Panaji: Goa's two ruling allies cannot agree on something as basic as whether they have started talking. Chief Minister Pramod Sawant said preliminary discussions for a BJP-MGP alliance ahead of the 2027 assembly election had begun, while senior MGP leader and power minister Ramkrishna 'Sudin' Dhavalikar said no talks had taken place.
"We will forge the BJP-MGP alliance. We had a meeting with MGP president Pandurang 'Deepak' Dhavalikar and started the discussion," Sawant said, adding that the final round would involve central BJP leaders. "We have decided to go ahead with the alliance and win the 2027 assembly election."
Sudin Dhavalikar, however, said the decision would come only after his party's working committee and annual general body meetings. "After the AGM, we will start alliance talks, and I will travel to Delhi to meet Union home minister Amit Shah, the BJP national president and the Maharashtra chief minister," he said. The MGP, he added, has been working in 13 constituencies and would continue there.
The alliance has history. The MGP gave Goa its first chief minister in 1963, first tied up with the BJP in the early 1990s as the senior partner, and has been in the ruling coalition since 2022 — when it contested alongside the TMC and won two seats, including Dhavalikar's own.
Sawant pushed back, saying the MGP should "understand its limitations," pointing to its two seats. Dhavalikar hit back, claiming the party had "at least 3,000 votes in each constituency." BJP state president Damodar Naik insisted relations were on track. In Mandrem, former CM Laxmikant Parsekar and his old rival Dayanand Sopte have buried a feud to challenge the MGP's Jit Arolkar.
The MGP has flipped such alliance arithmetic before. In 1994 the BJP won four seats for the first time, largely on the MGP's voter base; by 1999 the two contested separately and the BJP expanded. After 2022 the MGP joined the ruling coalition. Sudin Dhavalikar has begun campaigning in Ponda — a seat vacant for nearly a year after the death of BJP MLA Ravi Naik. With the assembly election due in 2027, both parties need a seat-sharing deal, and both are avoiding one.