Ex-Congress MLA joins TMC bandwagon in poll-bound Goa

Another senior Indian National Congress (INC) leader from poll bound Goa, Aleixo Reginaldo Lourenço, the sitting MLA from Curtorim Assembly segment, on Tuesday joined the Trinamool Congress in Kolkata in the presence of party president and West Bengal chief minister Mamata Banerjee and party’s national general secretary Abhishek Banerjee.

The MLA had resigned from the grand-old-party a day earlier, and hinted that he might go the TMC way. With this new defection, the strength of Congress had reduced to two in the 40-member Goa Legislative Assembly. In the 2017 Assembly elections, the grand old party had won 17 seats.

Lourenco, who was the Congress’ working president in Goa claimed that there is a TMC wave in the state and people see Mamta Banerjee as the main challenger to the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP). Interestingly, the name of Lourenco had featured in the first list of eight candidates that the Congress had announced for the Assembly elections scheduled early next year.

In the developments which started yesterday, Lourenço, the sitting MLA from Curtorim Assembly segment, submitted his resignation to Goa Assembly speaker Namrata Ulman at her office.

The grand-old-party is witnessing defections since the last two months, with Luizinho Faleiro, former Goa chief minister and Congress leader, resigning from the party and joining the Mamata Banerjee-led TMC, which is making a lot of effort in the state. After that, another former chief minister Ravi Naik resigned as Congress MLA.

Since the victory in the West Bengal assembly polls which were held early this year, Mamta Banerjee is making a lot of effort to emerge as a key challenger to Narendra Modi led BJP at the national level, and in that she is targeting the Congress party. While experts of Indian politics feel it will be tough for the West Bengal CM to displace the Congress party as the main opposition force in the country as even now the grand-old-party is the main opposition party in 12 of the country’s 28 states and is ruling directly or indirectly in six states.