Mumbai: In his previous term as Goa Congress president, Girish Chodankar had tendered his resignation on three occasions on “moral grounds” after the party put up a lacklustre performance in different polls. His resignation was finally accepted the third time when the Congress lost the 2022 Goa assembly elections.
This is why, when the All India Congress Committee (AICC) named Chodankar as the new Goa Congress president about nine months before the next assembly polls, it raised a few eyebrows.
Political analyst Cleofato Coutinho said a change in leadership ahead of elections was necessary for the party.
“There is a definite space that has been created for the Opposition this time, and the existing leadership wasn’t necessarily able to capture that space. The party organisation is crumbling, so in a way, there was a need to change the leadership and enthuse some freshness into the party ahead of elections. The grouse is that people in Congress with grassroots connect weren’t consulted,” Coutinho added.
Party leaders said Chodankar is a leader familiar with the organisational structure, and a name from the state’s dominant Bhandari community (which falls under the Other Backward Classes) at a time when the Congress has one MP, Viriato Fernandes, and the Leader of Opposition, Yuri Alemao, from the Catholic community.
However, what has not gone down well with many in the party is the lack of a wider consultation among Goa Congress functionaries and workers on who they would like to see as their next state president.
Goa Congress MP Viriato Fernandes told ThePrint even he was not taken into confidence before making the new appointment. “I am absolutely not aware. I have not been consulted, and I have not been taken into confidence. I am the only Congress MP at present and have been in constant touch with people from not just south Goa (his constituency), but also the north.”
Loyalists of outgoing president Amit Patkar are also upset, they believe he strived hard to build the organisation ground up after Chodankar failed to stem defections.
Chodankar’s appointment has triggered a wave of resignations within the Goa Congress. General secretary Manisha Usgaonkar, social media chairman Divyakumar, and state social media coordinator Shamila Siddiqui resigned, among other block-level office bearers.
“He (Patkar) travelled across the state, spent his own money, but tried to build the organisation back. Party MP Viriato Fernandes too personally visited homes across north and south Goa trying to get back all the karyakartas who had left the party disillusioned and joined other parties like Aam Aadmi Party and the Trinamool Congress before the 2022 polls,” a party functionary who did not wish to be named said.
Leaders from the Patkar camp also talk about how the Congress was able to improve its tally in the Zilla Parishad polls last year from four seats to 10.
Moreover, Chodankar’s track record the last time he was Goa Congress president has not been the best given the party’s repeated defeats and defections.
Manikrao Thakre, AICC in charge for Goa, defended Chodankar. “Across the country, within Congress we have given second chances to many leaders. Secondly, we don’t just see a leader’s work in the state, we see his work across the entire Congress machinery. Girish Chodankar has proven himself to be an able, hardworking leader. He effectively got the Congress power sharing in the Tamil Nadu government as well,” he told ThePrint.
Thakre added: “And if we look at the state, there have been so many defections from the party that among the leaders who are left now, he is the senior most. We also need to send a strong message to the OBC community by trusting someone who is a senior name from the community with an important party position.”
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Chodankar’s last stint as Goa Congress chief
Chodankar has climbed up the ranks in the Goa Congress, and is also known to be in the good books of Rahul Gandhi. The leader started his political career in 1990 as a booth-level head of Comba in Fatorda. He made his way up to the Fatorda Block Youth Congress Committee, and then to the position of chief of the Goa Pradesh Youth Congress.
In 2011, he was moved to the AICC secretariat in Delhi and took over the reins of the National Students Union of India. In 2013, Chodankar made it to the post of AICC secretary.
Four years later, the Congress emerged as the single-largest party in the 2017 Goa polls, but failed to form the government as the BJP cobbled together a patchwork alliance with the Maharashtrawadi Gomantak Party and the Goa Forward Party. The BJP brought in Defence Minister Manohar Parrikar to lead this alliance as CM. Parrikar had to contest a by-poll to hold on to the CM’s post, and Chodankar had grabbed headlines by being Parrikar’s worthy opponent, getting 32.5 percent of the total votes polled and losing to the Goa CM by 4,803 votes.
