Casinos in the Indian state of Goa will have to wait a little longer to learn if the government will maintain their operating licenses.
On Saturday, the government revealed the results of February’s election results, which showed the incumbent Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) falling from 21 seats to just 13 in the 40-member Assembly. Meanwhile, the opposition Congress party increased its presence to 17 seats, eight more than it won in the 2012 campaign.
With neither party winning an outright majority, a frantic race began to see whether BJP or Congress would be able to muster the support of a sufficient number of the smaller parties’ elected members to achieve the necessary 21-seat majority to form the next government.
The remaining 10 Assembly seats are divided as follows: the Goa Forward Party and the Maharashtravadi Gomantak Party (MGP) won three seats apiece, while three independent candidates won single seats and the final seat is held by the Nationalist Congress Party.
On Monday, Governor Mridula Sinha indicated that the BJP had produced a letter of support from both the MGP and Goa Forward, as well as two of the independent MLAs, bringing the BJP’s support to 21, which led Sinha to invite the BJP to form the next government.
Former Chief Minister Laxmikant Parsekar was among the BJP MLAs who were defeated in the election, so former Goa CM Manohar Parrikar, who was transferred to Delhi in 2014 to serve as India’s defense minister, has decided to resign his national post and once again run the Goa state government.
Just two days before the results were made public, the BJP renewed the operating license of Goa’s sixth ‘offshore’ floating casino. The BJP had sought to avoid authorizing the controversial renewal ahead of the election but had been ordered to make a decision one way or the other by the Bombay High Court.
Ahead of the elections, the Congress party campaigned on a pledge to revoke the licenses of the casinos floating on the Mandovi river as well as the licenses of the state’s 11 land-based gaming halls. The BJP dethroned Congress in 2012 by campaigning on a similar pledge, only to reneg on this promise by arguing that (a) the government needed the revenue, and (b) cancelling casino licenses would be challenged in the courts.
It remains to be seen what action Parrikar’s BJP government will take regarding the casino industry. The floating casinos’ licenses all expire on March 31, and the government had given operators until then to find an alternate waterway on which to operate.
