The Aam Aadmni Party on Monday named former IAS officer Elvis Gomes its chief ministerial candidate for the upcoming Assembly election in Goa. “He is the son of the soil...If he wanted to indulge in corruption, he could have easily earned several crores, but he didn’t,” said AAP convenor Arvind Kejriwal, according to dna. He made the announcement during a rally in Cuncolim to mark Goa’s liberation day.
Gomes, 53, is currently the elected president of Goa Football Association. The AAP leader was earlier the Inspector General (Prisons) and Urban Development secretary before he took voluntary retirement in July to join AAP. He was also the director of municipal administration and tourism, chairperson of Goa Housing Board, commissioner of the Municipal Corporation of Panjim, and Captain of Ports. “We are banking on the clean image of Gomes,” a party leader told PTI.
The party has said that it would shut down casinos in the state if it was elected to power in the 2017 Assembly elections. Kejriwal had said the Congress and the Bharatiya Janata Party have failed to shut the casinos because their leaders were involved in the business, reported NDTV. The 40-member Goa Assembly currently has 31 BJP legislators and nine Congress leaders. Though AAP will contest for all 40 seats, the party has so far announced 25 candidates, reported dna.
Goa, which will go to polls early next year, is the second state after Delhi where AAP has declared its chief ministerial candidate before elections. In Punjab, it has refrained from doing so. “Unlike in Punjab where declaring a CM candidate will be messy affair for the party, in case of Goa, this thing is expected to help us,” an AAP member told PTI.
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