In 2018, Chodankar replaced Shantaram Naik as the Goa Congress president. In the next few years, the Congress crumbled under the weight of losses and defections while Chodankar was at the helm. The same year as he joined as Goa Congress chief, the party saw its first two defections in what later turned into a wave.
In October that year, Subhash Shirodkar and Dayanand Sopte resigned as Congress MLAs and joined the BJP.
In the 2019 Lok Sabha polls, the Congress, which got a severe drubbing nationally, won only one of the two Lok Sabha seats in Goa and only one of the four assembly seats that had bypolls. Chodankar had at that time offered to resign as Goa Congress president. He had contested the Lok Sabha poll as a candidate from North Goa, and had lost to the BJP. He, however, continued in the post.
The following year, Chodankar once again offered to resign when the Congress put up a poor showing in the Zilla Parishad polls. The party had won only four of the 49 seats that went to polls, while the ruling BJP secured 32 seats. This time too, his resignation wasn’t immediately accepted, and Chodankar went on to serve as Goa Congress president right till after the 2022 elections, when the party won just 11 out of the 40 seats in the Goa assembly as against the BJP’s 20. Chodankar resigned in March that year and was replaced by Patkar.
Political commentator Cleofato Coutinho told ThePrint that when the party contemplated a change now, it did not have too many options as it had not been able to create leadership from within. “The leaders that the party created have defected to other parties,” he added.
Between the 2017 polls and the 2022 polls, a lot had changed. The Congress, which had emerged as the single-largest party with 17 seats in the 2017 polls, was down to two MLAs in the house by 2021.
Then in September 2022, after the state polls, eight of the Congress’s 11 newly-elected MLAs also defected to the BJP, leaving the party with a measly number of three elected representatives.
“Our problem is the person who has been appointed in the place. Under whom there were losses and defections, he himself put in his resignation and the party leadership accepted it,” Usgaonkar, one of the leaders who resigned post Chodankar’s appointment, said in a video statement.
Thakre told ThePrint that while there is some criticism of the party’s decision to appoint Chodankar now, “there were just as many people who were complaining about the organisation being lacklustre before the leadership change”.
‘Will get 21 seats by hook or by crook’
Over a year after losing the state polls and the post of the Goa Congress chief, Chodankar was appointed as a permanent invitee of the Congress Working Committee. He took on the responsibility of being the AICC in charge for states such as Sikkim, Tripura, Nagaland and Manipur, before taking over the same responsibility for Tamil Nadu and Puducherry in 2025.
As the AICC in charge for Tamil Nadu, Chodankar led a hard bargain with the Dravida Munnetra Kazhagam with which it was in an alliance ahead of assembly polls in April this year. When the results threw up a hung assembly, under Chodankar’s leadership, the party swiftly backed the Vijay-led TVK and got a share of power in Tamil Nadu for the first time since 1967.
Thakre told ThePrint that the party will establish a dialogue with everyone not happy with the leadership change, and bring them on board to work together.
Interacting with reporters in Goa Sunday when Chodankar took charge, Thakre also said that he had spoken to Patkar, who had assured him that he was not upset with the decision. “Amit Patkar did well for four years, we would like to thank him. But the Congress party’s rule is that when the leadership calls for a change, party workers accept it. I have spoken to Amit Patkar and he said he is not upset with the party and we will all work together.”
Meanwhile, Chodankar has set his sights on clinching 21 out of 40 seats in the Goa assembly “by hook or by crook so that no one will dare to leave the party and join BJP”.
Speaking to reporters Sunday, he said his priority will be to focus on strengthening organisational structure right till the booth and expose alleged scams of the BJP government, which Chodankar said has “put Goa up for sale”.
This time, the new Goa Congress president said, candidates will be declared early so that they have enough time for ground work, and also reiterated something that the party has often said in Goa—that there will be no tickets for defectors.
Patkar was not present when Chodankar took charge, but he wrote on X that “though positions may change, the purpose of public life remains constant: to serve….To every Congress worker across Goa, I wish to say this: our mission remains unchanged…”
(Edited by Gitanjali Das)
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