By
ByGerard de Souza
Oct 31, 2023 08:38 PM IST Hindustan Times
The minister tried to bring in large-scale changes which he was forced to retract after facing opposition. Even in his party, he is at loggerheads with his CM
When a government notification went out on October 19, it followed a video message from the chief minister of Goa. In it, Pramod Sawant announced that the Pernem zoning plan — a controversial land use document that intended to change large stretches of zones currently marked as ‘green’ into ‘settlement’ and ‘commercial’ zones — stood scrapped.
Goa minister Vishwajit Rane (Hindustan Times)
The rollback followed several weeks of protests by residents of the villages, especially those in Pernem, Goa’s northernmost taluka that now hosts the Manohar International Airport in Mopa. Unable to move Goa’s town and country planning (TCP) minister Vishwajit Rane on the earlier plan to allow the development of large tracts of green, they knocked on the CM’s doors, their MLAs in tow, seeking his intervention to scrap the plan.
The plan, Rane’s brainchild, faced mounting opposition over its large-scale redrawing of zones that allowed 21% of the land to be developed. Finally, at the behest of the CM, Rane announced that the plan was “no longer in existence” and that a fresh one would be drawn up taking “all stakeholders into confidence” this time.
Over the past 18 months since the new government came to power, this is the third time that the government has been forced to backtrack on decisions under Rane’s purview.
In the short duration he has been in charge, Rane has left in his wake upset architects, planners, environmentalists and village residents. This even includes his own constituents who objected to his idea to bring an Indian Institute of Technology in Melaulim — a forested stretch of land in the lower reaches of the Western Ghats.
“Vishwajit Rane can at best be called mercurial, at worst, juvenile. With the two often coalescing, the result has been irresponsible decision-making and the inability to see the larger picture in the interest of the state as in the case of his resistance to the tiger reserve,” Devika Sequeira, a senior journalist who has tracked Goa’s politics for several decades, said.
Who is Vishwajit Rane?
Son of Goa’s longest-serving chief minister Pratapsingh Rane, (his terms extended from 1980-1990, then 1994-1998, and 2005-2007), Vishwajit hails from a clan of warrior chieftains from Rajasthan whose story of arrival in Goa changes depending on whom you ask. While to some they arrived on behalf of the Bhosles of Sawantwadi as mercenaries to defend against the Marathas of Kolhapur (1624-1838), others suggest that their clan’s history in Goa dates back to the reign of Yusuf Adil Shah of Bijapur (1490-1510), a Deccan Sultanate that ruled Goa and surrounding areas prior to the arrival of the Portuguese.
It has been at least 16 generations since the first Rane (largely considered to be Satroji Rane) settled in Goa. Pratapsingh Rane, 84, counts himself among the fifteenth. Together the clan owns 12 mocassos (land grants) across Sattari (a taluka in the northeast of Goa), each the size of a village.
Locally referred to as Khase (loosely translated to mean ‘esteemed’ in Konkani), the clan continues to have a stranglehold over their ‘territory’. While Pratapsingh and Vishwajit enjoyed popular support among voters, other members of the clan have not been so lucky. In 2005, an irate mob of villagers lynched to death Prithviraj Rane, another member of the extended family, allegedly aggrieved over a stone crusher he was operating in the village.
Vishwajit Rane was elected an MLA for the first time in 2007 after contesting as an independent (the Congress had a policy of one ticket per family). He promptly pledged support to the Congress which formed the government and was made minister for health while his father was the Speaker during that term.
Rane made the switch to the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) in 2017 when it was clear the Congress party would not be forming the government despite emerging as the single largest party in the Goa Legislative Assembly.
Like his father, who represented the Poriem constituency for five decades since 1972, Rane is electorally unassailable and has since become a formidable force in Goa’s politics. He now directly controls two constituencies — Poriem, now represented by his wife Deviya, a BJP MLA, (elected for the first time in 2022) and Valpoi which he has represented since 2007.
“The Ranes spent years in the Congress, with Pratapsingh Rane serving as chief minister for 16 of them. But when the BJP won power in 2017 and formed the government under Manohar Parrikar despite not being the single largest party, Rane Jr chose to defect to the saffron side the very day Manohar Parrikar won the vote of confidence, leaving his father on the other side of the political fence. Five years later, Vishwajit Rane made sure his father would no longer contest from his Poriem seat, replacing him with his political novice wife Deviya instead, which gave the BJP two seats in Satari which for long had been with the Congress,” Sequeira said.
