THE VALLEY OF WORDS

DUAL CITIZENSHIP: THE OVERDUE MOTHER OF ALL DEALS

2026-02-05T02:21:00.001-05:00

The recent India-EU deal has been dubbed “the mother of all deals.” Made on the sidelines of India’s Republic Day celebrations, the deal was welcomed across the political divide in India and Europe. But if cheaper olive oil, wine, and BMWs are the headline achievements, then the real deal—the one that actually shapes Indian lives—remains unspoken. That deal is dual citizenship for Indians.

Citizenship, too, entered the conversation along with the India-EU trade deal because António Costa, the Goan-origin head of the European Union and former Prime Minister of Portugal, was seen as the counterweight against the arm-twisting of Donald Trump’s tariffs.

As he had done previously when he visited India as Prime Minister of Portugal, António Costa flashed his Overseas Citizenship of India (OCI) card. This recognition of Costa's Goan and Indian heritage is not surprising in the least. António Costa has been known to flaunt his OCI card to facilitate better relations between India and Portugal, and now, as head of the European Union, between India and Europe.

The fact that António Costa’s origins became a diplomatic resource should give all Indians pause. The OCI card is not citizenship per se, but simply a long-term, effectively permanent visa given at the express pleasure of the Government of India. Hence, António Costa is allowed to return home as many times as he wants, but he is not exactly a citizen of India. The Government of India retains the sovereign right to revoke the OCI. The Government of India has exercised this power on several occasions, especially against those it views as dissidents.

Goans, particularly, have been very sensitive about the fact that OCI is not citizenship but simply a visa. In fact, they have been demanding dual citizenship as their connection with their ancestral land, property, culture, and family is forcefully taken away by the Indian citizenship regime. In the last two decades or little over it, many Goans have reclaimed Portuguese citizenship and left for better prospects—better jobs in the United Kingdom and now increasingly in other parts of Europe.

In order to take up Portuguese citizenship for better mobility, socially as well as internationally, Goans must surrender their Indian citizenship. This legal requirement is rather unfortunate. In 1975, after relations between India and Portugal normalized, Portugal recognized the right of Goans to retain Portuguese citizenship because, before 1961, before the annexation of Goa by the Indian army, Goans were citizens of Portugal by birth. India, too, agreed with Portugal. The Portuguese state never extinguished that right, even though sovereignty over Goa had transferred to India. António Costa is simply returning the favor.

To get Portuguese citizenship is no easy task. Goans, and other residents of the former Portuguese India (Daman and Diu), must prove that their ancestors, either parents or grandparents, were born in Portuguese India. In other words, they have to prove that their ancestors were, by birth, Portuguese citizens.

Thus, if one goes to the historical archives in Goa, where most of the birth and other records are preserved, you see anxious people waiting to find out if birth certificates or baptism records of their parents or grandparents are available. They are helped by certain ‘agents’ who have a rudimentary knowledge of Portuguese. The other people there are landsharks and real estate agents who want to cash in on the land market (but that is a story for another day).

In 2023, I was a regular visitor to the archives, not because I wanted Portuguese citizenship or buy land but because as an historian, I was looking for traces of rice and cultivation in early modern Goa. It was over these months that I spent in the archives that I befriended several agents who would help these anxious people find birth records.

One of these agents told me something very interesting, something that I had always intuitively known. I asked this man how many Hindus also take up Portuguese citizenship. This man leaned into me—now bear in mind that the COVID contagion still posed a serious threat in early 2023—and so I could sense that he wanted to reveal a shocking secret. For my ears only.

He told me that almost half, if not more than half, of his clients were Hindus. It is a common stereotype that Catholics, branded ‘anti-national’, take up Portuguese passports and desert their motherland. I knew many Goan Muslims had also taken up Portuguese passports, but then again, that was only stereotypically expected of them. But Hindus? That revelation was still shocking, although I intuitively knew that many Goan Hindu were also reclaiming Portuguese citizenship.

A few days after this conversation, I overheard a Hindu man talking to another agent about the abysmal job situation in Goa. He belonged to the Bahujan Samaj, as was clear from the name he told the agent. This man, a mechanic working for the Government of Goa, was complaining about not making enough money and not being able to provide enough for his wife and children. As he spoke, I could see dark clouds of frustration darkening his face, and there was sadness in his eyes. “I should also make a Portuguese passport and earn better,” he said casually. Stereotypes collapse instantly when confronted with the economic realities of jobs and joblessness.

The situation in Goa is hardly unique, though the legal circumstances are. In states like Gujarat, Punjab, and Kerala, the numbers of Indian citizens giving up their citizenship is a lot higher. Goans can legally be Portuguese; Gujaratis and Punjabis cannot—unless they fake their papers. The other option for Indians is to go via the dunki route and risk their lives. Or get deported in shackles with the blessings of Trump.

Yet, in the last five years, more than 900,000 Indian citizens have given up their citizenship, and the number will grow. For many Indians, across class and caste, the quality of life has measurably deteriorated. The numbers of the AQI do not lie and they affect rich and poor. While the rich will legally abandon the country for cleaner air and a better quality of life, the poor will escape, even by treacherous illegal routes from India, because they want better jobs and better futures for their children.

In such a situation, it makes sense for all citizens of India to demand dual citizenship. It makes sense for the Indian Government to open routes for dual citizenship. India needs to follow the path shown by one of Goa’s most well-known sons, António Costa. There are more Antónios waiting to return home—or invest in its economy. Dual citizenship is the mother of all deals that is long overdue.

Published in The Wire.

THE CASUAL CASTEISM OF THE HOMELESS COSMOPOLITAN

2025-11-14T03:42:00.003-05:00

A curious figure keeps showing up in Goa (and also in certain liberal pockets of the Northeast): the homeless cosmopolitan. You have come across them many times. They have hopped between metros all their lives, enjoyed cushy middle-class lives, studied in the UK or US, floated through well-upholstered childhoods, and now, usually in their late twenties or thirties, decide it’s time to “move” somewhere decent: Goa.

They are not really homeless. They just don’t want to live in most parts of India. Once here, they appoint themselves brokers of culture (or real estate) and good taste. Some arrive as artists, filmmakers, designers (“Goa-based” is a brand not a description); others simply log in to their corporate jobs and ‘work from home’. They are hyper-mobile, hyper-credentialed, and cushioned by inherited privilege. Yet the talent they bring and the cultural authority they assume is questionable to say the least.

Take the new wave of homeless cosmopolitan “artists” who descend on Goa. Scroll through their exhibitions, installations, residencies, and you start to wonder: where is the depth, meaning, and beauty in their art? (I am sure one of them will lecture me about ‘art’—good for them!).

Before I talk about the casual casteism of the homeless cosmopolitan, let me admit something: I feel a certain sympathy for them. I have lived in eight different cities in the last fifteen years. I consider three of them, Washington DC, Lisbon, and Doha, as places like Goa or my home. These travels have impressed upon me the possibility of rootedness or the act of place-making that does not come from entitlement. So I know the joy of finding your home and the heartache of not belonging. I understand that uprooted through childhood, of moving from one city to another, shifting schools, never quite belonging leaves behind crushing emptiness. To not have a home to return to, a place that anchors you no matter how far you travel, is a genuine psychological wound. I get that. I don’t mock it.

But this is India and casteism has to pop up everywhere. The truth is that most of these wanderers can relocate to Goa because they carry caste capital in their deliberately modest tote bags. Their mobility is not magical, it is the gift of Indian society. They are privileged but strangely unaware of the means that facilitate their mobility in the first place. They want to hide this privilege by saying they cannot belong anywhere largely because the locals don’t accept them.

And here lies the rub: despite all the talk of cosmopolitanism, global citizenship, worldliness, art, anti-casteism, the homeless cosmopolitan has rarely examined their own position. There is no soul-searching, no discomfort, no ethical pause, and certainly no examination of the conscience. Just a seamless, thoughtless, and entitled slide into Aldona, Moira, Assagao, and Siolim; those promised lands for outsider salvation.

What emerges from this is not explicit bigotry but something subtler, slipperier, and far more common: casual casteism. It is casteism of the hip and meritorious.

The outpourings of the homeless cosmopolitan are not new. For about two decades, I’ve watched the same script unfold: homeless cosmopolitans arrive in Goa and immediately style themselves as custodians of culture and good taste. They settle in, throw around words like “community,” “healing,” and “creative ecosystem,” and then, within months, begin lamenting that Goa has “gone to the dogs”: the internet is slow, the governance chaotic, and the locals are difficult. Or, as the notorious Dilliwali novelist, Deepti Kapoor, they bounce to some other exotic location.

Two decades of this cycle and no one seems to learn the obvious lesson: the problem is not Goa. The problem is you.

But say this aloud and immediately a familiar deflection appears: “But aren’t Goans also contributing to the problem? Aren’t Goans selling land? Aren’t Goans, especially Catholics, also casteist?”

Of course Goans, like any community, have internal contradictions and pressures. But the question here isn’t about Goans. The question is about you. And the moment the spotlight turns to your role, why the instinct to weasel out? Why the sudden high-falutin sociological analysis when all that’s being asked for is a moment of honesty?

There must be a reason why Goa is the preferred destination. It is certainly not the natural beauty, for you get that aplenty in Maharashtra and Kerala, for instance. The reason is something that only Goa offers: a respectful, decent, and free life, or at least the only chance of such a life in India. Freedom is what they seek, a feeling best captured by numerous Bollywood and South Indian films.

The truth is simple: the homeless cosmopolitan votes with their feet. There is no other state in mainland India that offers the freedoms and decency that Goa does, except perhaps a few pockets in the Northeast. Even Kerala, despite its high HDI numbers, is not good enough.

Yet, there is no effort to imbibe Goan culture. No attempt to change one’s heart and soul. The homeless cosmopolitan simply occupies Goan space and jacks up the prices of rent and real estate?

Many homeless cosmopolitans ironically cling tightly to the cultures they arrived with. They hold on to a cultural identity that is steeped in caste privilege. And that unexamined self manifests effortlessly through the everyday and casual casteism of the homeless cosmopolitan.

But is there a solution?

One option is brutally simple. You can vote with your feet one last time. Pack your bags and go elsewhere. Try improving that place instead of extracting from Goa while complaining about Goans. Perhaps you can turn your Delhis into the Goa of your dreams! (Those who want to “move” to Goa and open a café must reconsider or delay that decision).

Goans have lived, lost, thrived, and fought their battles for five centuries without you. Whatever our problems, we have figured out our ways of living, our internal negotiations—our convivências. Goans will be fine without your art, without your good taste, without your self-appointed cultural authority, without your money, and without your casual casteism.

But there is a second option. And it is harder. You can choose to stay and surrender to Goan culture.

Apart from reading Ambedkar to get rid of the intrinsic and casual casteism, a homeless cosmopolitan needs to understand what Goa is. Goan culture is not a vibe, a beach aesthetic, a curated dinner, tourism “beyond its beaches,” an escape from India, or a “creative community.” The social and intellectual culture of Goa is a historical formation shaped by two deep, intertwined streams over five hundred years: Roman Catholicism and a specific Iberian liberal tradition—this is what made the freedom so desperately desired by the homeless cosmopolitan.

With these resources, Goans turned themselves into a people who are open, joyous, and fiercely protective of the good life—not the luxury life, but the moral good life. These values were accessible to the high and the low. Through our history, we have never been defined by money, even the bhatcars never had enough of that. Goans are a people who respect leisure without making it a commodity, who value freedom without turning it into individualism, who treasure conviviality as a civic principle. “Susegad” is a philosophy of the common good.

Catholicism is not as an exotic religion at odds with Indian culture, but a lived moral community. It is the base that defines Goan culture, whether or not one professes that faith. Further, Goans practiced secularism and engaged with liberalism (think the Uniform Civil Code) almost a century before rudimentary municipal elections took place in British India to teach Indians how to become good liberal subjects. Goans were modern much before the rest of India. (I understand the Bhadralok might protest—good for them!).

Allow Goa to change you: your being, your soul, your whole life.

Otherwise that rootlessness, not your mobility, not your career, not your origin, will sustain your casual, unexamined, and so effortlessly reproduced casteism. There is a way out of being a homeless cosmopolitan, a person forever drifting, always extracting, and never belonging.

TRACTORS OR CATTLE?

2021-03-03T20:50:00.001-05:00

No matter your feelings are regarding the farmer protests, one thing is certain, the tractor is the symbol and icon of the protests. Farmers marching from all over Punjab and other neighboring states first used their tractors to barge through the barricades erected by the police. Once camped at the borders of Delhi, farmers marched inside Delhi along with their tractors to assert their demands. This is the first time that tractors have been used in farmer protests. So, why did tractors become symbolic of the protests?

The answer might lie in India’s modernization of agriculture, especially in the Punjab and Haryana, starting from the 1960s. A newly-independent India faced a crisis of grain shortage and hunger. The Nehruvian vision of modern India, led to a policy wherein chemical fertilizers, pesticides, and mechanization was promoted in these traditionally agrarian spaces. The American agroscientist Norman Borlaug was roped in to implement the new vision. The resulting ‘Green Revolution’ not only created a grain surplus, especially of wheat from the granaries of Punjab and Haryana, but, over time, a situation where much of this grain would rot in poorly managed and ill-equipped storage facilities.

It is obvious, then, that the ‘Green Revolution’ agriculture was not possible without mechanization. Machines like tractors were necessary to plough the thousands of acres that a farmer would own. The use of draught animals was no longer economically viable, not that it was earlier if the deficit of agrarian production is given due consideration. While farmers needed to invest in more and more tractors, the use of draught animals was perhaps confined to smaller farms and on a much-reduced scale.

