Was Luizinho Faleiro offered Rs 25 Cr and a Rajya Sabha Seat to switch from Congress to TMC?

NAVELIM, GOA: From Canacona to Margao, and even in North Goa, over the last 3-4 days, people have been speaking in hushed voices, discussing the moves and counter moves made by the strongman of Navelim Luizinho Faleiro over the years.

There are several rumors and arguments doing the rounds, over feni and salted peanuts, or soro and fried chicken, that the former Goa CM and Navelim Congress MLA has been offered a “huge package both in cash and kind” to dump the floundering Congress and join the “rising” All India Trinamool Congress (AITC or TMC).

Rumor and drunken gossip, doing the rounds in the coastal state over the weekend, in bars and taverns of Goan villages seem to allege that Faleiro has been promised a package of at least Rs 25 crore (or more) and a guaranteed Rajya Sabha seat. And with this kind of moolah, nobody would want to stay put in the backyards of Navelim!

Goans are just not ready to believe the narrative played out by the Faleiro camp and his associates of being “sidelined, humiliated and the works”, as most Goans who have worked with or seen Faleiro up close, know that he wielded enough clouth within the Congress setup in Delhi to have his way if he so wanted it.

For a freelance journalist like myself, who over the last 28 years has worked and lived in Delhi, Bengaluru, Pune, Mumbai, Ahmedabad and Goa, and interviewed and interacted with hundreds of politicians, Faleiro never once attempted to reach out, in spite of several attempts from my end for an interview over the years. Faleiro’s personal phone numbers were a guarded secret and I doubt he used a mobile phone. Even the Congress House reception desk at Panjim didn’t have a mobile number against his name and was many a times unable to reach him even when urgently required during the by-polls of 2019.

He was quite smug in his own little kingdom and couldn’t be disturbed, even if the sky was falling.

Faleiro was just a few days earlier appointed chairman of the Congress State Election Committee, which would have given him a lot of say in candidate selection and designing the party’s poll strategy. He had a very responsible job at the state level and such posts are not given to someone you plan to humiliate. He had a hotline to the Gandhi family and there was hardly any possibility that his voice would not be heard if he had a grievance to air.

Across the length and breadth of Goa, as our reporters found out, Goans refused to accept a scenario that Luizinho Faleiro was so humiliated that he could not take it anymore and decided to join another party. The people’s response had one common strain – Luizinho was leaving for greener pastures, read bigger money bags and the humiliation story was just a ruse and an excuse to cover things up.

Goans are not the same, like they were a decade or two earlier. Smartphones and 4G, not to forget Google voice search have wizened them up to a great extent. So Faleiro and Kishor need to put on their thinking caps and get a new PR strategy.

We spoke to several Goans across the State, who seemed convinced (without any doubt) that Faleiro was switching sides for bags of money and power, which probably the Congress at this stage couldn’t give him.

Looking at other aspects, Faleiro was facing a lot of animosity in his own constituency in Navelim, with the Aam Aadmi Party (AAP) gaining ground day by day.

Former Goa Mahila Congress chief Pratima Coutinho – who has a personal axe to grind with Faleiro – switching over to the AAP and counting the days to the polls, when she would get a chance to give Faleiro a run for his money and a taste of his own medicine was also playing on his head.

Faleiro’s audio media bytes given out on Sunday evening went viral across Goa within a few hours. He can be heard saying something like: “I am in deep meditation. I am hearing everything and everything. I am doing tapasya” and so on, were found to be amusing by most Goans.

The narrative put forth by the Faleiro camp definitively did not impress Goans. If such a powerful man felt humiliated, why didn’t he speak up all this while. He could have given vent to his anger and frustration in a myriad of ways, without damaging the party. Senior leaders like Francisco Sardinha, Ravi Naik and even Aleixo Reginaldo Lourenco have been speaking up from time to time.

As he picks up the microphone today afternoon at the Marriott, to address the media, it would definitely do well for Faleiro to accept that he is moving on in life for different and bigger challenges and more financial gratification, rather than stick to the “humiliation sob story” which no Goan will buy.