting the stage for an escalating row between the BJP and its alliance partner, the MGP, ahead of next year’s election. Its dominance continued through the 1960s and 1970s until the Congress unseated it. Faced with declining influence, the MGP first aligned with the BJP in the early 1990s as the senior partner. BJP leader and Goa transport minister Mauvin Godinho has backed Arolkar, urging people to re-elect the MGP legislator. But the remark hasn’t gone down well with colleagues in Godinho’s own party.
“I leave the decision to the party,” Parsekar told HT. Dhavalikar hit back, reminding the chief minister that the party has “at least 3,000 votes in each constituency”.