Rane has made no bones of his ambition. In the run-up to the state legislative assembly election in 2022, his father, still with the Congress, announced his intention to contest. Rane could barely contain his surprise. “At 83, why does he have to continue in politics? One should gracefully retire after becoming a CM for more than six terms. After so many years in politics, a decision should be made according to age. I have a suggestion for my father, at his age, do not contest. You have done a lot for Goa, but at the same time, there is a generational shift… I had requested him. We had discussed this. It will be a very messy thing,” he said.
“Shri Pratapsingh Raoji Rane is my father and we shall sort this issue amicably… we will resolve this internally within the family,” Rane said later that day.
Goa chief minister Pramod Sawant. (Twitter)
Rane vs Sawant
In the 2012 Goa legislative assembly polls, Rane sponsored seven candidates to whom the Congress party gave tickets to at his behest, including one who contested against Sawant in what was the current CM’s first election as a BJP candidate. Besides himself and his father, none of the candidates he backed won and the Congress was reduced to single digits in the 40-member assembly leaving the Ranes in the opposition — the only five-year period when Vishwajit was in opposition in his political career.
Even after joining the BJP, Rane has fielded candidates against Sawant at the panchayat and municipal level polls. While neither has publicly admitted to the rivalry, both have been eager to deny its existence. As recently as July, Sawant was forced to clarify at a public function that there were no differences between him and Vishwajit and that they were one “working together under the leadership of Prime Minister Narendra Modi.”
However, rumours of a rift reached a peak during the Covid pandemic in May 2021 when Sawant wrested control of the oxygen supply to the Goa Medical College and Hospital after allegations that Rane as health minister was manhandling the logistics that saw as many as 85 people die over successive nights allegedly due to oxygen shortage. In June 2021, the BJP high command flew down party general secretary BL Santosh to address the rift.
“There is a bullfight between two bulls. Who are the two bulls you take a guess? Why should I comment about it,” a veteran BJP politician in the state said, declining to be named.
Rane is known to staff the departments under his care, especially the health department, with candidates from his constituency. He has been the health minister for 11 years and counting since 2007, save for a gap between 2012-2017, when he was in the opposition.
The Bombay high court bench at Goa issued notices and is currently hearing a petition alleging a ‘scam’ in the recruitment of nearly 1000 posts in the state health department.
“Ever since Manohar Parrikar’s death, Rane Jr has been consumed by the ambition to become chief minister and, once, even put on RSS fatigues (the uniform of khaki bottoms and a white shirt) to a Sangh public function. He enjoys little support within the BJP legislature party though which has more Congress defectors than original saffron MLAs,” Sequeira added.
Overlooked for the chief minister’s post by the party’s high command despite some hard bargaining, Rane was instead rewarded with the town and country portfolio — considered the most lucrative — in addition to health and forests.
Rane has since set about making large-scale changes that he has been forced to walk back on.
Now in the hot seat
The Goa IIT Campus at Melaulim in his constituency setback was only one of the reversals Rane experienced as a BJP MLA.
“In 2019, he made a unilateral decision to bring an IIT to Shel-Melauli in his constituency, on a sprawling 10 lakh square metres of land. However, when the local populace caught wind of this plan, they assembled in large numbers at the site, driving the surveyors away. When the residents stood their ground, the situation escalated into a lathi charge by the police, met with retaliation from villagers hurling stones,” Nisser Dias, a journalist and political observer said.
“Initially Rane displayed bravado claiming “opposition from the people cannot stop the IIT, IIT is a feather in the cap of Goa.” As the protest garnered support he swiftly changed his stance and requested the relocation of the IIT project, saying he is “with the public, and will never go against the wishes of the people,” Dias said.
In 2022, one of the first tasks that Rane set out to accomplish no sooner he got charge of the department was to bring in a farmhouse policy for the state allowing structures up to 1000 sq metres of built-up area to be defined as farmhouses and permitting them to be built in agricultural land that was earlier only restricted to small farmhouses and only by registered land tillers.
