Team Goemkarponn
PANAJI: In a letter to Governor P S Sreedharan Pillai, the Opposition Congress Party demanded the immediate removal of the Pramod Sawant-led government and the creation of an inquiry panel led by a retired High Court judge to look into recent communal incidents in the State.
The vice-president of the Goa Pradesh Congress Committee (GPCC), Sunil Kawthankar, wrote a letter to the governor claiming that communal conflicts have harmed people and the state’s social fabric.
Kawthankar said that Jairam Ramesh, Member of Parliament former Union Minister and charge of Communication All India Congress Committee has reiterated his demand.
“The problem has gotten worse due to the government’s inaction. Chief Minister Pramod Sawant’s administration had failed to safeguard the people and uphold law and order, and if it remained in office, the state would become much more unstable,” said Kawthankar
In light of the Sawant government’s collusion with those responsible for the state’s heightened intercommunal tensions and its willful inaction in addressing the law and order crisis, Kawathankar urged the Governor to use constitutional authority to recommend the Sawant government’s removal from office.
He described the situation in Goa as unusual, saying that long-standing communal harmony is being methodically destroyed in order to achieve limited political objectives.
In light of the severe public backlash against the BJP government in the state over a range of issues, including rampant corruption, environmental destruction caused by massive illegal hill cutting, and the destruction of forested land to make way for mega real estate projects that threaten Goa’s identity, culture, and heritage, Kawthankar urged the governor to form a probe panel headed by a retired High Court judge to investigate the sudden escalation of communal tensions.
As per Kawthankar’s assertion, the fallout resulted from the Goa Police’s purposeful failure to act on the spur of the moment in response to former RSS Goa Prant chief Subhash Velingkar’s remarks about St. Francis Xavier allegedly hurting religious sentiments. Other BJP leaders also made similar remarks in public.
“This begs the question of whether these occurrences were planned to happen in a particular order in order to sow religious strife in the otherwise calm state of Goa and deflect attention away from the real problems that the state is facing,” he added.
