By IANS,
Panaji : The delay by the ruling Congress-Nationalist Congress Party (NCP) combine to announce a seat sharing formula for the Lok Sabha elections in Goa has begun to tell on the nerves of the alliance leadership.
Senior leaders of both the parties have been indulging in a war of words over the past few days.
NCP Goa president Wilfred De Souza triggered the war. In a press conference Wednesday he called Home minister Ravi Naik “incompetent”.
Naik Thursday hit back at the 82-year-old NCP president. “Wilfred De Souza has become old,” he told the media.
The home minister, who is a Congress legislator from Ponda, said that De Souza’s outburst was a result of groupism in the NCP and there was nothing he could do about it.
Dr De Souza, a day earlier, did not mince words to criticise Chief Minister Digambar Kamat’s style of governance. It is “non functional”, he said.
The war of words follows aggressive posturing by the two party leaders over sharing of Goa’s two Lok Sabha seats for the April 23 elections.
While the Goa Pradesh Congress Committee has said that they would contest both the North Goa and South Goa seats, the NCP has been insisting on contesting in North Goa.