CONG LEADERS MEET GOVERNOR, DEMAND FLOOR TEST IN GOA

PANAJI: A day after staking claim to form the government in Goa, a Congress delegation met governor Mridula Sinha on Tuesday and demanded that a single-day assembly session be called for the government be prove its majority.

The ruling Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), meanwhile, is looking at reappointing a Cabinet Advisory Committee to sanction expenditure proposals on behalf of Goa chief minister Manohar Parrikar, who undergoing treatment in Delhi, officials familiar with the proposed move said.

A final decision on the CAC was likely to be taken as early as Tuesday night or the following morning, the officials said.

“The structure will be the same, only the dates of the notification will have to be changed,” said an official, referring to the three-member CAC that was appointed when Parrikar was away from February to June for treatment for his pancreatic ailment. The Congress has dismissed the proposed move to set up the CAC as illegal.

“Where is the provision in the constitution for a CAC? It is all useless,” said Congress leader Ramakant Khalap.

The Congress has 16 MLAS in the 40-member house.

››FULL REPORT, P8 SRINAGAR: Former Jammu and Kashmir chief minister Mehbooba Mufti has said that she and her party suffered significantly from the alliance with the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), which was broken abruptly in June following three turbulent years in power.

“Of course, I did,” Mufti remarked when asked if the alliance’s collapse left her and the Peoples Democratic Party (PDP) as the bigger losers. “We had to bear the wrath of the people. The love and affection they showered on me when I was in the Opposition turned into anger and hatred after we partnered with the BJP,” she told Hindustan Times in an interview.

The alliance between the PDP and the BJP was forged in March 2015 after the state elections threw up a fractured result, with Mufti’s father Mufti Mohammad Sayeed leading the initiative. Sayeed died in January, 2016, months before the killing of Hizbul Mujahideen militant Burhaan Wani set off a cycle of violence that claimed the lives of at least 100 civilians.

Mufti, 59, said that the BJP lacked the vision of former prime minister Atal Bihari Vajpayee, who was credited for an outreach to Kashmiris in the late ‘90s and the early 2000s. “Perhaps we overestimated things. We were so much in awe of the Vajpayee era and felt things will be the same under (PM Narendra) Modi. That didn’t happen because the BJP’S thought process was different,” she said. On the topic of secularism and if she saw a rise in communal friction, Mufti said she