Panaji: GFP’s decision to walk out of an alliance with Congress and join hands with AAP has provided Goan voters with a flashback of 2017, when GFP aligned with BJP despite winning on an anti-BJP plank, said state Congress president Girish Chodankar.He said the GFP-AAP tie-up went against the electorate’s sentiments, and that local NGOs submitted a memorandum urging all opposition parties to contest the elections as a united front. “GFP and AAP don’t have a large presence in the state. They have gone against local sentiment. The voters want a united opposition,” he told Goa News Hub, a local online news portal.The Congress president said his party had exercised restraint with GFP despite what he described as months of provocation. “For the past three months, (GFP chief) Vijai Sardesai has been criticising us and speaking about defections, saying that he cannot trust us even though he is our alliance partner and our alliance talks were on. We never criticised him back,” Chodankar said.He also aimed at AAP national convener Arvind Kejriwal, criticising the party’s campaign videos targeting Congress. “When Kejriwal says his fight is against Congress, and when they unnecessarily release videos targeting Congress, in which women are portrayed in a bad light, the tone is regressive. It is objectionable,” Chodankar said.Asked if the door remains open for GFP to join the Congress-RG combine, Chodankar said that such a proposal would be examined jointly by the alliance committees of both parties. “We have not given a knee-jerk reaction, and we have begun to see that people themselves have started to reject the AAP-GFP alliance,” he said.On the Fatorda seat, currently held by Sardesai, Chodankar said Congress would wait to assess the situation before deciding on its candidate. “If Congress contests from Fatorda, it will contest to win Fatorda, not to defeat Sardesai,” he said, adding that Sardesai and AAP had “no right” to raise questions about defections.
