Yuri Alemao, Altone D'costa and advocate Carlos Alvares Ferreira, the three Congress MLAs who didn't join the eight of their former party men in jumping ship speak up about their decisions and their motivations to stay with the 137-year-old Congress.
The opposition party termed the defection by eight out of its 11 MLAs in Goa only seven months after the assembly elections as the "height of betrayal and shamelessness."
In a similar move in July 2019, 10 Congress MLAs had switched over to the BJP.
Goa has been following the Portuguese Civil Code 1867, which is also called Uniform Civil Code.
Five Goa Congress MLAs, who went incommunicado a day before, attended the state assembly proceedings on the first day of the monsoon session on Monday, and claimed there was 'nothing wrong' in the opposition party.
'Since we defeated their evil designs on July 10, their poaching approach became more aggressive with using blackmail and money power as tools to finish off the political opposition in Goa.'