The Green Revolution, as one knows, had a catastrophic fall out, especially in the Punjab. The use of large quantities of pesticides and chemical fertilizers has led to an increased number of cancer cases. The high yield varieties of crops need greater amounts of water and this has led to a decrease of the ground water table level. The increased investment has only led the farmers into greater debts. Add to this, and the trigger of protest of decades of hardships, was the government’s plan to increase privatization of grain distribution. The farmers could lose their last option of earning a fair and minimum price for their produce.

For some time now, especially after the present government came to power, the ban on cow, and now in some areas buffalo, slaughter has been promoted as a way out of the Green Revolution mess. In fact, persons and NGOs associated with the ruling party, the BJP, or its parent the RSS, have been at the forefront in promoting ‘traditional’ agriculture. Of course, the laws banning cow slaughter predates the BJP: Goa’s Maharashtrawadi Gomantak Party was one of the earliest regional outfits to legislate on the matter, in addition to the Congress. While it is only now that the rhetoric has shifted to banning the consumption of beef, earlier these laws were enacted ostensibly to protect the cattle for agrarian purposes.

The argument for promoting ‘traditional’ agriculture seems to promote a caste order in rural India. In 2015 when Maharashtra imposed a stringent ban on the consumption of beef, the Viniyog Parivar Trust, a Jain NGO instrumental in promoting the law, claimed that agriculture would be the main beneficiary of the beef ban. One of its leaders then claimed that more cattle will be available to farmers and consequently there will be more work for ‘untouchable’ communities traditionally forced to clear dead cattle and leather workers.

It then appears that farmers in North India have two options: continue with the mechanized agriculture (and ensure that the government fixes prices and makes proper policies) or go back to an older traditional form of agriculture—the bucolic idyll of Gandhi—and make a greater use of cattle and other such animals. The farmers have chosen neither and the choice is significant. After all the choice between Scylla and Charybdis is not choice at all!

By focusing on the need for a fair price, the farmers are not supporting either of the agricultural visions. Rather than choose between a modern, future-oriented Green Revolution or rooting for village-based traditionalism, the farmers are shifting the debate to fairness and just economic practices. It is unlikely that big farms would be economically viable through village-based traditionalism. The farmers know that mechanization is still necessary to earn their livelihood, or even profit from farming. Thus, the appeal of tractors as symbols of the protests.

As much as the tractors help to plough, they also are useful to push through police barricades. With a segment of the protests going out of control on Republic Day this year, and following the propaganda of news channels, the tractor as a symbol of the protests had a quiet exit from the scene. But not the protests: the farmers continue to ask for a fair minimum price that would save them from ruin and immiseration.

Following the farmer’s protest, many commentators believed the protests were crucial for the future of the Indian Republic. How exactly do the farmer protests stop the downward trend of India’s democratic institutions is something that, as the cliché goes, only time will tell. But one thing is for certain: the visions of both, traditionalism and modernization have utterly failed the small and large farmers in the country.

(First published in O Heraldo, dt: 3 March, 2021)

ELECTION WINS ARE NOT VOTES FOR DEVELOPMENT

2021-02-03T18:41:00.005-05:00

The cancellation of the IIT project in Melaulim is a clear indication that the government can heed the wishes of the people. The cancellation further suggests that all development that the government sees fit to impose on Goans and the Goan land is reversible. The decision to cancel the IIT project came after much chest-thumping bravado by ministers in the ruling government, especially after the Zilla Parishad elections that the BJP swept, that they had the mandate and support of the electorate.

The Chief Minister, Pramod Sawant, assumed that this sweep of the Zilla Parishad elections is people’s approval of his leadership and giving him the go ahead for the recent projects in the Mollem forest reserve. Similarly, the Health Minister, Viswajit Rane, who also tasted success in the Zilla Parishad elections as all the candidates he supported emerged victorious, acted as if the people of his constituency had given him the green light to proceed with the IIT in Melaulim.

For the legitimacy of Sawant’s leadership, the stakes at the Zilla Parishad elections may have been indeed high. Sawant became Chief Minister in 2019 after the demise of Manohar Parrikar, but has never been recognized popularly as the leader of the people of Goa. In 2017, the BJP had managed to cobble together an alliance, after the Congress failed to form a government despite winning a majority of 17 seats. The 2017 election thus disregarded the will of the people, in fact it reminded many of the horse trading era of the 1990s. Parrikar and the BJP justified their actions saying that they had a greater share of the polled votes. As a result of the 2017 horse trading fiasco, and the fact that he faced opposition within BJP supporters, Sawant desperately needed an electoral win, where both the vote share and seats would be in his and his party’s favor.

One cannot really fault Sawant and Rane for claiming that the Zilla Parishad results meant that Goans were effectively giving consent for the development projects. Perhaps the Chief Minister and the Health Minister jumped the gun because of the victory despite the widespread protests against mega projects, be it the IIT or the infrastructure projects in the Mollem forest. In the months leading up to the Zilla Parishad elections, these protests drummed up support for the anti-people and anti-environmental policies of the government, both through sustained actions on the ground and through social media. The public opposition to development was so strong that the Zilla Parishad sweep had to be a sign that the people were wrong, or so everyone thought.

And so, following the results of the Zilla Parishad elections, many, for this or that reason, were deeply dejected that all the protest had amounted to nothing. No matter what one believed, it seemed that everyone accepted the narrative that the victorious side promoted; many tried to make sense of why Goans had effectively voted for the same people who promoted the destruction of their land.

But the people of Melaulim seem to have proven everyone wrong! From what one gathers from the core leadership of the Melaulim protests, the primary goal of the protest was ownership of land. The people of Melaulim did not change their demand of land ownership even after most of the BJP-supported candidates won in the Zilla Parishad elections. They stuck to their guns, and in fact are pushing for their demands ever more vociferously these days, despite the IIT project cancellation.

While the issue of why Goans vote for pro- destructive development politicians might have to wait for some other day, the Melaulim case forces us to think about the role of elections in Goan society today. What are elections for? Just an occasion for the transfer of power and the gift and favors that are exchanged before voting? What is the value of one vote?

The value of a person’s vote comes into serious question when the government blatantly disregards people’s wishes. In this case by promoting destructive and harmful development. If the health of the citizens is jeopardized due to the coal dust, if the land on which citizens and their ancestors have lived and worked on is not legally theirs (as is the case in Melaulim), or forests and other fragile ecological niches are destroyed, or the fact that the government decides that another railway line should be cut through villages and the houses in them, then the government does not serve the interests of the people that voted it to power.

While politicians supplicate before the voter before elections, what happens after is that the will of the people is, more often than not, ignored. In fact, as far as the history of Goa is concerned, post 1961, what happens after elections matters much more than the pre-election promises of the politicians. A recent case in point is the private resolution to scrap the three linear projects in Mollem where 11 members voted for the resolution, and nine abstained. The resolution was defeated by 20 votes.

An electoral victory is no license for ‘development’. From the Melaulim example, it is quite clear that winning an election, or having a greater vote share, or majority seats, does not give authoritative powers to the elected representatives. But it is also clear that while one can approach politicians for personal favors, one cannot count on them when it comes to issues that determine the collective future of the state. The people then have to protest and put their lives on the line. This unaccountability of elected representatives post elections is fast rendering the electoral process empty.

(First published in O Heraldo, dt: 3 February 2021)

THE MEANING OF LIBERATION IN 2021

2021-01-05T22:16:00.001-05:00

This is not the first time that Goans in large numbers have questioned if Goa is truly liberated. But this is the first time when a large number of peaceful citizens, including children, were detained by the police, for creating awareness about the destruction of Goa, right on 19 December, the day Goa was liberated from Portuguese rule! The recent protests, in a long history of protests in Goa, were sparked by the Government’s decision to promote the double-tracking of the South Western Railway, and a power line and a new National Highway through Goa’s lush green Mollem forest on its southern frontier. That the state government has received a grant of 100 crore rupees for the year-long celebrations marking the 60th anniversary of ‘Liberation Day’ only added to the irony of the situation.

The first time that any serious debate took place on the meaning of liberation in contemporary Goa, at least in recent memory, was about 4 years ago. In 2016, many responded to some unsavory comments by a group of freedom fighters, who asserted that Goans who had opted for Portuguese citizenship must be punished. The irresponsible comments by some Freedom Fighters opened a Pandora’s Box and the ensuing debate highlighted that in a truly liberated Goa, the voices of the people would not be muzzled. In such a Goa, another strand of the same debate pointed out, the Goan landscape would not be destroyed by commissioning mega-projects in the fragile ecology of Goa.

In the current context, while Goans were debating if they truly enjoy liberty in their homeland, many people also remembered the Portuguese dictator Antonio de Oliveira Salazar. His memory is alive and kicking largely because many, including political opponents, view the Government acting in a highhanded and dictatorial way. A spokesperson for the Aam Aadmi Party, Sandesh Telekar, and the supremo of the Goa Forward Party, Vijai Sardesai, likened the current CM Pramod Sawant’s repressive measures to those enacted by the Salazarist regime on the Goans who questioned Portuguese rule in Goa.

To an extent, remembering Salazar’s dictatorial regime at this moment makes sense. Goans are witnesses to how their liberties are being slyly eroded by the state through its police, among other institutions. While the full extent of Salazarist repression in Goa is yet to be studied, what is important in this context is that his name serves as a shorthand for the highhandedness of politicians and governments who repress the citizen’s right to free speech and dissent. The Sawant-led government’s refusal to allow any protest, along with its refusal to scrap the triad of destructive projects, is clearly seen as a dictatorial way of functioning. In liberated Goa, definitely, representatives of the people should be more responsive to the grievances of the electorate as well as the integrity of the state’s resources.

To his (dis)credit, Sawant is not the first Chief Minister of Goa to be likened to a dictator. His mentor, the late Manohar Parrikar, whose portrait sat next to Sawant when he took charge, was the first CM to receive the dishonor of being likened to a dictator. Ever since Parrikar first took charge as Chief Minister, after a decade-long saga of political horse-trading in the 1990s, his dictatorial style of functioning became the hallmark of his government. His word, it was said, was the law, and many of his supporters even admired that, claiming that such a style delivered the ‘good governance’ that was desperately needed in Goa then.

But comparisons to Salazar started happening about 10 years ago more openly. For instance, a gag order of sorts was issued against the tiatrist fraternity in 2014. This move came after Parrikar was being widely criticized, with his aura of ‘good governance’ waning. The tiatrists had had enough of his style of governance and, as is their tradition, were subjecting him to stinging criticism. The now-rescinded guidelines were framed for performances at the Ravindra Bhavan and explicitly demanded that MLAs should not be criticized nor attacked personally. Such a gag order revived memories of censorship, for tiatr and tiatrists were indeed under censorship in the final years of the Portuguese regime.

It is no coincidence that new debates about the meaning of ‘liberation’ or ‘liberty’ were articulated simultaneously with a revival of memories of a dictator or dictatorial ways of functioning. Liberty cannot exist without freedom of speech and protest. And these are the fundamental rights that are being extinguished in the name of development, or in the name of citizenship (by refusing to see the benefits of dual citizenship for Goans), or in the name of cultural-religious politics (like indirect beef bans or frequent shortages, and increasing communalization of the society by political parties and their fringe groups). Freedom and liberty, then, appear to be a distant dream or an illusion, or something that, at best, can be found in the pages of textbooks or in politicians’ speeches.

Goa’s post-Liberation history has been one economic crisis after another. In recent years these economic crises have only deepened, and new social problems have added to the state’s woes. The people of Goa have paid a high price of poor economic planning, an almost non-existent regulation of industry, and development of an extractive nature, be it for tourism, or in the iron ore mining, or in the unregulated growth of the real estate industry. The forcible promotion of projects and the destruction of Goa will only further erode the confidence of Goans of having any rights or protection in their own homeland.

(First published in O Heraldo, dt: 6 January, 2021)

INTERGENERATIONAL EQUITY: THE OLD AND THE NEW

2020-12-02T11:35:00.000-05:00

The end of a calendar year often makes us reflect on the ‘old’ that we leave behind and the ‘new’ that we hope for. When most of the economic, social, and political problems that Goa faced last year, or even over the last few years, remain firmly in place, it makes little sense to hope for a better 2021. The pandemic, of course, gives us reasons to be even more pessimistic. We really do not know how 2021 will unfold, especially because the government everyday reinforces its spectacular inefficiency in handling the pandemic. It is for this reason that, rather than offering the usual clichés about a new calendar year, it might be better to reflect on some of the positive changes over the last six months.

I am referring especially to the massive participation of college students and other youth in environmental protests since, at least, June 2020. While youth have always participated in protests and agitations before, and have been as vocal and well-informed, this time around youth participation is marked by a clever social media savviness. Additionally, they believe in confronting their elected leaders directly, especially through social media, not kowtowing to them as if they were feudal lords. At the height of the pandemic, many college students started mobilizing public opinion on Whatsapp and Twitter. Soon, these mobilizations developed into letter-writing campaigns, as well as creating public awareness through hashtags (#savemollem), artworks, and Instagram stories.

The main issue in the recent participation of the youth in Goa is intergenerational equity. In other words, the future of Goa and young Goans. But there is a conceptual difference as the ‘future’ in the recent protests takes the environment as its basis, and not culture or politics. Intergenerational equity is rather an old concept in economics but one that has been gaining increasing traction in debates about the environment, especially climate change. Intergenerational equity here means that the environment is the basis of life, and any livelihood must be based on conserving and protecting the environment.

