PANAJI: First Mickky Pacheco dared to use an expletive against Margaret Alva, AICC general secretary and Goa in-charge. Then he carried out a public tirade against chief minister Pratapsing Rane. Now he has begun attacking his own boss, National Congress Party (NCP) president Dr Wilfred de Souza.
Pacheco, state’s agriculture minister and NCP vice-president, was issued a show cause notice, on orders from national president, Union agriculture minister Sharad Pawar. That triggered another bout of tantrums from Pacheco who threatened to meet Pawar over the issue.
Says NCP general secretary and spokesman Surendra Furtado, “Pawar thought that the JD(S) imbroglio in Karnataka might harm us here politically as this issue has similar connotations and ordered the show cause.” Questioned if Pacheco had officially been asked to apologise by de Souza, Furtado told DNA, “We sent our message through his friends.”
In response, Pacheco told DNA, “There won’t be an apology, because 20 of the 21 general secretaries concur with me, including the coordination committee and executive committee. It is de Souza’s ego now that is also angering party workers because only he and I were rewarded with cabinet berths.” The NCP has only two MLAs in the coalition Congress government.
Earlier he was stripped off the tourism portfolio in the BJP government over problems he had with former chief minister Manohar Parrikar. In July 2005, he contrived to bungle the simple exercise of voting in a Rajya Sabha election and got his vote invalidated. Pacheco’s politics of blackmail (he wanted better portfolios then) did not go unnoticed, stimulated abundantly by him from June last year. ‘Rane works in slow motion,’ ‘The Parrikar government worked faster,’
‘This government is not functioning’ etc have been some of his common refrains. In October, he summoned the director of animal husbandry and abused him over an issue. As far as rebellious politicians are concerned, Pacheco has rivalled south Goa’s MP Churchill Alemao, by coincidence also from the same village of Benaulim, which curiously, stages Goa’s only illegal bull fights.
