Without Ravi, the fight for Ponda gets much closer

Panaji: The death of Ravi Naik has set the stage for Ponda constituency’s first by-election. This election, which has to be held within six months, will be a major litmus test ahead of the 2027 assembly election. All three major political parties in the state — BJP, MGP, and Congress — have a strong presence in Ponda.All three parties will have to go back to the drawing board to chalk out a strategy to test their political strength. While BJP is currently in an alliance with MGP, the two parties contested the 2022 polls independently. Naik had joined BJP on the eve of that election, and won the seat for the saffron party for the first time, albeit by just 77 votes.Naik secured 7,514 votes, narrowly edging out MGP’s Ketan Bhatikar, who won 7,437 votes.The difference in vote share among BJP, MGP, and Congress is around 2%. During the last election, BJP secured 29.1% of the votes, followed by MGP with 28.8% and Congress with 26.5%. Naik first won the constituency in 1984, on an MGP ticket.In the 2019 Shiroda by-election, BJP and MGP locked horns. Even being part of govt, MGP, represented by its president Pandurang Dhavalikar, contested the election against Subhash Shirodkar, who had quit Congress to join BJP. Shirodkar won the seat by just 76 votes — he secured 10,661 and Dhavalikar, 10,585.A political observer said that there are a sizable number of votes for all three parties, and even a 2% swing can change the result. He said that BJP was only able to win the seat thanks to Naik, who had his own followers; otherwise, BJP would have lost.In the 2012 assembly election, Naik, who was the home minister in the Congress govt, was defeated by the BJP-MGP alliance.The political observer said that with the increase in Ponda’s minority population, Congress could put up a tough fight if it puts its house in order and selects a good candidate.“It is difficult to say at this moment whether BJP-MGP will continue their alliance and put forward an alliance candidate for the by-election. If MGP, like last time in the Shiroda by-election, decides to contest it, it will be difficult to predict the result,” he said.