The demands are strikingly different from what one generally assumes would be made by the youth. The youth are simply asking the authorities to protect and conserve the environment, and not necessarily create economic opportunity—or development—so that more jobs are available in the future. The old ways of pacifying youth unrest through government jobs do not seem to be working these days because the demands are not about the economy but about the ecology.

There are some urgent reasons why the environment needs to be protected and conserved from predatory development. For one, as the pandemic has taught us, destroying forests will only lead to more diseases being released onto human habitation. Secondly, it is about having a place to call home, so that one can live and make a living by accessing basics like clean water, air, and food. Without ecology, as it is getting clearer to almost everyone, no employment, cultural life, or society is ever possible.

Today, we are concerned about our future because successive waves of development in Goa have destroyed the intergenerational equity for the Goan youth. Goa’s history of destructive development shows that those most affected by it are the youth from the subaltern classes. Take the example of the tourism industry. When the industry started booming from the 1980s, many young people in the coastal areas dropped out of schools. One can also think of the mining boom which, while creating deep scars on the environment in those regions, also left the people living there little or no facilities. An environmental crisis only deepens a preexisting social one.

The most important political change that environmental and intergeneration equity activism needs to deliver is rather in the social sphere. While the social media blitz has turned the tides against developmentalist policies, Goa is yet to create equitable stakeholders, the young and the old of all social background, within a vision of intergenerational equity. Intergenerational equity is throttled if there is no vision for how communities will interact and use the land in the future. To put it in another way, we are yet to create a vision where Goa’s rich ecology is preserved and handed over to the next generation irrespective of caste, creed, or religion.

The big question is this: Who will benefit from the Goan environment that we want to protect today? Because, over the years, resources that one generation can hand over to the next have been steadily depleting. There is less land, for instance, that a new generation of Goans can inherit, or even purchase, for the building boom fostered as development has taken it out of common Goans’ reach. Despite the so-called development that successive governments are proud of and constantly promote, more and more Goans are forced to migrate for decent jobs. Thus, it is not surprising that young Goans in their 20s and 30s find it better to opt for Portuguese citizenship. So, we need to protect the Goan environment to create a better and more cohesive Goan community.

The idea of intergenerational equity is rightly driving many to question the benefits of development for this and the next generations. The answers that the youth are giving us align with the destructive history of development in Goa: We don’t need more development! On a deeper reflection, the demands of the youth today are not really ‘new’ but by fulfilling it Goans can find better ways to regain the best aspects of the ‘old’ life they have lost through rampant development since the 1970s. That is what we need in the years to come.

‘AMKA NAKA’: IIT, COAL HUB, AND DEVELOPMENT

2020-11-05T20:48:00.002-05:00

From Canacona to Sattari, the chorus is loud and clear: ‘Amka Naka.’ Goans once again in large numbers are saying no to ‘mega projects,’ be it an IIT (that was shifted from Canancona to Sanguem) in Sattari, or the expansion of the coal hub in Mormugao with the supplementary project of double-tracking the South-Western railway line. Underlying these vociferous protests is a rejection of an economic model, called ‘development,’ that destroys the livelihoods and landscape of Goans, and a political establishment that promotes such crony capitalist ventures. This development makes Goans and Goa disposable in the interest of (inter)national businesses.

Of course, this is not the first time that Goans have said no to such development. From the 1970s, the Goan economy began to change from one based on mining to one that diversified into tourism. Mining did not stop, of course, to the extent that mining and tourism became the joint ‘backbone’ of the Goan economy. The then MGP government, though not necessarily open to external capital, and which focused much of its energies on domestic agrarian reforms, nonetheless promoted tourism to boost the Goan economy. In both industries, particularly in the new tourism industry, conflicts over land control and ownership were rampant.

But, from the 1980s, the tourism industry was the chief site where these conflicts over land control and ownership were played out. It was an old conflict, no doubt, between the bhatcars and mundcars, but the difference now was that Goa was open to national and global capital. The fanfare around the Commonwealth Heads of Government Meeting (CHOGM) in New Delhi in 1983, with a retreat organized in Goa, is a watershed moment that ushered widespread urbanization and tourism-related conflicts in Goan coastal villages.

The takeover of land by the tourism industry was resisted right from the start. Back in 1983, it was widely reported that Goans were resisting. Josephine Lobo and Preciosa Menezes, then in their seventies, fought against the expansion plans of a starred resort in Candolim. While the fight predated the CHOGM event, the starred hotel in question seemed to use the opportunity provided by CHOGM, with the massive government investment and interest to ‘get things done’, to finally acquire some coconut orchards owned by the two septuagenarians mentioned above.

Things only got worse in the 1990s. The promotion of tourism required more starred hotels and more land, especially from the mundcars, who had become owners of small holdings thanks to the Bandodkarite land reforms of 1964. One could think of the well-known case of a Japanese retirement village that was opposed successfully, which also brought tourism’s links to land use to the fore. Simultaneously with the conflicts over land, there were deep-seated cultural changes that the coastal towns experienced. Studies and surveys that document these changes highlight how the school dropout rates increased by leaps and bounds in the 1990s.

In the 2000s, while tourism continued to grow unsustainably, the demand for iron ore increased due to the Beijing Olympics. The result was one of the wholesale destruction of the forested regions of Goa. The mining companies promoted local Goans to invest in trucks to transport the ore. The illegalities in the sector and the destructive extraction of the ore led to an investigation under Justice Shah. Mining thus came to a sudden halt due to the order of the Supreme Court. Those Goans who had invested in trucks were the ones who were severely affected, not to mention as well the agrarian communities in the mining belt whose fields were affected due to the waste from nearby mines.

But despite such obvious experience of how destructive the economy of Goa was, successive governments—be it Congress or BJP—pushed for a more significant share of tourism, and showed no interest or initiative to recover the dues of the illegally-extracted iron ores from the defaulting companies. At the very least, the political establishment could have tried to redeem themselves by formulating better economic policies in the wake of massive scandals and illegalities in these ‘backbone’ sectors. In other words, they could have thought about a better alternative and worked towards its realization through policymaking. Instead, we were given more mega projects in the form of IITs and coal hubs!

I have focused only on the major economic trends and the protests against them. There were other equally essential protests such as the Ramponnkar’s agitation against mechanized fishing, the bitter opposition to the Konkan Railway single track, or the movement against turning Goa into a Special Economic Zone (SEZ). Nonetheless, it is clear that since the early 1970s—that is after Goa was made a part of the Indian Union—successive governments have pushed Goa and Goans to the brink of an economic and environmental crisis.

Since the 1970s (at least), Goa has been experiencing the fallout of ‘development.’ Such a model, with its emphasis on infrastructure and industry, was touted as a solution to global poverty, especially after WWII. In simpler terms, or the common parlance of election discourse in Goa, ‘development’ means roads, water supply, and other necessary services. But to understand what development truly means, one must look at the destruction of Goa’s man-made and natural infrastructure by the mining and tourism sectors. There is no better way of doing business in the ‘development’ model.

With all of us facing the ill-effects of COVID, this destructive economic model patronised by the political establishment is untenable. Hence, when localized protests assert that “Amka naka IIT,” or “Amka naka kollso,” they should also unanimously assert that “Amka naka development.”

(First published in O Heraldo, dt: 5 November, 2020)

THIS CRISIS WAS FORETOLD

2020-10-07T21:01:00.003-04:00

The current COVID-19 crisis and the financial unpreparedness of governments worldwide in dealing with it are a cautionary parable. In Goa, the situation is no different. If there is a difference, the situation here is undoubtedly worse than in other places.

Be it the global financial crisis of 2008 or the Corona crisis now, it is certain that the poorly-paid workers are the first and the most affected of the lot. Though performing the most essential tasks for society, such as cleaning, these workers are treated as dispensable. Nowhere was this more apparent, and willfully ignored, as in India. The daily-wage workers’ barefoot attempts to return to their villages due to the lockdown should have haunted the country’s collective conscience.

But it didn’t! And the reasons are not hard to guess. The centuries-old and fossilized attitudes born out of an essential high and low within the caste hierarchy has seen most people condemned to remain poor and socially inferior. Of course, there have been moments when the underclass has rebelled, but the casteist system has survived, one way or the other.

In Goa, we hardly hear about how the pandemic has affected daily wage workers. In the grand narratives of megaprojects, like marinas, IITs, and coal hubs, these are precisely the people who are willfully ignored. Moreover, the government and big businesses want the land that belongs to agrarian, fishing, and daily-wage earning communities. The pandemic has surely deepened the financial problems for this section of our society.

And it seems that the pandemic and the financial crisis is ripping through the lives of even those who are not exactly poor or socially inferior. Recently, we read that in a small state like Goa, about 200 small businesses have asked for their trade licenses to be canceled. It is not surprising, though understandable, why small businesses made such a move. They are simply unable to stay afloat.

Also not surprising (as well as not ironic) is that while small businesses shut due to a mismanaged crisis, big businesses are expanding as if we are not in the middle of a health and financial crisis. News is trickling in of a major corporation, believed to be close to the ruling party, is planning to expand into e-retail, telecommunications, agriculture, and education. Another corporation wants to increase the volume of coal transported through Goa for generating power.

The state appears to favor big corporations unjustly. Nowhere is this partisan attitude more glaringly obvious than with the mining companies. Ever since the Justice M. B. Shah Commission made the startling revelations that Goa’s illegal ore extraction was worth Rs. 35,000 crores, the government has been unwilling to hold accountable any of the companies involved. After about eight years from the first revelations, it is now reported that the state can at least recover about Rs 466 crores. It is a fraction of what was alleged in the Shah Commission report, but it appears that the state will once again drag its feet.

Today when small businesses are shutting down, and people are losing their jobs, the treasury could have enjoyed some fiscal stability from these 466 crores at the very least. The resulting benefits from this stability could have been passed onto the people of Goa. For instance, the recovered cash could have been easily used for medical equipment and life-saving drugs against COVID-19. But alas, all these measures are ‘could have beens.’

Before or after COVID-19, the state never ensured that the exchequer was in good health. There were repeated warnings that the Goan economy was hurtling towards a crisis. For instance, the tourism industry’s performance and management were sure signs of what was to come. The mismanagement of the shack allocations every year, the taxi operators’ issue, and a general environmental crisis that is tourism-related took Goa to the tipping point.

Since the 1980s, successive governments have ignored warnings and recommendations that the carrying capacity—the number of people a tourist destination can serve yearly without environmental and cultural damage—should not be exceeded. But the governments want to increase the number of people visiting Goa each year continuously. Even at the peak of COVID-19 infections, both in Goa and the rest of the country, the Goa government announced that it was opening the borders for Indian tourists—even if they traveled from the Corona hotspots—while Goa itself had zero cases.

The role of the government in averting any crisis, with or without a pandemic, is central. If governmental policies make no provisions to withstand shocks and crises, then the government fails in its duties towards its people. Merely promoting multi-crore projects is a sure indication that more disasters will happen in the future. We are living in one now!

If one considers the last two decades of financial crisis and mismanagement, one gets the eerie feeling that our current crisis was foretold. True that there are some things that the government cannot fix; a vaccine takes about 18 months to be safely administered to the people, for instance. But be it a vaccine or safeguarding jobs and the economy, the government needs to be held accountable for an utter lack of fiscal stability. While people are suffering a pandemic and a financial crisis, the government cannot start building new monuments, like a parliament building or a Governor’s residence. The government demonstrates its accountability by prioritizing its spending. For instance, now, it needs to spend on healthcare.

It isn’t doing it now, just like it didn’t do it then. So, a future and worse crisis is already foretold today, if the Government does not reverse these actions.

(First published in O Heraldo, dt: 7 October, 2020)

TECHNOLOGY AND COVID-19

2020-09-03T21:36:00.000-04:00

All the worst predictions about COVID-19 have, thus far, been proven true. Whether it was the rise of infection in a particular month, or the fact that the Government would clear “projects” in the absence of any opposition, or the increase in poverty and unemployment, the COVID-19 crises have deepened existing inequalities in accessing basic resources for sustenance, and technological ones such as internet and smart phones. With India’s GDP diminishing to about 23 percent in the first quarter, these technological inequalities will deepen further.

Goa’s Chief Minister, Pramod Sawant, had, a couple of months ago, made a candid admission that all people do not have access to technology like smart phones and internet. “Arogya Setu [app] is not compulsory. However, those who have smart phones need to compulsorily download the app,” he said. While the statement appears to contradict itself, the condition that only those who have smart phones exposes the gap in access to technology. All people in India do not have access to technology which means that the Government’s strategy of using apps and smart phones for communication is misguided.

The unequal or poor-quality access to technology is now hampering the education of children. The sudden switch to online and smart phone-based teaching has left many parents and teachers in the lurch. We have seen several examples of students climbing the roofs of their houses or a hill to get better internet coverage. We have also seen parents selling their meagre property to purchase a smart phone.

In Kerala, for instance, sometime back a photo of students perched on the roof of her house went viral. Many applauded the dedication of the students. But the viral photo actually suggests how deeply flawed is our education system, even in a state like Kerala which scores high marks in human development indices. Though the Kerala government has been proactive in making resources available, especially through television classes, the access to a television is also difficult for families who depend on daily wage jobs. But the gap between the haves and the haves not of technological access is wider than before.

Since 2002, successive governments in Goa, under the chief ministerships of Manohar Parrikar and Digambar Kamat, have implemented the Cyber Age scheme. Under this scheme, students after completing SSC were to be given computers and later laptops at a subsidized rate. The scheme did not meet the targets of promoting e-learning and computer literacy. A couple of years ago, the government once again floated another iteration of the Cyber Age scheme, for the year 2017-18. The 2017-18 iteration too did not succeed as it hardly reached households that needed computers or laptops the most during the lockdown.

