India Political Blog

Suddenly, there are a number of questions about the conduct of the mother in the case of the British teenager Scarlett Keeling in Goa, a horrible case where the daughter was murdered on a beach in Goa. There is some backlash emerging against the mother in terms of questioning as to why the girl was left alone, that the girl was doing drugs, that she should have been in school, etc. These are all valid questions, and are relevant to a case where child services would investigate as to whether the children are being brought up in a home where they are getting the proper care, education, etc.
However, the worrying facts of this case is the conduct of the local Goa police.

After Scarlett was found dead on the Anjuna beach, her family had contended that she was raped and murdered. Initially reluctant to treat it as a murder case, Goa Police carried out a detailed probe after a second autopsy was conducted by a team of doctors here following a demand by the girl’s mother Fiona MacKeown. “We are happy that police have conducted investigations properly but we want that police’s act of misguiding Fiona Mackowen (Scarlett’s mother) should also be probed,” Vikram Varma, lawyer for Scarlett’s family, said.

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Goa has been going through a period of turmoil for many years now. Given that there are only 40 members in the assembly, and the 2 competing blocs of the Congress and BJP are not far away in terms of distribution of seats, there is the potential for a lot of horse-trading and governments getting over-turned. In the past, the Governor and the speaker would play key roles in fashioning a government as per their political affiliations. However, with the courts and the media getting more attentive on issues of horse-trading and bias shown by the speakers and the governor, the incidence of such misuse had decreased.
Well, no longer, since the current situation on Goa has turned all these beliefs upside down. In a test ordered by the Governor as the first business of the day, the speaker in an interim order disqualified 3 members from voting and with this change, the Congress managed to retain victory. Now, there was a hope that the Congress will provide a stable administration, but those hopes flew out of the window when 3 members moved out of the Congress side. But this action by the speaker on behalf of the Congress has just made things worse. This issue will be sure to go the courts for further decision-making:
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Goa has become the latest state to show the classic symptoms of horse-trading. With a total assembly size of 40, it has always been susceptible to horse-trading; after all, with the past election resulting in the parties being separated by only around 4 seats, it is always on the cards that things would change and with the switch of just 3-4 people, the Government in power will totally change, and this is what has happened.
So, in the latest from there, the Congress led Government lost the support of an ally and its sole women member, and automatically the BJP led opposition is now all set to form the Government. This is not a positive trend. Such Governments are inherently unstable, and hence unable to have the focus on good administration. As long as elections are not threatened, the Government does not care for good policies, all they want is to ensure that legislators are kept in good humour, else they land up in situations similar to this one:
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