Performance audits in Goa’s minority-dominated areas

PANAJI - Performance audits in constituencies with sizeable minority pockets in Goa will be done on a regular basis, newly-appointed state Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) president Laxmikant Parsenkar said Wednesday.

Speaking to a local television channel for the first time after being appointed state president Sunday, Parsenkar said such audits would be able to gauge the social reach of the local legislators and party workers.

“The audit will also check the performance of all the BJP legislators who will be judged on how much they have reached out to the people. We will also know how well they have been interacting with minorities,” he said.

Goa has a sizeable 26 percent Christian population and the BJP had to face the brunt of the minority backlash in the Christian-dominated eight assembly segments of Salcete taluka in South Goa. Six of the eight assembly segments are known as the traditional strongholds of Congress.

“My own experience speaks that booths dominated by Christian voters, where we couldn’t even open our account during elections a decade back, are now slowly becoming BJP bastions,” Parsenkar said, adding that repeated attempts by the Congress to brand the BJP as a communal party were beginning to fail.