One thing is clear that had the Cyber Age scheme been implemented properly, along with strengthening the e-learning facilities in schools, the shocks of COVID-19 in education would have been minimally felt. Another problem in promoting computer literacy, apart from the logistics and distribution of quality equipment, is access to internet. Before the lockdown was implemented, rural areas had spotty internet at best.

Despite the lack of basic technology in primary education, the Government has been repeatedly promoting higher technocratic education, such as engineering, through the IITs. Thus, the technocratic and merit-based vision of India’s future, nurtured by the so-called middle classes for so long, is a mirage. The crores of rupees spent promoting technocratic education and to create professionals for the IT industry, for example, has not seeped down to the lowest strata of Indian society. There are considerable number of areas in India where even spotty internet access is a distant dream.

In Goa, too, we have seen similar hardships faced by our students, especially in the rural areas. As such one needs to ask if technological innovation and technocratic education—the IT and engineering careers—have really benefitted Goa. The pandemic, while exposing the yawning gaps in access, has also made it evident that technocracy and STEM education has not created innovation that is required in a fundamentally unequal society.

As such the new IIT project in Guleli—which was shifted there after intense opposition from Canacona and Sanguem—seems like a case of misplaced priorities. The IIT project once again is promoted as a way of encouraging Goans to compete for a spot in a top-quality engineering training as well as boosting regional infrastructure and investment. Both these claims, touted even during the pandemic, seem hollow and a far cry from the reality of poor access to something as basic as the internet and smart phones.

Considering e-learning and technology, we must not forget that what literally powers these devices is electricity. The electricity supply is not regular; there are frequent power cuts. In the rural areas, sometimes there are power cuts for hours on end, if not more. In such a scenario how does one even begin to promote cutting-edge technology, least of all in teaching and learning?

In the last few weeks, the Goa government has announced that local bodies will be circumvented to set up telephone towers and lay cables to improve internet connectivity. Such a move seems directed to bypass any opposition or due process. Rather than taking the people into confidence during a difficult time, the Government chose to ignore them. This appears to be another way of clearing “projects” despite public opposition in the guise of fixing a COVID-19 related problem.

In the absence of basic services, pertaining to water and electricity supply to name a few, it is unwise to talk about e-learning or smart learning. Or even to promote advanced technical education because this will only deepen existing hierarchies and privilege. The COVID-19 crisis is proof that we need to strengthen basic infrastructure more than anything else.

(First published in O Heraldo, dt: 2 September, 2020)

READING A. K. PRIOLKAR IN 2020

2020-08-04T23:25:00.000-04:00

How should we read A. K. Priolkar in 2020? Or, more importantly, how should we understand ‘his’ interpretation of Christianity and the Inquisition in Goa? Two important aspects of Priolkar’s methodology need to be borne in mind: the ideological context of the mid twentieth century when he wrote, and his reliance on a sparse collection of facts.

Priolkar based his understanding of Christianity on the nationalist ideology of ‘foreign’ religions. Many Indian nationalists, notably Gandhi, considered Islam and Christianity as ‘foreign’ and antithetical to the idea of swadeshi. They thought that Indians would convert to Christianity only if given material gifts, or through fear and violence. Hence, it is not surprising that Priolkar generalizes about conversion to Christianity only on the basis of violent events. Marry this swadeshi politics with the Black Legend (as I wrote previously), that is, exaggerated accounts of violence and oppression, of the Inquisition and the colonial state, and one gets a potent cocktail for anti-minority politics in Goa. Who will bell this cat?

In addition to Indian nationalism, the politics of anti-clericalism inherited from European liberalism, especially Southern European liberalism since the twentieth century, influenced Priolkar’s interpretation, thus conflating Christianity with the history of the Inquisition. Hence, the Black Legend was the main interpretative framework in his analysis. By limiting his study of the Inquisition to very few sources, Priolkar made the broader suggestion that the practice of the Christian faith, then and now, lacked any spiritual motivation. He argued that all conversions were forced and the result of the fearful hold exerted by the Inquisition on the populace, so that those who embraced Christianity did it only out of fear.

While critics of the Inquisition are right to draw attention to the issue of force in conversions, historians have pointed out many more reasons why people converted. Ângela Barreto Xavier, for instance, highlights the pre-existing caste relations that created conditions where the underclasses sought a new social life through Christianity. In addition to spiritual and subjective reasons, they tried to escape the stranglehold of caste and landlordism, and even patriarchy in the case of women. Violence, therefore, was not a prerequisite for the spread of the religion. In early modern as in later times, there are several examples where persons interacted with Christianity outside the realm of violence. Indeed, the religious hybridity visible in the Kristapurann (1616 onwards), and surrounding the veneration of St. Francis Xavier, are good examples.

In any case, only highlighting the violence in Goa’s colonial history does it a disservice, and is a source of misinterpretation and misinformation. If the Goa Inquisition pursued a coherent repression of all non-Catholic religiosities and identities, why would it rent out shop spaces of its Palace to Hindu merchants? An architectural plan of the headquarters of the Tribunal, based in the old and now-demolished palace of Adil Shah in Old Goa, was drafted by a Brazilian engineer João Baptista Vieira Godinho in c. 1779, and depicts ground floor shops that were “always” rented out to “Gentios”—a generic term used for Hindus, Buddhists, and Jains, but which, in the context of eighteenth-century Goa, meant only Hindus. These rented-out shops were a source of income for the Inquisition. The headquarters of the institution that policed religious heresy, then, was also a site of inter-religious interaction. The plan, studied by the Portuguese architectural historian Helder Carita, suggests that there are more facts about the Inquisition that Priolkar was completely unaware of, or simply ignored.

As is clear, even with the violence of the Inquisition, and all the laws and decrees that it enacted (together with the colonial state), a good section of non-Christians, especially the elites and traders, were not only interacting with the ruling hierarchies and colonial institutions without converting, but also profiting from this interaction, being tax-farmers, ambassadors, translators, royal medical practitioners, and the like. The addition of such facts does not change or erase the violent events, but it forces us to think more carefully about the nature of Indo-Portuguese history, and the contours of violence therein. While we contemplate temple and mosque destruction, or the ill-effects that an institution like the Inquisition had on the local population, we must also consider how the same institutions gave space, metaphorically as well as literally, to many locals, and how the past was essentially a negotiation between various groups.

Priolkar’s book (and contemporary understandings of it) is unreliable today precisely because he had no way of knowing the new facts, like the one mentioned above. His nationalist leanings also blinded his analysis, and hence he borrowed the narrative of the Black Legend uncritically. Our reliance on Priolkar should stop at least for the simple reason that recent researchers have read the available archives with patience and care, and thus brought more facts to light. Those who politicize the Inquisition today ought to study this huge body of recent literature.

Therefore, I would like to reiterate—with the hope that those who disagree with me do not mischievously misquote and deliberately misunderstand me as happened recently—that we need a nuanced understanding of not just the history of the Inquisition, but also other interlinked aspects of Indo-Portuguese history. Certainly, new research in the last ten or twenty years have not shied away from calling out violence of all sorts: be it of castes, religions, or the state. The new research, hence, is more reliable and provides a more accurate picture of Goa than the older works.

With thanks to Paolo Aranha. Image Courtesy: Manor Houses: Portugal, Brasil & Goa.

(First published in O Heraldo, dt: 5 August, 2020)

MISUSE OF HISTORY: THE INQUISITION

2020-07-01T00:46:00.000-04:00

If there is one thing that unites all in Goa, it is misinformation about the Inquisition. The extent of this misinformation was recently demonstrated on the Goanet listserv by the author, Alan Machado when he pointed out the falsehood, or “fiction,” that is passed off as historical facts. Catholics are misinformed because any attempt to confront this most shameful chapter of history is met with right-wing abuse and the ire of secular liberal ideologues. Hindus are also misinformed because this right-wing propaganda is the main vehicle through which they receive information about the Inquisition. The result is suspicion and animosity amongst the two communities—the end goal of right-wing politics. Such a politicization of this history eerily reminds us of the communalization of the ‘Muslim invasions.’

The result of this misinformation, as professional historians have pointed out for some years now, is the ‘Black Legend’ against the Spanish empire. Starting from the seventeenth century, the ‘Black Legend’ was the propaganda directed against the Spanish monarchy which resulted in wildly exaggerated views of the Inquisition. One of the enduring legacies of this propaganda is the belief that executions were the norm under the Inquisition. However, historians today tell us that this is false: about 200 death sentences were given in the 15000 cases tried from 1561 to 1812. “What is the Inquisition?” is a question that historians are still trying to answer.

One of the singular problems with A. K. Priolkar’s The Goa Inquisition (1961), which is the most popular source in Goa about the activities of the institution, is that it made liberal use of the ‘Black Legend’ in interpreting the history of the Inquisition in Old Conquest Goa. On its publication, noted historians differed on the book’s usefulness. No less a figure than the noted Indologist, Fr. Henry Heras, whose contribution to Indian history and archaeology is immense, to put it modestly, felt that Priolkar relied heavily on authors drawing from the ‘Black Legend’ propaganda. In response, Priolkar acknowledged his reliance on his doubtful authorities, but offered a weak defense that he was guided by the archives available in Goa. However, Priolkar did not consult the available archives, as papers pertaining to the Inquisition are not held in the Goa archives. Rather, Priolkar relied too heavily on Charles Dellon and Francis Buchanan’s accounts, and that too poorly.

Every fledgling student of history is trained to inquire into the reasons why historians put together a narrative. In Priolkar’s case, it appears that his book was not about the Inquisition (per se) as it was a comment on Christianity in India. By stressing, or overstressing, the violence of the Inquisition as defining Christianity and Christians in India, Priolkar asserted that fear, rather than belief, forced Christians to convert. He felt that his book would persuade everyone “that religious persuasion played but a very insignificant role in the conversions of the Indians to Christianity effected during this period. It was only to be expected that persons so dragged into the new religion would have little understanding thereof or love therefor” (58). Priolkar never explained why Christians continued with the faith after the Inquisition. An explanation was given by Fr. Anthony D’Costa in his The Christianisation of the Goa Islands, 1510-1567 (1965). Reacting to Priolkar and bringing archival data into the discussion, D’Costa argued that the earliest converts demonstrated their understanding of the faith and that local and pre-Portuguese forms of social oppression also pushed people to convert.

Today, many lay persons consider Priolkar’s partisan and methodologically-flawed book as authoritative. Its multiple reprints have only helped the book’s popularity. A self-confessed Hindu nationalist publishing house, Voice of India, reissued the book in 1998 as The Terrible Tribunal of the East: The Goa Inquisition. Recently, in 2008, Rajhauns Vitaran, a Goa-based educational publisher, also reprinted the text. Despite new publications since the 1960s, such as James Boyajian’s, “Goa Inquisition, A new light on First 100 Years (1561-1660),” in Purabhilekh-Puratatva (1986), many in India still promote Priolkar’s dated study because it fits into the nationalist idea of colonial violence, and aids a virulent agenda of religious sectarianism.

Admittedly, most of the new research on the Inquisition is in Portuguese, which creates problems of accessibility in Goa. But that is no excuse for our dependence on ideologically suspect and politically motivated books like Priolkar’s. A serious topic like the Inquisition requires an investment of time and money in reading the available scholarship and archival documents. It also requires that we rely on cutting-edge research methodologies developed (and being perfected) by professional historians. Research always brings more data to light that requires newer interpretations, and hence it is all the more important not to rely solely on an old study.

New studies such as Giuseppe Marcocci and José Pedro Paiva’s História da Inquisição Portuguesa (1536-1821) (2013) proves helpful in updating our knowledge of the Inquisition. Scholars of religion in the west coast also feel the need for better sources that inform the public about the history of Christianity in India. Via a recent telephonic conversation, Paolo Aranha, an Italian scholar of Mangalorean origin working on early modern Christianity in India, suggests that we might profit from a series of video podcasts, with interviews with historians who have undertaken scholarly research on the Goa Inquisition. They could present their own results, as well as discuss other scholarly contributions, produced particularly in the last forty years. Aranha’s suggestion is relevant, as there is a dire need of informing the general public on scholarly advances in such an important field.

The way forward for all Goans is to invest in (and demand) empirically-sound scholarship and politically-neutral (as far as possible) information on the history of the Inquisition in Goa. If not, the current dog whistle politics of religious sectarianism and hatred will continue unabated.

(First published in O Heraldo, dt: 1 July, 2020)

THE PUBLICITY CULTURE OF OUR POLITICS

2020-06-02T22:22:00.002-04:00

Politicians cannot stay away from publicity. They depend and thrive on it. Through propaganda, politicians suggest that the polity is in good health, even if the reality might be completely to the contrary. While at other times, this publicity culture creates dense smokescreens of misinformation, in times of a pandemic, it could be fatal.

The publicity culture unfolds in the following way. Often there will be a leader who is ‘doing something.’ This act is inaugurating a new public work or donating for a charitable or worthy cause. If it is an inauguration, the leader will pause a few moments before cutting the ribbon for the photographers. If it is a donation, the giver and the receiver will also pause so that their generous deed is recorded for posterity. The brief moment when these leaders and philanthropists ‘pause’ for the camera is the moment of publicity.

The most recent example of the dependence of politicians on publicity is the statements of Goa’s Chief Minister, Pramod Sawant. While Goa enjoyed a relatively COVID-19-free April, at least going by official figures, the CM jumped the gun to declare Goa a ‘Green Zone.’ The reason was that no new cases were being reported in that month. However, it was common knowledge that many Goans, either in India or abroad, were to be repatriated in the first weeks of May. Naturally, there was a likelihood that more COVID-19 positive cases would come to light. And they did! By the end of May, the official number of cases rose from 7 to 70 (and counting). Now Mangor Hill in Vasco is a containment zone.

