In any healthy democracy the vote of the people is not a temporary loan that politicians may later reassign like surplus furniture. It is a nontransferable asset. Once the ballot is cast, the resulting mandate belongs to the electorate and cannot be traded, gifted, or quietly walked across the aisle without their consent. In Goa this basic principle has been treated as optional. The result is a political culture in which protecting Goan interests is endlessly promised while the very instrument of that protection, the people’s electoral will, is repeatedly emptied of meaning.
The story begins with elections that looked decisive. In 2017 the Congress emerged as the single largest party. Voters had spoken with reasonable clarity. Within days the arithmetic was rearranged. Legislators elected on one platform discovered sudden affection for another. Government formation followed the new numbers rather than the original verdict. The same pattern repeated with greater efficiency in 2022. Congress candidates, many of whom had sworn public oaths of loyalty before temples, churches, and a dargah, later found the path to the ruling benches irresistible. Eight of the eleven Congress members who had just been elected crossed over. Over the longer stretch from 2017 onward, twenty three individuals who entered the assembly on a Congress ticket eventually joined the BJP. The people’s choice was not defeated at the polls. It was simply reassigned after the counting was over.
This is not ordinary political flexibility. It is the systematic conversion of a public mandate into private career capital. The BJP did not need to win every seat. It needed only to ensure that enough of the winners later preferred its company. Democracy, in this arrangement, becomes a two step process: first the voters choose, then the chosen choose again. The second choice is the one that counts. The first is reduced to a formality that can be corrected by inducement, ambition, or quiet negotiation.
Satire almost writes itself. One might call it democracy’s magic trick: now you see a mandate, now you do not. Or the political equivalent of a timeshare scheme in which the public buys the property and someone else moves in. The assembly becomes a revolving door with better lighting. Voters are invited to cast their ballots in good faith, only to discover that the product they purchased has been relabelled while still under warranty. The warranty, of course, is the anti defection law, which has proven remarkably elastic when the numbers favour the ruling side.
The deeper damage is not merely numerical. When mandates become transferable, the incentive structure of politics collapses. Candidates learn that the real constituency is not the voter but the post election marketplace of power. Loyalty is temporary. Principle is negotiable. The language of Goan interest, of protecting land, water, culture, and employment for locals, is deployed freely during campaigns and then subordinated to the more urgent business of staying in office. A government that acquires its majority by absorbing the opposition has little structural reason to fear the electorate until the next election. By then the memory of the earlier robbery has been softened by the passage of time and the noise of new controversies.
Protection of Goan interests cannot be separated from protection of the mandate that is supposed to serve those interests. If the electoral will itself is treated as movable property, every subsequent claim of safeguarding the state’s unique character rings hollow. Land conversion debates, village urbanisation proposals, and infrastructure projects that alter the ecological balance all take place under a government whose composition no longer matches the original verdict of the people. The symbolic order of governance continues, but its democratic legitimacy has been quietly diluted.
A serious recovery of democratic practice in Goa would begin by treating the electoral mandate as nontransferable in substance as well as in law. That means stronger and more consistently applied anti defection provisions, public accountability for those who switch, and a political culture in which voters are not expected to treat their ballot as a provisional suggestion. It also means recognising that parties which repeatedly lose their legislators to the ruling side are not victims of fate. They are participants in a system that rewards the conversion of public trust into private advantage.
The people of Goa have shown, through village agitations and sustained civic pressure, that they still care about the substance of their homeland. The next necessary step is to care with equal intensity about the integrity of the process that decides who governs that homeland. Until the mandate is restored to its proper status as a nontransferable asset, every promise to protect Goan interests will remain vulnerable to the same quiet transaction that has already emptied so many earlier promises of their force. Democracy does not die only through coups or cancelled elections. Sometimes it is simply reassigned, seat by seat, until the original owners no longer recognise the property.
