Weeks into his job as chief minister — that indeed was his first ministerial assignment — Pramod Pandurang Sawant grasped his first lesson in politics. That was Darwin’s law of survival worked more unrelentingly in the smaller Indian states where the joust to grab a crumb of a moderate-sized power cake is intense enough to obliterate political loyalties and scupper personal relationships.
Sawant took over the reins of Goa after Manohar Parrikar lost the battle to cancer. Parrikar was a formidable predecessor while Sawant had little to commend him other than being the ...