One wonders why the CM was so hasty to declare Goa a green zone. The reasons become apparent as one observes the positive coverage in the national press. The national press hailed Goa for being the first COVID-19-free state in the country. Perhaps the country needed some positive news, or it was good PR by the Goan government. But the Goan government and the national media discarded commonsense. They prematurely celebrated the absence of new cases for April. The result was a miscommunication of COVID-related information to the Goan public; people felt that they were safe from the disease.

The health and economic crisis created by the pandemic is a severe challenge to the leadership pretensions, one created by carefully crafted PR, of the politician. The Corona crisis tests a politician’s ability to take decisive actions to ensure that the state or country does not descend into chaos. In times of crisis, one expects politicians to enact laws that protect the citizens; make financial resources available to tackle disasters; and provide the citizens with accurate information about the crisis. The shocks and destruction that the pandemic is leaving in its wake, as, for instance, in the migrant worker crisis, is proof that most of the elected representatives have failed the people.

But the need for publicity is not just a necessity of the politicians. Everyone who engages in a public act of leadership or philanthropy indulges in the publicity culture. I watched with horror as many people reached out to the poor and vulnerable without any regard for the social distancing norms. The images of someone giving foodstuff or medicines to the older person, and thereby standing close to them for a photo-op, was a cause of concern. What if the corona virus was transmitted in the process of ‘handing over’ the foodstuff, medicines, or money?

And politicians, being leaders, are reinforcing such irresponsible and foolhardy behavior. So hungry are our politicians for publicity that social distancing norms are violated to gain publicity. Recently, the CM was pilloried for not following his own orders when he showed up to inaugurate the grade separator of a flyover in Dabolim. More than anything else, the inauguration of the grade separator was a move to earn publicity. The CM and his cabinet colleagues were standing close to each other, no doubt to be photographed as politicians ‘doing something’ for the people of Goa.

I am not questioning the charitable motives of all those who reached out to the poor and vulnerable without social distancing norms. It is important to reach out to the vulnerable and provide them with essential care and relief. Philanthropy is fine so long as it is not done merely for publicity—and in times of corona, done with social distancing.

Our leaders could have lived by example. In other words, they could have set aside the publicity-seeking culture, or altogether jettison it. Photo-ops are not necessary to show that the government is working for its people, or that the elected representatives are performing their constitutional duties. These photo-ops rather suggest that the government is not doing enough for the citizens. After the Mangor Hill cases came to light, the CM was nowhere seen, and the press conference was conducted by bureaucrats. The photo-ops also suggest that there will be no change in the political culture after the corona crisis.

We can easily see how a culture of publicity in our politics and public life could end up being disastrous. In times of severe crisis, our publicity-seeking political culture creates more problems than it solves. In other times, when there is no pandemic or natural disaster, the publicity-seeking culture leaves a trail of ruined or decaying public infrastructure projects. Who among us have not uneasily entered ramshackle buildings or driven over potholed roads? Funnily enough, these infrastructure projects were once inaugurated with fanfare and photo-ops. The commemoration plaques that gather dust and the photographs of the inauguration of any infrastructure project are a grim reminder that our leaders fail us daily.

(First published in O Heraldo, dt: 3 June, 2020)

BETTER LAWS AND GOVERNMENTS IN TIMES OF CRISES

2020-05-06T21:50:00.001-04:00

Good laws are necessary in times of crisis, or even otherwise. The poor management by state and central authorities of the COVID-19 pandemic lays bare the legal and infrastructural unpreparedness in India. As if the threat of the disease was not enough, the country-wide lockdown created more problems regarding the welfare of the countless million laborers in the casual and informal sectors. There exist no laws, and no new ones were made that protect such laborers in times of crises. Consequently, the government’s policies in tackling COVID-19 essentially lacks a strong legal basis.

For instance, on the question of the wages of workers in various industries during lockdown, the directive to pay the employee has not worked because the period has no legal base. A few business organizations in Goa, in a letter (19 April 2020) to the Chief Minister, questioned the legality of asking private companies to pay wages to their employees. This letter reported in the press, and circulating online, was made by Confederation of Indian Industry (CII), Goa Chamber of Commerce and Industry (GCCI), Goa Hotel & Restaurant Association (GH&RA), Goa State Industries Association (GSIA), Goa Technology Association (GTA), Travel & Tourism Association of Goa (TTAG) and Verna Industries Association (VIA). Lawyers are also debating the same question over the interpretation of the laws, a question that the courts will have to settle.

The letter claims that both the Epidemic Disease Act, 1897, and the Disaster Management Act, 2005, imposed following the outbreak of the pandemic in India, does not empower the State to force private companies to bear the burden of a health crisis or disaster. Instead, the letter claimed that the onus of providing for lockdowned employees, be it “permanent” or “contractual workmen,” and “inter-state migrants” lies firmly with the State. The letter argues, “If for any reason the government decides to extend the lockdown [further than May 3], it should bear the wage burden and should not give any advisory for payment of full wages given it lacks the authority to do so.” Clearly, the workers are left in the lurch.

The imposition of the Epidemic Disease Act, 1897, has also divided public opinion. In addition to the fact that this Act failed to enforce norms of social distancing, some argue that it had several legal loopholes, apart from being archaic. These naysayers are proven right. We can see it in the joint representation by Goan business associations or in the fact that the original Epidemic Disease Act lists only ships and ports as areas of inspection, whereas COVID-19 spread largely through air travelers.

If history teaches us anything, it is that governments need to do more than enough to tide over the crises. As far as making useful laws, the government of India is not rising to the challenge. True, the President issued a recent ordinance making it punishable to harm healthcare professionals in times of an epidemic. This ordinance that lays down in such minute detail the kinds of punishment for such a violation has no place for providing adequate healthcare facilities, for patients as well as doctors.

We know that, like in many other places, healthcare professionals and facilities are facing a severe shortage of essentials, such as testing kits and Personal Protective Equipment (PPE). But the government does not see it fit to make a legal provision to guarantee the health and safety of the citizens of India. Nor did it see fit to make a law to protect workers over their jobs and salaries due to an unprecedented lockdown. At least, the ordinance could have added a clause for enforcing ‘social distancing.’

The transportation of the royalty-paid ore that resumed in May, on the order of the Supreme Court, in times of the lockdown is further proof of a law and order problem in Goa. The trucks on the route from Cavrem to Curchorem has made a mockery of the ‘social distancing’ norms supposedly enforced in Goa. If the government and the mining companies are unwilling to act lawfully (by respecting the lockdown norms), at least they could have delayed the transportation until the COVID-19 situation is no longer a threat to the life and health of the people of Goa.

The Goa government’s refusal to intervene, and thereby maintain at least some semblance of the existence of the rule of law, in the iron ore transportation issue, is, in the words of Claude Alvares, one of the activists against illegal mining, “sheer hypocrisy.” Alvares further observes “COVID-19, the State government should be reminded, is a respiratory illness. By what yardstick is an activity that is closely associated with respiratory illness[es] being allowed in the hot summer on State’s roads, with COVID-19 lurking around every corner?”

As seen in the Goan case, the state’s legal basis for enforcing norms during COVID-19 leaves much to be desired. One reason the government has not been able to reduce the chaos following COVID-19, in fact, has added to it, is because it has not made laws that are relevant to our unprecedented time. The existing laws that the government is using are also inadequate. Thus, the refrain of our times, as in all times, has to be that we need both proactive laws and governments that will be responsive and sensitive to the realities of the socially and economically marginalized sections of society.

(First published in O Heraldo, dt: 6 May, 2020)

THE IMPORTANCE OF PUBLIC SYSTEMS

2020-03-31T23:31:00.000-04:00

Widening roads and promoting the auto industry will not solve traffic hassles; but investing in reliable public transport will. Private schools won’t deliver a good education to all except if the public schools get a boost in infrastructure and better teaching methods. Clanging pots and pans won’t make a deadly pandemic go away; but having an efficient public healthcare system will, or at least mitigate dire circumstances.

The corona virus pandemic has brought the importance of an efficient public healthcare situation to the fore. India’s healthcare system is bad—by one estimate about 63 million people in India face impoverishment every year due to their inability to confront medical emergencies. Indians pay as high as 70% out-of-pocket for healthcare in the absence of proper health insurance and bureaucratic blocks in accessing government healthcare schemes. The Indian Journal of Community Medicine, the official journal of the Indian Association of Preventive and Social Medicine recently published an article identifying five challenges in promoting efficient healthcare: a lack of awareness of health issues and access to healthcare, a dearth of healthcare professionals, high cost of medical treatment, and a lack of accountability in the public healthcare system.

In India, rather than public health services, it is private hospitals that provide healthcare care at a high price. For most Indians, healthcare is either unaffordable or it leads to impoverishment if they somehow manage to pay their medical bills. A 2005 article in the British Medical Journal estimates that the private sector receives about 82% percent of outpatient visits, and 58% of inpatient expenditure of the total patient care in India. The same article mentions that less than 1% of the GDP was spent on public health in 2005. Private health sector grows at the expense of the public one, and successive governments in India have shown an unwillingness to promote public healthcare.

There are exceptions to the high medical in the form of the hospitals and clinics run by minority religious charities. While private, these minority charity institutions offer low-cost quality treatment. Recently, the Shiromani Gurudwara Parbandhak Committee and the Christian Coalition for Health offered their hospitals to treat the corona affected patients. The Christian Coalition of Health has at its disposal over 1000 hospitals and over 60,000 inpatient beds. But clearly the Indian government needs to do a lot more.

Perhaps it is clear by now—if not, it should be—that India urgently needs to completely overhaul its healthcare system. The reason is simple: the existing healthcare system is unaffordable, leads to impoverishment, and is totally ill-equipped to deal with a health crisis. The emphasis on public cannot be overstated. In times of crisis it is not the private institutions but the public ones that make a difference between life and death for the thousands or millions.

In contrast to most parts of the country, Kerala’s response to the corona crisis is a lesson in good governance and the utility of publicly-funded essential services. In addition to pumping 20,000 crores into the economy, the government in Kerala ensured that essential medical and food supplies were not affected. Through regular press conferences and efficient communication by other means the government and civil society made sure that panic and disinformation did not spread. Kerala was able to mount a quick and efficient response to the corona crisis because the state has a long history of investing in public health. From 1960 to 2004, the Primary Health Centers and the number of doctors increased from 369 to 1356 and 1200 to 36,000 respectively. The state also boasts of the highest ratio of bed to population in the country.

The already bad healthcare system made worse by a pandemic speaks to the attitude of the privileged citizenry toward public institutions and infrastructure. This attitude of disdain and apathy toward public institutions is India’s old problem with social divisions; the poor and subaltern castes bear the brunt of the system. The ill-effects of the disdain for public facilities manifests in the development policies of successive Indian governments, cheered on by the middle classes.

The Indian middle class applauds stock market bull runs and multi-crore investments in infrastructure and defense projects, or development, but they are often silent on the shockingly low spending on healthcare. The result of such misplaced priorities and apathy by the middle class, who corner so much of resources and political power, will feed into the crisis of the corona pandemic.

The medical fraternity now has to push for greater share of public funded healthcare. The reports of understaffed and understocked hospitals, particularly the lack of supplies of such basics like masks and hazmat suits, should give medical professionals a pause. They must ask themselves what has happened to their profession and whether starkly unequal access to healthcare is the best for the future of the profession. Doctors as professionals have a moral responsibility and they cannot shirk it.

The extraordinary situation of the corona pandemic forces us to think of better public systems and infrastructure. The lessons learnt (or those that we will learn in the next few weeks) must be transferred into other sectors of our social and political lives. We need accountable public systems that will not only efficiently deliver services in times of peace but withstand shocks in times of crisis. It is time to demand from out elected representative offer more than personal favors. Once the crisis is over and we will begin to pick up our lives, we must demand better schools, roads, safe and unadulterated food, regular and efficient supply of water and electricity. These facilities are the basic to sustaining life, and we cannot fail ourselves with the basics again.

(First published in O Heraldo, dt: 1 April, 2020)

SEDITION, DEVELOPMENT, AND CITIZENSHIP

2020-03-04T20:02:00.001-05:00

Can some progressive laws deliver justice when a country’s statutes books have various other discriminatory and problematic laws? The widespread protests against the Citizenship Amendment Act (CAA) (and rioting in response to these protests) highlight the various unresolved issues dogging the Union of India. Because ‘citizenship’ is the broad, catch-all, and all-encompassing legal concept at the heart of the Indian Republic, the various ways in which it remains unrealized for millions needs to be considered. As the legislations around citizenship are the issue these days, it is vital to think of the various other laws that might subvert the realization of citizenship. Two important legislations are those that pertain to seditious speech and land acquisition laws that promote development, often at the expense of socially and economically marginalized communities.

The current law granting citizenship in India is not based on the principle of jus soli: i.e., an individual being born in the territory of the Union of India (as it was when the law was enacted in 1955). Today, one needs at least one parent to be a citizen of India, that is to say, that one’s parent(s) cannot be an illegal immigrant. This change is effectively making the principle of Indian citizenship that of jus sanguinis, or by descent. The Citizenship Act, 1955 as it stands today, is not as open as it used to be, and the recent policy decisions that demand proof, or papers, of one’s citizenship restrict the rights and freedoms of a person living in India.

Apart from the laws and policy decisions that concern citizenship, other laws have also chipped away at the rights and freedoms of the people. It is then not ironic that the various governments that have ruled the Union of India have used the dreaded Section 124A of the Indian Penal Code, more popularly known as sedition, to clamp down on protest and views that are contrary to its own.

