Margao: The Aam Aadmi Party, which has made attacking the Congress central to its politics in Delhi, Punjab and Gujarat, is now ready to join hands with the same Congress to take on BJP in the 2027 Goa assembly polls.The party on Wednesday named a three-member team to conduct alliance negotiations on its behalf: state president Valmiki Naik, working president Gerson Gomes, and organisational secretary Prashant Naik.AAP state president Valmiki Naik said the party’s primary adversary was BJP, and that the “ideological battle” to save democracy and protect Goa needed to be fought unitedly.Explaining the rationale behind the outreach, Naik said AAP was not prepared to take the risk of another fractured mandate and believed Goa needed a stable govt with a decisive majority. He said the next govt should command at least 35 MLAs so that the BJP could not engineer defections or destabilise it once formed.Naik urged all opposition parties to set aside personal aspirations and leadership ambitions and unite in the larger interest of Goa. He said AAP was ready to enter into an alliance with like-minded opposition parties that genuinely wished to save Goa, protect democracy and defeat the BJP. Such an alliance, he said, should give Goa a stable govt, prevent defections, avoid leadership tussles and ensure govt completed its full term.The rethink follows a turbulent period for the party in Goa. AAP’s showing in the Dec 2025 zilla panchayat elections was poor, triggering the resignation of then state unit president Amit Palekar, who subsequently crossed over to the Congress.Notably, Palekar had revealed that he argued at the time of the zilla panchayat polls that the opposition ought to contest as a united front against the BJP, but the party leadership had instead opted to go it alone — a decision whose outcome now appears to have pushed AAP towards the very alliance strategy it had rejected only a few months earlier.
