An old saying goes, ‘A frog in the well knows nothing about the ocean’, but the frog is being proved wrong by a man of the ocean as thinks from the confines of a well.
It is none other than Benaulim MLA Venzy Viegas.
In just six months of the 2022 elections, constituents who exercised their franchise in favour of an educated seafarer over the other, have started feeling that they have plunged Benaulim constituency into further depravation.
‘A known devil is better than an unknown angel’ stands true in the thought process of Venzy Viegas.
Opposition to Ola and Uber cab services, moving of private members bill in support of cruel, blood-letting ‘dhirio’ (bullfights) is nothing but taking the constituency and Goa to lawless-age.
But he has a sinister plan behind all this. He is laying the foundation to be in the political arena for the next five years also.
Viegas could not garner much support from a majority of tourist taxi operators and their families during his campaign and elections, now he is pandering to them or rather dangling a lollipop for them to join his camp.
Tourist taxi operators have not only been fleecing the tourists, they have been terrorizing other stakeholders in the hotel industry. Even family members are threatened by these goons while picking up their loved ones from the hotels.
MLA Viegas who generates his ratings through social media posts should first study Ola and Uber concepts in other states in depth before letting out his verbal diarrhoea.
To his knowledge, the general public travelling to the office on two-wheelers in other states of India are registered with the taxi services and earn money from it.
So also is the case with the bullfights. Fighting bull owners, enthusiasts of this bloody and gory dhirios (which also includes seafarers) were also sceptic about Venzy and his support for it. To now woo and win them over to his side as future vote-bank, he has moved the bill.
In fact Venzy is simply behaving like a ‘bull in a China shop’. It doesn’t seem he has thoroughly studied the matter or the Supreme Court judgment banning gruesome ‘dhirio’ but is in a frenzy to increase his popularity and win the next election.
During the summer Benaulim MLA organized a mock cyclone drill. Fishermen were made to pull a canoe as a part of the exercise, which they did, all this, while the gullible television media and social media enthusiasts were recording it. The funny part is fishing vessels and canoes are banned from venturing into the sea during cyclonic days in monsoons. Again, it was for cheap publicity.
This very week, Venzy called the disaster management team to inspect inundated and flooding at Khareband. He resorted to petty gimmicks like venturing into the catchment area in a dinghy only to capture eye balls.
His predecessor Churchill Alemao always claims that decades back he dived into the same catchment and surfaced with a dead body that the divers could not locate. In that era, there were no mobile phones or social media to capture ex-MLA’s achievement.
The agitation against western bypass passing through the same catchment area had started way back while Viegas was busy canvassing for himself, he never once bothered to study the matter or even lend support. But after being elected he tried to hijack the agitation just for publicity.
In May this year, he called for inspection of a canal built for Colva creek. At the time of the inspection, four labourers were physically in the filthy waters removing the plastics bottles. The water in the creek is highly polluted according to Water Resources Department and not fit for humans to wade in it. But Benaulim MLA Viegas did not even have the gumption or the human touch to enquire who engaged them at the risk of their lives.
For Venzy Viegas it is all about being in the public eye, blow hot gas for TV cameras and mobile phones to post it on social media. All this exercise to pull wool over the constituents to show that he is serving them so as to get elected again and make politics his career.
No comments:
Post a Comment