The BJP has taken the lead in early trends in the counting for the Goa zilla (district) panchayat elections in the state with the party winning 13 of the 21 seats that have been counted so far leaving the Congress a distant second with two seats while Independents have bagged five seats and one seat went to the Maharashtrawadi Gomantak Party.
The party is also leading in another six seats for which counting has begun. The Aam Aadmi Party is yet to open its account.
The elections, which were to be held in March, were postponed on account of the lockdown and were held on December 12 but suffered from a poor voter turnout on account of fear of the pandemic, as many opted not to step out of their homes to vote.
The ruling BJP has a commanding majority among MLAs, who often sponsor their own candidates for the district panchayat polls with 27 of the 40 MLAs owing allegiance to the ruling Bharatiya Janata Party.
The party has however lost crucial seats where candidates sponsored by its MLAs have been defeated by independent candidates or by opposition Congress MLAs including in Santa Cruz, Nuvem and Colvale constituencies, where the Congress or independents have managed to win the seat despite having lost their MLAs to the BJP.
The BJP is expected to improve on its tally from the 2105 zilla panchayat polls in which the opposition parties including the Congress and the NCP didn’t take part and instead fielded their candidates as independents.
In 2015 the Independents won 25 of the 50 seats, the BJP 18, the MGP which was then in an alliance with the BJP won five seats and the Goa Vikas Party, which has not taken part this time won two seats.
Both the BJP and the Congress have expressed confidence that they will emerge victorious at the hustings.
With the zilla panchayat bodies performing only a nominal role, the polls are seen more as a preliminary test for political parties ahead of the state assembly elections a little more than a year away in early 2022.