With or without the CAA, vaguely defined offenses such as sedition goes against the spirit of inclusive citizenship. As scholars and legal experts highlight, the use of a vague term like “disaffection” is at the root of much persecution against activists and socially and economically marginalized persons. The history of 124A suggests that the law was made by the British in the 1860s to quell the uprising of the Wahhabis. In other words, to crush popular uprisings, the British State added a vague criterion in which those who were ruled were not permitted to harbor feelings of ‘disaffection’ against the government. What might this disaffection look like? Sadly, it is up to the state officials to arbitrarily decide on this matter.

Indian governments have repeatedly made use of this law since 1947. While High Courts and the Supreme Court have gone back-and-forth in determining the legality and constitutional validity of the law, the sad truth is that it is still on the statute books of India. Mostly, this law has been used against those who resist development, especially the wholesale landgrab for mining and industries. Thus, any reflection on bettering the regime of citizenship in India must also think of the havoc caused by developmental policies and politics.

We in Goa are intimately familiar with the development politics and its human and environmental costs. With industries like tourism and mining being the backbone of Goa’s economy, especially after 1961, the land and other natural resources have experienced tremendous stress. Successive Goan governments have intensified the volume of these two industries, for instance, to the extent that the availability of resources like land and water is not sufficient for effective management of these industries.

The legal basis for this intensified and destructive development is laws like the Goa Investment Promotion Act, 2014, and the Goa Requisition and Acquisition of Property Bill, 2017. While the first Act aims to expedite investment by circumventing the checks and balances already in place, the second Act uses vague terminology that empowers the State to evict and rehabilitate people for “public purpose.” Just like Section 124A, the abovementioned Goa Requisition and Acquisition of Property Bill draws most of its provisions from an old British law, The Land Acquisition Act, 1894. Both these Acts aims to provide arbitrary powers to the State so that the rights of the individual, in this case to the land, can easily be subverted.

Land is a crucial resource for upward mobility, as so many activists from the marginalized communities highlight. Denying access to land to many marginalized communities is an age-old practice in the subcontinent. For many such marginalized communities, access to land and protection from being evicted is the primary means through which they realize citizenship. The aim of any movement around citizenship should be to realize full citizenship within the Union of India by tackling all or most of the allied issues through which full citizenship gets subverted. It should also take into account the history of the last 70 odd years where Indian politics has failed to realize full citizenship.

The point of this reflection is fairly simple: a few good laws (or laws that some assume to be good) is of no use when several other laws enable the State, corporations, and powerful individuals to trample upon the weak and the marginalized. These laws should not be on the statute book at all.

(First published in O Heraldo, dt: 4 March, 2020)

LESSONS THAT STUDENTS LEARN: MoI IN TIMES OF CAA

2020-02-04T22:11:00.000-05:00

It is four years since the tragic death of Hyderabad Central University scholar Rohith Vemula. Driven to commit suicide by a deeply casteist and discriminatory educational system, Vemula now is a symbol of liberation for all students who hail from minoritized- and discriminated-against backgrounds. In the context of the recent country-wide protests against the Citizenship Amendment Act, 2019, Vemula’s memory fortifies protestors to soldier on.

Vemula’s life and death is also an indication that thousands of people in India desire education, particularly higher education, even when the system is so discriminatory and fails to deliver quality education. Many of these people, just like Vemula, want to be writers, scientists and enjoy the pursuit of knowledge for its own sake. However, as Vemula’s life and pursuit of his dreams indicate, this aspiration for education and a better life is riddled with obstacles. Yet, it was through higher education and the university space that Vemula challenged the casteist politics in India—many like him do the same.

The access to higher education after the Mandal Commission reforms has resulted in many students from minoritized backgrounds thinking about how to make their lives and those of others better. It has also resulted in students from elite backgrounds coming in contact with their non-elite colleagues. Though not always in mutually respectful encounters, this sharing of educational space has led to a change in thinking about Indian society. In short, more people are challenging received wisdom and articulating their opposition to discrimination. More and more people want a say in their political futures.

Thus, many students, like and unlike Vemula, join schools, colleges, and universities to make something out of their lives, to succeed, and to have decent employment. If there is a disconnect between what students expect from education and the realities outside an educational institution, they realize that their hopes, dreams, and aspirations will not be fulfilled. Therefore so many students have taken the lead in safeguarding their futures by registering their protests against misguided policies of the government.

Despite having a less than ideal educational system in this country, it can be said that education has positively molded minds. Perhaps, it is the values that education imparts that makes some difference, however little it may be. In learning about ourselves and the world around us, students are automatically led to question: Why does a particular chemical reaction occur? Why does an equation work? Why is there so much poverty around us?

Hence, in Goa, it was not surprising to see the speech by a 14-year old student, Diksha Talaulikar, a student of Maria Bambina Convent High School, to make the news. This speech, made on occasion to mark 70 years of the Indian Constitution, organized by the Department of Education, was a passionate plea against the Citizenship Amendment Act, 2019. Naturally, the ruling establishment was utterly embarrassed by the moral clarity shown by a young student.

Talaulikar, perfectly trained in the art of formal elocution, pleaded, “And today this bill discriminates [against] them (Muslims), thus making a mockery of my fundamental duty to promote harmony and the spirit of common brotherhood among people, transcending religion, region, and linguistic diversities. The country is burning. The soul of the Constitution, the Preamble, the liberty, equality, and fraternity has been murdered.”

Considering that Talaulikar is not alone in expressing such an opinion as school, college, and university students across the country are increasingly vocal about the state of affairs, we have to ask how the educational system can be made better. For despite the less than ideal condition of the educational system, some students demonstrate a remarkable moral clarity that is crucial to the health of the Indian republic and democracy. One needs to urgently think of the reform of primary, secondary, and university system in Goa.

As stated earlier, the demand for a better system comes from the citizens, especially those who are socially discriminated and economically deprived. Take, for instance, the demand for government aid for primary schools using English as the medium of instruction. Popularly known as the MoI controversy, it was a movement that demanded quality education for children so that, much like the children of the rich, the majority of the poor children will have a better shot at gaining employment.

Learning from the MoI movement can inform our current debates over citizenship. While those who were opposed to English as a medium of instruction wanted the poor to bear the burden of learning Indian languages with no guarantees of gainful employment, the poor wanted education in a seemingly foreign language for a chance at a better life. The poor, therefore, was only asking for a deeper realization of their Indian citizenship—the constitutionally guaranteed right of equal education.

The present moment of widespread student protests is an excellent opportunity in Goa to revisit the basic issues of education, as I have tried to show in reference to the MoI movement. The stress by some to use only ‘mother tongue’ as MoI for primary instruction is a political ploy to keep poor children undereducated, thus stealing their right to equal opportunity in employment. By not providing proper education to all members of the society, without discrimination, citizenship only ends up being a hollow concept.

The answer to many of our current woes, then, is simple: the education system needs to be better. Because even if it is bad, many students have found a way to make the best out of a worse situation. How much better would it be if we had a better education system?

(First published in O Heraldo, dt: 5 February, 2020)

INDIAN CITIZENSHIP AND GOAN BELONGING

2020-01-07T21:46:00.000-05:00

The passage of the Citizenship (Amendment) Act, 2019 (CAA) has exposed the Indian state’s trust deficit with its people. As it stands today, one needs to prove that at least one parent is a legal citizen. Being born in your country is no longer enough to belong in India! For Goans, this amendment may be in direct contradiction to the Goa, Daman, and Diu (Citizenship) Order, 1962, which granted them Indian citizenship.

The CAA ostensibly aims to give refuge to persecuted non-Muslims from Afghanistan, Bangladesh, and Pakistan. While the protocols and modalities of establishing persecution and refugee status are unclear, many commentators observe that the new amendment is a backdoor approach of accommodating the lakhs of Hindus identified as foreigners after the Assam NRC exercise.

The original law, the Citizenship Act, 1955, was enacted with the express purpose of recognizing all people as citizens within the newly-constituted India. This law liberally granted citizenship to people especially since India was a new nation formed after the demise of British colonialism. The liberal outlook of the law was in sync with standard democratic practices across the world. Thus, in India citizens were recognized on the basis of birth, descent, registration, and naturalization. Subsequent amendments to this Act (by Congress and BJP governments) restricted the liberal outlook of the law.

After the annexation of Goa, Daman, and Diu, the Indian government issued an order, appended to the Citizenship Act, 1955. Similar to the original law, the order extending Indian citizenship to Goans was also liberal in its outlook. Thus, the order states, “Every person who or either of whose parents or any of whose grand parents was born before the twentieth day of December, 1961, in the territories now comprised in the union territory of Goa, Daman and Diu, shall be deemed to have become a citizen of India on that day.”

Though India had granted citizenship to Goans in 1962, the diplomatic tussle between New Delhi and Lisbon over the sovereignty of Goa, Daman, and Diu continued till 1975. India, in 1962, recognized that the problem of sovereignty and citizenship did not have a clear solution. Hence, the 1962 order left the option open for any person in Goa, Daman, and Diu to maintain the preexisting citizenship by notifying in writing to the administration or any other authorities.

In 1975, under the leadership of the then president of Portugal, Mario Soares, who was keen to normalize relations with India (following decolonization in Africa and East Timor), Portugal recognized India’s sovereignty over Goa, Daman, and Diu. This treaty, signed on 14 March 1975 recognized India’s sovereignty by backdating it to 1961. By normalizing diplomatic relations, both Portugal and India recognized that Goans were Portuguese citizens and that the transfer of sovereignty did not extinguish preexisting citizenship rights. These rights could be preserved, redeemed, or renounced. At least in the letter of the laws and treaties, the option to choose was with the individual.

Following the wave of decolonization in the 1970s, Portugal ensured that the right of preserving or redeeming Portuguese citizenship was not eroded once Portuguese territories were incorporated into newly-independent (and expanding) nations like India and Indonesia. By enacting the Decree-Law 308-A/75 of 24 June 1974, Portugal kept the option open for Goans to redeem their right of preexisting Portuguese citizenship.

Goans effectively became Indian citizens because a new territory was incorporated into the Union of India (a legal provision available in the Act of 1955). Descent or naturalization did not apply to the Goan case due to the armed intervention of the Indian army. Conversely, in the case of Portuguese citizenship, Goans can legally claim birth or descent because the Portuguese state, at least from the early twentieth century if not earlier, recognized birth and descent as legitimate means of granting citizenship.

Both the Order of 1962 (India) and the Decree-Law of 1974 (Portugal) operate based on the will of the individual (or at least that is the essence of the letter). While the Indian law required an individual to give in writing to refuse Indian nationality, the Portuguese law requires an individual to reclaim his citizenship by providing the appropriate documents establishing descent to (former) Portuguese citizens. The Indian law assumes the silence of the individual as tacit acceptance of Indian citizenship, while the Portuguese law assumes that an individual or his descendant would like to reclaim preexisting citizenship at any moment in time.

The CAA contradicts the legal history that the Union of India shares with Goa and Goans since 1962. The state of India cannot ask Goans to prove their citizenship as the legal basis for Indian citizenship is not birth or naturalization but conquest. If at all the Indian state can ask any question regarding citizenship, it is if Goans want to opt in or out of Indian citizenship. More than 50 years after the armed annexation, such a question is a fait accompli. Nevertheless, it does not change the fact that Goans can enjoy multiple legal rights of citizenship that nation-states should proactively protect.

As we have seen in the diplomatic relations between New Delhi and Lisbon, citizenship in Goa is tied to national and internal politics. Goans need to think of their citizenship rights in broader terms. They must also think of citizenship historically. The benefits of citizenship depend on knowing how citizenship was recognized in the past, what is its status now, and what it should be in the future.

(First published in O Heraldo, dt: 8 January, 2020)

THE POLITICS OF THE UNDERLINGS: A QUICK HISTORY

2019-12-04T00:02:00.001-05:00

There is no doubt that the issue of the ‘migrant’ in Goa exposes the more significant problem of caste conflicts. Last month the issue of non-Goans changing their names to Goan ones made quite the stir, primarily because of electoral frauds and benefits of government employment are at stake. The blame mostly fell on the Banjaras, a traditionally nomadic community. In recent times, some sections of this community have achieved social and economic mobility. Nevertheless, a large part of this community still fares poorly on many human development indices.

With the inclusion of non-Goans through legal (or at times, an illegal) change of names, many fear that Goans will be marginalized in getting government jobs and in elections. These fears might be baseless. Nowadays, voting rarely has any consequences for government formation, and getting government jobs is a matter of ‘influence’ as a recent news report indicate. However, the noteworthy aspect of the debate was the protest by the Bhandari Samaj against migrants changing surnames.

While clippings of newspaper notices informing the public of name changes, mainly to Catholic surnames, have circulated for some years now, the present issue was about the “misuse” of the Naik surname. The Bhandari Samaj, who are among the Goan users of the said surname, contended that “outsiders” had no right to use the surname. In the debate aired on local TV, a leader of the Banjara Samaj argued that their folklore preserved a memory of the usage of ‘Naik’ as a marker of identity, and hence there was nothing wrong in changing their names to Naik.

Historically speaking, the term ‘Naik,’ which is a rank or title, has an interesting genealogy. In seventeenth-century documents, persons bearing the name or title of ‘Naik’ were usually associated with military service, sometimes even becoming rulers. Thus, kingdoms across the western coast had chiefs or governors or commanders called “Naique,” as they are recorded in Portuguese documents of the Estado da Índia. The Nayaka kingdoms of South India, which were established after the fall of the Vijayanagara empire after 1600s, were originally military commanders in the service of the rajahs of Vijayanagara. From Shivaji onwards, peasant and subaltern caste groups claimed a kshatriya status; their successful capture of state power across the Deccan and South India helped them to claim a new identity and a new way of life.