“What this means is that a builder who could until now only purchase land zoned as settlement and build on that settlement land can now purchase and build on fields and orchards in the name of farmhouses,” architect and planner Tahir Noronha explained.
The first real run-in with Goa’s activists came when Rane announced changes to the Land Development and Building Construction Regulations which, among other changes, allow for golf courses, film cities, race courses, motorsport tracks on agricultural and orchard lands and ‘natural’ zones which were hitherto for agriculture and allied activities alone.
In September 2022, faced with mounting protests — including from within the BJP — Rane backtracked on the amendments. On live television, he announced he was going to keep the plans in abeyance. Then, changing his mind, he said: “keeping it in abeyance would create confusion” and said that would scrap them altogether.
Protesting groups had alleged a conflict of interest since the Rane family is among the largest owners of agricultural and orchard land in Goa.
That’s not all, Rane has brought about arbitrary changes to Goa’s Regional Plan — a statewide land use document — allowing the conversion of zones marked as agricultural and orchard, under the guise of them being mistakenly marked as such.
“After taking over as TCP minister in 2022, he immediately scrapped section 16(B) of the TCP Act (that allowed for case-by-case changes to Goa’s zoning plans), claiming it was anti-people and massive illegal conversion was done by (BJP MLA and former minister) Michael Lobo and others claiming he was listening to people’s sentiments A few days later, he brought in (amended the law) section 17(2) in the TCP Act, virtually giving himself sole power to convert all land in Goa based on a simple letter by the owner claiming error in zoning. A clear intent to finish all of Goa in a single stroke,” Gaurav Bakshi, an actor and Goa resident, said.
“Vishwajit Rane’s move to convert 20% of the green cover in Pernem for luxury projects, his unilateral decision to bring in hurried changes to the Regional Plan via the zoning plan (scrapped since by a BJP worried about the elections) and his very public abuse of members of the Goa Foundation, display a sense of power and invincibility he believes he enjoys within the BJP run by a weak chief minister,” Sequeira said.
“Who we are dealing with here is Vishwajit Rane, for whom no law seems to apply. In many of the documents we have received under the Right to Information Act, his is the only signature on the documents approving land conversions. No other bureaucrat was willing to sign,” Claude Alvares of the Goa Foundation, said.
“Every single time, it was the sustained campaign by the people of Goa, led by upright citizens groups, NGOs and activists and media pressure that forced the government to take a step back, though briefly, only to come back once again to try the same again and again and again,” Gaurav Bakshi, an actor and resident of Goa, said.
Defending his action on the floor of the legislative assembly earlier this year, Rane accused the Congress-government-appointed committee that drafted the plan he was ‘correcting’ of corruption. He also vowed to blacklist. It mattered little that he was part of the government that took the decisions he now claims are fraudulent.
In turn, the architects hit back with a memorandum to the CM asking to hand over the Town and Country Planning portfolio to someone more ‘coherent’.
“Today if such behaviour is acceptable from the TCP minister, tomorrow Goa will descend to a point of utter lawlessness where each minister acts as a monarch and dictator, with no regard for rules and regulations, as he presides over his department,” the letter by the architects stated.
Rane later withdrew his comments and said no one would be blacklisted by his department.
“Now, changing lakhs of sqm of land to settlement, all in brazen violation of Forest, Coastal Zone and just about every Environmental Law in force, will mean massive upside to all these politicians. In the corporate sector, insider trading is a serious crime. In politics, using inside information to purchase lakhs of sqm of forest and hills and then illegally converting it to benefit each other is acceptable,” Bakshi added.
It was not all bad news for Rane though, as the Confederation of Real Estate Development Association of India (CREDAI), Goa Chapter jumped to his defence saying there were many “genuine cases” where lands were “erroneously marked as green.”
The BJP has sought to downplay the controversies.
“Each one has his own style of working which is ultimately for the benefit of the state. The government proposes and if the people do not like whatever is being proposed we respect the wishes of the people and take it back,” Adv Narendra Sawaikar a BJP spokesperson and former MP said.
“He had also proposed an IIT in his constituency but after sustained protests since the people didn’t accept the proposal it was taken back,” Sawaikar added.