RG’s freefall gives BJP, Congress room to breathe ahead of 2027

Margao: Revolutionary Goans (RG), which once appeared poised to reshape Goa’s electoral arithmetic as a credible third alternative, is now in a freefall. Founder and party president Manoj Parab's resignation from both his post and the party last month has brought into the open a bitter factional feud with the party’s lone MLA, Viresh Borkar, that had been simmering for months. What had begun as a youth-driven movement for Goan identity and rights has halted, in a very public unravelling. And BJP and Congress, the two national parties it once threatened, are quietly breathing easier.In the 2022 assembly elections, RG had made an impact, polling nearly 10% of the vote share, cutting into BJP and Congress votes. That 10% had represented a voter base of the young, cross-caste, and restless — prepared to look beyond the two established options. Its absence from the 2027 contest, or its presence in a diminished form, changes the math significantly.Lawyer and political analyst Radharao Gracias says the party’s early success rested on its ability to tap into a specific and very real frustration. “It came in with a bang and exploited the frustrations of young Goans. Its support base was almost entirely young — the young and unemployed,” he said. “Manoj Parab took advantage of the situation and created a niche for himself.”But the seeds of the collapse, Gracias argues, were sown early. “Parab had a tendency to centralise leadership — other voices within the party were not given adequate space to grow,” he said. The dynamic shifted decisively once Borkar won the St Andre seat. “Parab put in the hard work, but it was Borkar who gained the visibility that comes with elected office. When you are an MLA, you derive power from the legislature — you get all the exposure you want.” For Parab, who remained outside the House, matching that institutional weight was always going to be an uphill task.Political analyst Manoj Kamat is equally direct when he says that the failure of the party lay in its lack of a structured organisation. “No party can survive without a clear philosophical ideology to anchor it. RG’s philosophy was the protection of Goan interests, and agitations were held in furtherance of that. But a political party cannot sustain itself on emotional issues alone — you need a structured organisation, a clear agenda, and funding. RG succeeded in uniting people temporarily but failed to sustain that momentum,” he said.The Section 39A agitation over land conversions under the Town and Country Planning Act — which had been Borkar’s finest hour, drawing crowds to Azad Maidan and wresting a public assurance from govt — ultimately deepened the divide rather than healed it. “The 39A agitation gave Borkar enormous prominence. People began seeing him not merely as an RG leader, but as a leader of Goa. That was probably hard for Parab and his supporters to digest,” Kamat said.Kamat further pointed to the party’s inability to make political capital out of the social momentum the issue gathered. “RG failed to translate the agitation’s energy into party-building. It had no proper booth or block mechanism in place — nothing that could give a political turn to what was essentially a social movement.”Political analyst Rajendra Kakodkar identifies POGO — the demand for legislation on Persons of Goan Origin — as both the party’s defining USP and its strategic undoing. “POGO was RG’s calling card, but Parab realised too late that he could not win elections on that issue alone. In the meantime, Borkar became the stronger figure. Parab needed an issue that could win him a seat in the assembly, and when he couldn’t find one within RG, he engineered his own exit.”On the fate of that 10% vote share, Kakodkar sounds a caution. “A third front is necessary — whether united or fragmented — to ensure that those voters do not simply drift back to BJP. People who don’t want to vote Congress should not be left with no choice but to vote BJP, the way it played out in 2012.” That year, a divided anti-incumbency vote catapulted BJP to office.Kamat’s verdict on what RG’s collapse means for the broader electoral arithmetic is telling: “A weakened RG means its 10% vote share from 2022 could well return to BJP in 2027. The youth voter base that was RG’s greatest strength could go right back to the party it had once turned away from.”