Pramod Sawant: What sets Goa CM apart from his predecessor Manohar Parrikar

Parrikar was a formidable predecessor while Sawant had little to commend him other than being the deceased chief minister's protege and allegiant

Weeks into his job as chief minister — that indeed was his first ministerial assignment — Pramod Pandurang Sawant grasped his first lesson in politics. That was Darwin’s law of survival worked more unrelentingly in the smaller Indian states where the joust to grab a crumb of a moderate-sized power cake is intense enough to obliterate political loyalties and scupper personal relationships.

Sawant took over the reins of Goa after Manohar Parrikar lost the battle to cancer. Parrikar was a formidable predecessor while Sawant had little to commend him other than being the deceased chief minister’s protégé and allegiant. “He occupied Parrikar’s chair in the knowledge that he had inherited a legacy he would have to live up to and sustain,” said Sadanand Shet Tanavade, Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) general secretary, Goa unit. Sawant was 46 when he took office in March this year, but he was picked over Laxmikant Parsekar and Shripad Yesso Naik, who were senior, more experienced, and of Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS) provenance, which he was not.

Unlike Bharata in the Ramayana, who was tentative and moralistic about inheriting a throne that by right might have been someone else’s, Sawant did not look over his shoulder when it came to fortifying his position. He sacked Ramkrishna Sudin Dhavalikar, one of the two deputy chief ministers Parrikar had appointed in 2017 to shore himself up in a shaky coalition government. Dhavalikar headed the Maharashtrawadi Gomantak Party (MGP) but Sawant split the MGP, took away the two remaining legislators, Dipak Pawaskar and Manohar Ajgaonkar, and saw they merged the MGP with the BJP. In the 40-member Goa Assembly, the merger with the MGP increased the BJP’s numbers from 12 to 14 and brought it at par with the Congress. “It was a master stroke which nobody expected from the soft-spoken Sawant,” a Panaji political observer remarked.

The latest coup resulted in 10 of the 15 Congress legislators crossing over to the BJP and Sawant jettisoning another Parrikar ally, the Goa Forward Party (GFP). Like Dhavalikar, the GFP’s deputy chief minister, Vijai Sardesai, was ordered to quit and make way for a Congress renegade, who in this case was Chandrakant Kavlekar, the former Opposition leader. “Parrikar was true to his word. He would never dream of shunting out those who made him chief minister. This person only hankers after power,” said Sardesai. 

Of the turncoats, eight are Roman Catholic, a factor that the BJP’s central brass expediently spun into an “endorsement” for itself from the Goan Church. Churchill Alemao, Benaulim MLA from the Nationalist Congress Party, rejected the contention, saying, “The decision was solely the Congress’s, there was no Church pressure. Who’s to blame if the Congress wilfully gave tickets to hungry people looking to get into the government?” 

Raju Nayak, Lokmat Goa editor, said: “Everyone knows who these Congress Roman Catholics are. It’s a temporary phase. In a year, they will go back to the Congress or join a regional party.”

Unlike Parrikar, who, Goa’s political observers said, was open to loosen the RSS’s ties despite being a long-time “swayamsevak” and reach out to Christians because the Church was traditionally the Congress’s biggest strength and a serious challenge to the caste Hindus, Sawant, his pupil, was “too much in awe of the Sangh” to tilt towards the minorities. This, despite or perhaps because he never went to an RSS shakha and, had, therefore, to demonstrate the zeal of a new convert.

Sawant, an ayurveda practitioner, was a doctor in a government hospital where Parrikar sighted his political potential and introduced him to the RSS in 2000. Parrikar fielded him first in a by-election in Sanquelin, which he won in 2012, and again in 2017. Sanquelin was never a BJP-friendly seat, being part of the north Goa mining belt. That entangled the party in controversies and froze the government’s efforts to resume mining operations after the Supreme Court ban. Sawant earned his spurs with the back-to-back wins in trying circumstances. 

Yet, Nayak asserted that Parrikar and Sawant were “different”. “Though he came from the RSS, his philosophy of running Goa was different. He never consulted the Sangh before taking decisions while Sawant always goes to it,” he said. The chatter is when Sawant makes his first appointments in corporations and boards, he would likely oblige the Sangh-BJP cadres whereas Parrikar’s selection was “liberal”.

That Sawant might not entirely be his own man is evident from the fact that he consults a BJP core committee, comprising Tanavade, organising secretary and former RSS “pracharak” Satish Dhond and the state party chief Vinay Tendulkar. 

There are those like Congress’s former CM Digambar Kamat who believed it was too early to get judgmental over Sawant. “He was governed by the model code of conduct shortly after taking over, so he couldn’t do anything,” said Kamat.