Chodankar’s comeback sparks fresh crisis in Congress

Margao: Girish Chodankar was brought back as Goa Pradesh Congress Committee (GPCC) president to steady the ship — and soon found himself in a storm he didn’t see coming. Hours after his appointment, resignation letters started piling up from party functionaries upset over the change of guard.

For a party that can ill afford any more self-inflicted damage with the 2027 assembly elections closing in, the optics could not be worse.

When Amit Patkar was elevated to GPCC president in March 2022 — picked, as political analyst Prabhakar Timble put it, from “nowhere”, a man whose only party credential at that point was having been a candidate — Congress was at its nadir after a disastrous assembly election. The appointment was a gamble.

Patkar’s commitment to the party was never in question. Political analyst Cleofato Coutinho acknowledges that despite all the internal bickerings, Patkar “kept working till the very end, as though nothing was amiss”. However, Coutinho adds, “Congress failed to capitalise on the resentment against govt,” ticking off a list of squandered opportunities: the cash-for-jobs scandal, cholera deaths, the Arpora night club tragedy that claimed 25 lives, civic failures of Panaji. “These were issues the opposition should have gone to town on. But hardly any mobilisation happened.”

Timble’s observation lays bare the fault line between the Congress organisation and its legislature wing. He says Congress’s own social media handles gave almost no space to its legislators over the past year. Assembly debates, positions taken by the leader of the opposition — none of it found its way onto the party’s social media platforms. The deeper cause of this dysfunction, analysts suggest, was a near-total breakdown between the party organisation and its legislature wing. “From the time of the zilla panchayat elections, communication between the legislature party and the party functionaries had effectively collapsed,” Coutinho said.

While party insiders said the change at the helm was being talked about in the inner circles of the party for long, South Goa MP Viriato Fernandes, who has been assigned to head the campaign committee in the reconstituted GPCC, told TOI he was caught completely off-guard by the change. “The manner in which this was done was not right,” he said. “I was the only one from the newly constituted GPCC who was not taken into confidence. My question to the party is simple: Do you consider me a suspect? I have toiled alongside the party cadre to rebuild this organisation following the defection of eight of our 11 MLAs to BJP.”

Fernandes believes the party had done enough groundwork to be battle-ready, and that this was no time to effect a change of guard. “We were coasting comfortably toward the shore. A little push over the next few months, and we would have been through. Rocking the boat at this point has caused damage. For me, my state comes first, politics is secondary,” he said. He called on the party to act swiftly to contain the fallout.

The decision to bring Chodankar back appears to have been as much about the absence of alternatives as about conviction in his abilities. Many of the former senior functionaries have crossed over to the enemy camp. With that pool drained, the high command turned to a trusted, battle-tested loyalist.

“Nobody would imagine that Girish will ever leave Congress — not even if the whole world did,” Timble said. “That loyalty is his first credential. The second is his direct line to the high command. That rapport matters — it opens doors, both for human resources and capital resources.”

His Tamil Nadu assignment — where, as AICC in-charge, he helped negotiate Congress’s entry into the TVK-led govt — has also burnished his credentials as someone who can navigate alliances, an essential skill for the opposition heading into 2027.

Underpinning all of this, Timble adds, the high command was not convinced Patkar had the instinct for the electoral fight that 2027 demands. His ability to strike alliances, too, had come under a cloud.

However, analysts concur that Chodankar inherits the same intra-party fissures that his predecessor had to put up with.

“The gap between the legislature wing and the party may have narrowed,” Coutinho acknowledged. “But a new tension — between the old Patkar camp, Viriato’s circle, and the party — is already taking shape.”

However with the 2027 polls closing in, it leaves no room for a prolonged standoff.

“Girish has to organise his party and cadre to be ready when the anti-incumbency tide turns in their favour,” Timble said. “The fish is there. You have to be ready with the net.”