In Goa, at least since the nineteenth century, many non-Catholic subaltern groups have made claims to a higher kshatriya or particularly a Maratha warrior status. The formation of a group like the Bhandari Samaj, or a conglomeration of subaltern groups like the Bahujan Samaj owes its success to the history of subaltern caste mobilization. Shivaji and Sambhaji, as Maratha warrior figures par excellence, have a deep cultural resonance for these subaltern groups. We also have the example of the Kalavant Samaj that successfully mobilized since the nineteenth century for a better way of life, culminating in the formation of the Gomantak Maratha Samaj. Each instance of upward social mobility shows clear evidence of an adoption of a new group identity, as the scholarship of Anjali Arondekar and Parag Parabo demonstrate.

The Banjara Samaj appears to claim a kshatriya status. Thus, genealogies and folklore that link them to warrior lineages, such as Rajput, are cited for better living conditions, especially education and employment, for its members today. It is not surprising, therefore, that two groups claiming Kshatriya lineages—through the rank or title of ‘Naik’—should come into conflict when the issue in Goa is ostensibly one of ‘migrants.’ Which migrants, one may ask? Apparently, those who are upwardly mobile or at least claim upward mobility!

What the subaltern groups did in the nineteenth century and what the Banjaras are trying to do now is not different at all from upper caste groups. The Saraswat and Kayasth jatis mobilized similarly for a higher status in British India in the nineteenth century. The census that the British compiled pitted one group against the other, and not necessarily one caste against the other. Thus, the Saraswat jatis were competing with other Brahmin jatis in Maharashtra as valuable resources like government employment were at stake, and not just ritual honors in temples. Vaman Varde Valaulikar’s life and writings testify to this internal jati conflict.

The issue of name change is also not a new one. For instance, Muslim subaltern groups did the same thing since the nineteenth century. The butcher caste group adopted the surname Qureshi, the name of the tribal group from which the Prophet hailed. These groups adopted new (surname) identities to reclaim their humanity in a society that had marginalized them.

In our past, as well as in our present, we notice claims by several groups for higher status. These claims are tied to a desire for better material conditions in life: housing, jobs, education and so forth. Today we observe the success (however marginal) of many communities who had claimed a higher status and dignity a century or more ago. It takes that long to better one’s condition!

As history shows, the issue of the ‘migrants’ that is currently witnessing heated debates has its roots in claims to social mobility rather than identity. Hence, those who feel concerned with this issue of ‘migrants’ need to think of social justice and mobility more than identity.

(First published in O Heraldo, dt: 4 December, 2019)

MISPLACED PRIORITIES: PROFIT AT THE EXPENSE OF GOA

2019-11-05T23:57:00.000-05:00

Of all the misplaced priorities of successive Goan governments, the most recent is the Vibrant Goa summit. The summit aimed to attract investment in the areas of pharma, tourism, IT, and real estate. Even a cursory glance at the industries that the Goan government is promoting should make the alarm bells ring. For it is precisely these industries and their unregulated promotion that causes economic, social, and cultural problems in Goa.

The problem with the government’s promotion of such business schemes lies in the non-recognition of the environmental cost on Goa and its people. Some weeks back, a tanker carrying the poisonous naphtha chemical, docked at the port in Vasco, drifted and ran aground in Dona Paula, posing a severe threat to the lives and livelihoods. We are still anxiously hoping that the poisonous chemical will not leak in the Goan waters, which are already polluted by MPT’s coal handling. The tanker drifted because the October retreating monsoons brought with it the cyclone Kyarr, causing much damage to life (in addition to trees and animals) and property.

The government’s response to disasters, whether man-made or natural, is inadequate. Governmental authorities do not display the initiative that one expects of their government to regulate and prevent disasters. It is not the first time that a ship has run aground. The infamous MV River Princess at Candolim and the barge hired for a wedding reception at Arossim have cause irreparable sand erosion at both these places. Cyclone Kyarr is not the first time that cyclonic winds have battered the coastline of Goa as well as caused floods. The government’s preparedness is almost nonexistent, which is to say that in times of crisis Goans can only depend on good fortune and the divine.

When the government is so inefficient to provide disaster management as well as the usual utilities like clean water (recall that Ilhas had no drinking water for 8-9 days in August and Ponda for even more this year) and regular electricity, it is beyond ridiculous that it promotes business and investment in Goa. How do you expect people to work if they do not have clean water to drink?

A note also on the Vibrant summits, the brainchild of the Prime Minister, Narendra Modi, and a ‘Gujarat model of development’ is in order here. The claims of economic boost through the Vibrant Gujarat summit are at odds with the realities on ground. There is simply no accountability of the investment brought in by the thousands of MoUs signed in Gujarat. Compared to Goa’s 17 MoUs, Gujarat Vibrant summits have signed thousands of MoUs with business houses since its inception in 2003. The most recent assessment of the Vibrant Gujarat summit, with about 28,000 MoUs, confirms that it has not delivered on its lofty promises. And so, the question emerges: why does the government, assisted by the business community, engage in such shambolic ‘development’ and business practices?

The answer is startlingly simple: profit at any cost. By ‘profit,’ I do not only mean ‘greed’ of individuals but also a systemic problem wherein the social and political order rests on the extraction of natural resources by displacing the poor communities and an absence of fair redistribution of wealth. Demands for job creation or abysmal employment rates are then used as a smokescreen to promote businesses that do not care about worker rights and welfare. The government also does not display any seriousness in protecting worker rights. The result is an economic system that can collapse at any moment with catastrophic effects. Hence, it is a systemic problem that causes the most damage. Here’s how.

The government makes laws, such as those that create Special Economic Zones (SEZs) or Investment Promotion Boards, which give businesses incentives like tax breaks and a free hand to operate how they choose. Through its policies, such as trying to attract investment, the government abdicates its regulatory role—otherwise business houses refuse to participate in ‘boosting’ the economy. The government, as well as the business houses, circumvent the will and consent of the people on whose lands or in whose immediate vicinity these industries are established. Ignoring the irregularities, or rather actively promoting them, leads to massive losses to the exchequer. The exchequer also loses cash if the projects fail as the government, through a contractual binding, frees the business houses of all liabilities. In the case of the failed SEZs in Goa, the Goan government owes damages worth crores to the private business houses!

The systemic promotion of profit through law and policy is today, unfortunately, sustained by electoral democracy. Most people participate in the electoral democracy for basic amenities such as water, electricity, roads, and job security. But the result is opposite: both the government and business houses fail to deliver a stable economic system. Hence, the blame that individual voters are responsible for voting for the wrong guy by taking bribes, even if it is the case, does not explain the cause of my present situation. The vote of the honest voter also results in a systemic failure. Every government in power does the same thing, without fail.

Thus, we need to change our thinking about profit and economic growth. Stock market statistics are not a sign of progress and prosperity. As long as businesses demand unfair incentives, and as long as the government (party affiliation notwithstanding) humors such demands, the economic and social ills will continue unabated. Both the government and business houses must think of a ‘slower economy of life,’ meaning not a slow down of economic progress but a stable system that offers redistributive justice.

(First published in O Heraldo, dt: 6 November, 2019)

IDENTITY AND BELONGING IN INDIA

2019-10-02T21:05:00.000-04:00

As it happens now and then, papers published in reputed scientific journals receive media attention because the findings impact politics. Last month, two papers published in Cell and Science reopened debates about the origins of Indian civilization and consequently the cultural identity and belonging of contemporary Indians. The bone of contention was the ‘Aryan migration’ theory. In other words, the debate was whether Indian culture was indigenous or a result of foreign influence thousands of years ago. Surprisingly, while the written, peer-reviewed papers did not dispute the said migration theory, two of the authors, in a press conference, claimed otherwise. As embarrassing as the contradictory statements were for the professional reputation of the scholars, the incident also suggests the misuse of history and archaeology for political gains.

That India’s history is being misused for political gains is a concern that is as old as the nation—which is to say, about 70 years. Scholars, public intellectuals, and lay citizens worry that communal readings of history may compromise the secular credentials of the Indian nation-state. For these intellectuals committed to secularism-as-religious-equality, the idea of belonging—that is, what makes one person ‘Indian’ in relation to other Indians—rests on fealty to a multicultural past. Even if it is true that the history of the subcontinent witnessed prolonged episodes of multicultural tolerance, the linking of this diversified history by scholars and pubic intellectuals to the present-day Indian nation-state may be hasty. While it may be true that ancient and pre-colonial history of India witnessed episodes of great cultural efflorescence in addition to tolerance, it is also equally valid that this history was marked by violence of various sorts.

That is why the present-day Indian nation-state, or, the Union of India, to use the technical term, was a political project aimed at extending civil liberties without the hindrances of religion, caste, class, creed, and ethnicity. Thus, the Constitution of India emerging out of an experience of anti-colonial struggles took its inspiration from models of western liberal democracies. The idea, then, was not to go back to an ancient and glorious past but to rectify centuries of injustice suffered by the marginalized through colonialism, caste, creed, and gender.

Many scholars forget the recentness of the democratic project in India when they suggest that the proper way to understand contemporary belonging in India depends on an accurate understanding of ancient history. In the last five years scholars such as Jonathan Gill Harris (The First Firangis, 2015) and Audrey Truschke (Aurangzeb, 2017), and writers like Manu Pillai (Rebel Sultans, 2018) and Siddhartha Sarma (Carpenters and Kings, 2019) write, in elegant and accessible prose, that pre-colonial India which contained persons of different identities and belonging did not depend on narrow religious or sectarian conceptions like today. The lesson, therefore, is that contemporary India should emulate pre-colonial India. These writers are partly right, and the lessons they teach have value.

One of the key ways in which many recent authors talk about belonging is through the figure of the migrant. It may be the European migrant ‘who became Indian’ in Harris’ work or the Persian or Central Asian migrants (or invaders as they are popularly called) who established the Mughal and Deccani sultanates in the works of Truschke and Pillai, or it could be a ‘migrant’ religion like Christianity in Sarma’s book. The figure of the migrant provides historical evidence of a malleable pre-colonial culture, one that contemporary Indians need to emulate. Though, the extent of the malleability of this pre-colonial Indian culture is still open to debate.

While these authors are not wrong in making such an assertion, they run on the wishful hope that the political vision of the Indian nation-state must also be the political vision within pre-colonial polities, such as the Mughals or the Marathas. Only Truschke’s work departs from such a view. This thinking is patently inaccurate as the political agendas of various polities of the past, separated by vast amounts of time, were different from the political agendas of the Indian nation-state. Merely by arguing that a secular and welcoming culture existed in the past does not strengthen the political vision of the Indian constitution, neither does it excuse shortcomings of the nation-state. On the contrary, such arguments only leave history vulnerable to misuse.

To understand the problems with present-day disputes regarding belonging, one needs to look no further than the various amendments to India’s Citizenship Act, 1955. While the Act initially granted citizenship to all based on birth or jus solis, subsequent amendments have restricted this right to citizenship only if one’s parents, either one or both, are Indian citizens. The amendment of this act, to the best of my knowledge, has so far hardly been part of debates on belonging in India. To state it simply, an eminently modernist project of granting citizenship under the nation-state is being eroded for several decades.

Debates about belonging or the ‘Aryan’ migration theory always contain an immediate political purpose, as seen in the politics surrounding the National Registry of Citizens across India. The observation that pre-colonial realities and belonging are different from the way belonging is conceptualized in present-day India, should make historians and public intellectuals ask different questions. Not so much “what makes an Indian Indian?” in a cultural sense but “why does religion or ethnicity or any other marker become the rallying point for conflict and legal exclusion at various moments in time?” By asking different questions, one would guard against the misuse of history – whether Indian or Goan.

(First published in O Heraldo, dt: 2 October, 2019)

ERA UMA VEZ, OR WHAT COULD HAVE BEEN

2019-09-03T23:48:00.000-04:00

Until then I had thought each book spoke of the things, human or divine, that lie outside books. Now I realized that not infrequently books speak of books: it is as if they spoke among themselves.

Umberto Eco, The Name of the Rose

The late Paulo Varela Gomes, former delegate of the Fundação Oriente in Goa and an architectural historian, always emphasized Goa’s difference, and thus uniqueness. In his crucial intervention in the debates on Goan church architecture, Whitewash, Red Stone (2011), he emphasizes that rather than interpreting church architecture in Goa as Portuguese-European or Indian, Goan architecture is simply Goan. A few years before his untimely demise from cancer, Gomes turned to write fiction and memoirs. In one of these works, a novel titled Era uma vez em Goa (2015, Once Upon a Time in Goa), Gomes returns to his obsession of Goa as different, as unique.

Reading Era one is struck by the impact of the English novelist, Graham Greene on Gomes’ writings. One can consider Greene as the first British writer to think of Goa as different and “unique”. Greene jotted his brief impressions of Goa from his short stay in 1963 in an essay he wrote for the Sunday Times in March 1964, “Goa the Unique”. In this essay, Greene contrasts his experiences in Bombay to the one in Goa—the stark poverty and utter squalor of Bombay was completely different from the clean air, emerald fields, and the small but decent houses he found in Goa. The destitution in Bombay was in stark contrast to the poverty in Goa.

