20 out of 40 Goa MLA's have changed parties since 2017 polls

Panaji: The four years from 2017 have marked a new epoch in Goa's political carnival, as 50 per cent of the 40 MLAs have ceased to represent the political parties on whose ticket they were elected to the state Assembly in 2017.

The ruling BJP's magnetic broth pot appears to have drawn legislators from all hues - from Congress, of regional parties and even an Independent legislator - in four years.

'Horse-trading', which was once an affair whose brief window opened and closed days after the counting of votes polled in an Assembly election, now appears to have become a year-long phenomenon.

Since 2017, the litany of legislators who have quit their respective parties reads something like this.

After the 13-MLA-strong BJP pipped the Congress (17 MLAs) to power in 2017 with support of alliances carved overnight, the first legislator to crossover was Congress MLA Vishwajit Rane resigned from the party on March 16, the day of the floor test itself.

Vishwajit Rane, whose father Pratapsingh Rane is a veteran Congress leader and a former Chief Minister, was appointed Health Minister in the cabinet led by then Chief Minister Manohar Parrikar.

More than a year later, it was the turn of two more Congress MLAs - Dayanand Sopte and Subhash Shirodkar, a former state President, to quit the party on October 16 and join the BJP on the same day. Rane, Sopte and Shirodkar all faced by-elections which they won to become newly-minted BJP legislators.

On March 27, 2019, the BJP split the three-member Maharashtrawadi Gomantak Party legislative unit, by inducting two of its MLAs - Manohar Ajgaonkar and Dipak Pauskar - into the party.

Three times lucky already, an emboldened BJP counted a midnight raid on the Congress's ranks, taking away 10 of their lawmakers this time, leaving the Congress tottering further.

This was followed by a period of a lull as the newly-appointed Chief Minister Pramod Sawant, who succeeded Parrikar (who died in office) had a comfortable majority to see out the rest of his tenure thanks to all the crossovers.

While the year 2020 and the early half of 2021 was plagued by the pressures exerted by the pandemic, the political hunting season in Goa picked up again late in 2021 again, as the state Assembly poll beckoned.

So far three sitting MLAs - Jayesh Salgaonkar of the Goa Forward Party, former Chief Minister Ravi Naik of the Congress and independent MLA Rohan Khaunte - have quit as legislators. While the former two have already joined the BJP, Khaunte is scheduled to join the saffron party on Friday.

Another Congress MLA Luizinho Faleiro quit in March to join the Trinamool Congress, while Nationalist Congress Party's lone legislator Churchill Alemao earlier this month claimed to have merged into the Trinamool.

On Thursday, in a first, sitting BJP MLA and former Forest Minister Alina Saldanha quit the BJP and is tipped to join the Aam Aadmi Party soon.

If the decade from 1990 to 2000 gave India's smallest state 13 Chief Ministers, within the four years from 2017, as many as 20 MLAs (of the 40-member Assembly) joined political parties, different from the ones they won their seats for.