By IANS,
Panaji : Campaigning for the two Lok Sabha seats in Goa wound up Tuesday evening, with both the ruling Congress-Nationalist Congress Party (NCP) combine and the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) claiming they would win both seats with relative ease.
Speaking to reporters Tuesday evening, Chief Minister Digambar Kamat said that the BJP candidates would be routed April 23, when Goa’s approximately 1.2 million voters will cast their ballot.
“Francisco Sardinha (Congress) will win the South Goa seat by 50,000 votes, while Jitendra Deshprabhu (NCP) will win North Goa with a 25,000 vote margin,” he said.
Kamat further said that the electorate would boot out communal forces and vote for the United Progressive Alliance (UPA) at the Centre, for the development carried out by the Congress-led UPA for the last five years.
The BJP, on the other hand, said that it would win both seats with relative ease. “I would not like to go into exact margins or victory, but Shripad Naik will win the North Goa seat, while Narendra Savoikar will win South Goa for us,” leader of opposition Manohar Parrikar told IANS.
The election campaign, which was carried out on a low key note by both parties, did not have any celluloid stars campaigning in the state, barring Shatrughna Sinha, a BJP candidate in Patna himself, who campaigned for Savoikar in South Goa on Saturday.
The political heavy-weights who visited the coastal state for campaigning included Congress president Sonia Gandhi, Gujarat Chief Minister Narendra Modi and Civil Aviation Minister and NCP leader Praful Patel.
Naik, a former central minister and former chief minister and sitting MP Francisco Sardinha are the two prominent candidates seeking to make it to the 15th Lok Sabha from the North Goa and South Goa seats, respectively.
The battle for the two seats will be spread over 679 polling booths in North Goa and 660 booths in South Goa, with 1,020,794 voters eligible to exercise their franchise.