Greene traveled to Goa in the footsteps of many British predecessors. The most (in)famous of them all was Richard Burton who wrote Goa and the Blue Mountains (1851). Burton was followed by more charitable British travelers such as Isabel Burton (his wife) and Evelyn Waugh, a contemporary of Greene. Most of these British travelers were Catholics by faith and came to Goa to observe the lived Catholicism here. Filipa Lowndes Vicente’s Entre Dois Impérios: Viajantes Britânicos em Goa (2016) suggests that Goa’s links with Catholicism were one of the main motivations for many British travelers to visit Goa.

One can consider Gomes’ novel as an engagement with Greene’s travel account, for Greene’s Sunday Times article is translated as an annexure in the novel. Gomes fictionalizes the very brief visit of the English writer; he imagines the conversations that Greene may have had, regarding culture, history, and politics, that led him to write his brief impression of Goa. Accordingly, Gomes casts the semi-fictionalized Greene in various scenarios: his incomprehension with any of the local spoken languages at that time (Portuguese and Konkani), his encounter with the Indian security forces and the remaining Portuguese secret agents, his travels in the caminhão, his reception into Goan hospitality, the relief that literally washes over him when he enjoys a hot bath after a long time, his appreciation of the clean water and air, and his lengthy conversations about the architecture and culture of Goa.

Greene visited Goa immediately after India’s annexation of the territory, and it was also a time when the first hippies had started trickling in. In imagining the conversations of Greene, Gomes demonstrates the prescience of Greene’s observations for Goa’s future—albeit in hindsight. Green’s encounter in the novel with the first flower children is a portent of the destructive way Goa was opened for global tourism. His encounter with the famed Goan hospitality is another portent of the havoc that the tourism industry would wreak in the decades to come. Thus, Greene’s visit occurred at a momentous present when the past was being undone, and an uncertain future loomed. In such a moment, Greene asserted Goa’s difference from the rest of India, and thus its uniqueness.

While the real Greene confined his observations to “Franciscan Goa” and “Jesuit Goa”—the North and South of Goa, the semi-fictionalized Greene engages more strongly with the non-Catholic Goa. After all, the semi-fictionalized Greene enjoys the benefit of hindsight and progress in historical research. He talks about Betal at length, the feisty non-Brahmanical deity, as much as he enjoys talking about church architecture (as indeed Gomes the architectural historian would have loved!). He also speaks with upper-caste Hindus about religion, caste, and their connections with Portuguese culture. And in this context, the semi-fictionalized Greene continually reflects on the question of identity—what gives Goa its character? Religion? Culture? State? History?

It is remarkable that a short piece on travel writing has such an impact half-a-century later. Even more remarkable as Greene did not consider himself as particularly knowledgeable about matters of the subcontinent. Greene told Maria Aurora Couto, who wrote Graham Greene: On the Frontier (1988, rep. 2014), that “India rather frightened me by its size. I have enjoyed myself very much during two weeks in Goa, but to write about India in a novel I would have had to live there over a considerable period of time…” Yet, his one insight, ‘different and unique’, sparked in Gomes a life-long obsession, so much so that Gomes’ academic writings seek that which was different and unique about Goa.

Era uma vez, or once upon a time, is a phrase that invokes happenings in the past. It is also a phrase, as Gomes uses it, that hints at possibilities, or ‘what could have been’. Gomes indulges in thinking of possibilities in the guise of telling a once-upon-a-time story.

(First published in O Heraldo, dt: 3 September, 2019)

DOES GOA NEED ‘DEVELOPMENT’?

2019-08-06T22:41:00.000-04:00

No. In fact, there isn’t any other answer to the question in the title except an emphatic “No!”. And here’s why.

In Goa, ‘development’ does not mean an improvement in the quality of life but rampant destruction of natural resources, corruption in various sectors of the administration, and disparities in wealth and opportunities. Further, most of the infrastructure projects built in the name of development rapidly deteriorate after a few years, either because of poor construction quality or the failure to maintain this infrastructure regularly. In promoting development, the Goan exchequer loses money in the short- and long-term.

In the existing situation, Goans are placed in a lose-lose situation. Such public infrastructure as roads (for instance) is indeed needed but a 4- or a 6-lane highway does not need to be built across the rural landscape, making Goa a transit point to facilitate the movement of goods. Thus, the public demand for simple infrastructure, such as 2-lane roads, is, in the eyes of the government, an open invitation for constructing ever larger highways.

Another reason Goa does not need ‘development’ is that the government is not investing in the maintenance of public infrastructure. In fact, the government is not serious about maintaining or fixing the existing infrastructure. The government bodies build public infrastructure like roads, bridges, parks, and so on, but after a few years, there is hardly any upkeep—leading to many projects turning into white elephants. Thus, the way forward is not more development but the preservation and maintenance of the existing natural and built landscape.

The heavy rains and the subsequent flooding, after a frighteningly dry spell in June, indicates the value of maintaining, in fact nurturing the existing public infrastructure rather than building more roads, highways, and apartment complexes. Despite having inherited a good network of drains, both natural and artificial, Goa’s roads and streets get flooded, leading to substantial losses. Such flooding happens not only because of rampant and haphazard construction but also due to the failure of maintaining the existing drainage system.

The images of Panjim flooding “like Bombay” underscores the failure and negligence of the municipality and the concerned governmental authorities. Panjim is such a glaring example of the government’s failure to maintain existing infrastructure as the city already had a well-designed drainage system before it was torn to bits by piece-meal real-estate development. Panjim’s fate is the result of years of neglect together with the Goan authorities allowing the construction of new buildings haphazardly in recent times.

The monsoon season also exposes the poor quality of work of the many mega projects recently commissioned. A couple of weeks ago, and the most recent example of the administration’s misguided priorities, a retaining wall of a newly-constructed bridge in Mashem, Canacona collapsed, luckily before it was commissioned. The project consists of a 7.7 km four-lane highway, with three bridges in Galgibaga, Talpona, and Mashem at a whopping cost of 190 crores. The collapse of the wall means not only a wastage of a considerable sum of money and precious natural resources for the construction but also highlights poor quality of work. Many infrastructure projects, such as new highways are not necessarily what Goa needs or something that the people of Goa have demanded.

In contrast to mega highways, and as stated earlier, Goa does need its existing roads to be in proper condition, that is, Goan roads should not end up being washed away after brief spells of heavy rains. But what we observe is that most Goan roads get easily riddled with potholes with the first drizzle of the season. Once the roads get damaged, the authorities take forever to fix them. Even if they do, the job is so shoddily done that the condition of the road does not improve, and the next season washes away the previous year’s ‘repairs’.

The recent state-wide protest against the proposed Coastal Zone Management Plan (CZMP) is a step in the right direction. The CZMP proposes, amongst other things, to reduce the Coastal Regulation Zone (CRZ) limit from 500 meters to 50 meters—this means more construction activity in eco-sensitive areas if the proposed changes go through. The logical conclusion of such a plan would be more destruction across the coastal and riverine areas, destruction of sand dunes and other mechanisms of nature which help against flooding.

The residents of Goa’s coastal and riverine areas have rightly rejected a model of development that is only interested in taking over the coastal resources and making them available for the exploitation by corporations. Instead of the government’s plan to intensify construction activity, in other words, development, the people have rejected the move as they do not want the destruction that development and construction activity brings in its wake. With the rejection of the CZMP, as with other such projects, the people have asserted that they want the preservation of the existing natural and built environment and a better quality of life.

Therefore, Goans need to redefine the significance of development radically. As it stands, the vision of both the central and state governments and big businesses is driven by profit for few and the destruction of the Goan landscape. The challenge, then as it is now, is to create an environment-friendly model of public infrastructure beneficial to the public at large.

(First published in O Heraldo, dt: 7 August, 2019)

DELAYED RAINS ARE THE COST OF ‘DEVELOPMENT’

2019-07-03T10:27:00.001-04:00

Water reserves are dangerously low owing to the delayed rains in most parts of the country; in some places, reservoirs are bone dry. Scientists express fears that in 3 or 4 decades, most Indian cities will be unlivable as they will run out of water. The delayed rains and the disruption of the seasonal cycles is another aspect of climate change, and it should be clear by now that such a change has dire consequences for the survival of life.

The climate change that we confront today is the product of human intervention as opposed to the climate fluctuations experienced by our ancestors. While bad seasons are a part of the natural cycle, the issue today is not the occasional natural disruptions but continued and increasing problems due to human intervention in nature, as well as a dire need for an efficient response to disasters or disaster-in-the-making by governments. As the problem is a man-made one, its solution lies in a sincere and creative response to the crisis by the government by taking into confidence various communities, especially marginalized communities.

In Goa, the almost-dry June is unprecedented in recent memory. The delayed monsoon has sparked fears of the scarcity of water and the disruption of the agricultural cycle in the future. The situation in Goa is grave because successive governments and profit-hungry business interests have destroyed the environment and the landscape at an unparalleled rate—politicians and bureaucrats call such destruction ‘development’. This ‘development’ involves unnecessary and environmentally destructive mega-projects, be they bridges, roads or highways, real estate in eco-sensitive areas, the cutting of trees and mangroves, the destruction of hills and mountains that act as water catchment areas or reservoirs, and rampant mining that forever destroys forests and water resources.

A stoppage in the destructive ‘development’ creates conditions where the environment heals to its previous condition. Following the ban on mining activities in Goa, many farmers reported a better yield as the groundwater table improved considerably. But though the ban on mining had given some respite to the forested areas of Goa, construction of mega-projects in other parts continues with the axing of thousands of trees.

The regularity of rainfall depends on trees and the forest cover. It is not enough that forests are preserved within the borders of Goa. What happens in the neighboring regions, too, affects the environment in Goa. The Maharashtra government, for instance, announced that the Mumbai-Ahmedabad bullet train project will affect more than 54,000 mangroves. The NGO Vanashakti, which released their findings last month of monitoring forests and eco-sensitive areas of the Konkan, says that within four years – from 2014-2018 – almost 1,600 acres of forests were lost to industry and mining.

Almost every environmental clearance from the government or an independent body involves the destructions of thousands of acres of forests. The ruling politicians and those who benefit from such mega-projects claim that the government bodies carry out compensatory afforestation. The Government of India until recently had a policy of afforestation, which the BJP government made into a law. However, the policy and the law does not work in reality as it does on paper. Sometimes the land earmarked for the compensatory afforestation displaces forest-dwelling communities, in other instances, it is unsuitable for plantation, or the compensatory afforestation project suffers from the apathy of the forest department.

The future, therefore, seems to be clear: Goa (as many other parts of India) faces rampant deforestation, and consequently a disruption of the seasonal cycles. While activist and civil society groups are finding some small but significant successes in their fight for the preservation of the environment, the question of the best way, or ways, to tackle environmental destruction still confronts the people of Goa. Successive governments have not adequately performed its duty in protecting the environment, nor have they shown goodwill towards the Goan environment by making strong protection policies and laws and implementing the same in letter and spirit. How, then, do we safeguard our future?

If we want to avoid delayed rains and other catastrophic climate change issues, we need to think of environmental concerns together with social concerns. In most occasions, the destructive ‘development’ is promoted in areas where communities of lesser socio-economic status live—land and water bodies are grabbed without any concern for the life and livelihood of such communities. For instance, in Goa’s mining areas, tribal and agrarian communities have lived for centuries; their lifestyle was seriously affected by mining. For the promotion of tourism, fishing communities, as well as agrarian ones, have suffered the ill-effects of high-end projects and upmarket ‘development’. Often the government and big businesses exploit the differences between different caste and class statuses, between those who own the land and those who are tenants—playing these sections against one another, and often using the legal procedures and the people’s lack of knowledge of these legal procedures to promote non-sustainable economic activities.

Currently, policy decisions by governmental bodies concerning the environment do not integrate the people—thus destructive policies displace communities, considering them as extraneous to the process of policy formation. Contrary to the governmental vision, environment-related activism in recent times in Goa is progressing in the right direction. The agitation against the increasing handling and transportation of coal, for instance, has integrated the concerns of the fishing community, some leaders of the movement earn their livelihood from fishing—a reason such efforts meet with success. Environmental activism can deepen their respective movements by subverting the caste and class fractures in Goan society.

Thus, stronger vision for a better environment and better politics needs to combine ecological issues with sociological ones.

(First published in O Heraldo, dt: 3 July, 2019)

A REPUBLIC ALWAYS IN CRISIS

2019-06-04T00:09:00.000-04:00

The Indian Republic is, was, and will be in crisis. And perhaps the biggest issue that dogs the Republic is social and economic inequality. Seventy years of electioneering has not solved the problem. Successive governments and civil society groups have failed to address the issue of inequality. The social and economic inequalities manifest in the form of routinized violence and discrimination in everyday life for the marginalized and minoritized communities. The crisis will only deepen in the future if these inequalities remain unaddressed.

The routinized violence and discrimination against the marginalized and minoritized communities are not new; it is a way of life since the establishment of the Indian Republic. Ever since its founding, the Indian Republic has been unable to stop the discrimination and atrocities committed against its marginalized and minoritized communities. The most recent and shocking revelations of the death of Dr. Payal Tadvi, a resident doctor at a hospital in Bombay, exposes yet again the casteist way of life in India. Barely three years after the institutional murder of Hyderabad Central University scholar Rohith Vemula, Dr. Tadvi’s institutional murder (now suspected to be cold-blooded murder) is déjà vu for those familiar with the discrimination, harassment, and violence against marginalized and minoritized communities.

The recent deaths contradict the democratic vision enshrined in the constitution of India. The routine violence and harassment fly in the face of political grandstanding about the greatness of Indian culture and its ability to harmoniously bond the various communities now and in the future. Fractures of caste and religion are often used—especially during elections—to polarize and scapegoat many marginalized communities. The result of almost seven decades of polarization, scapegoating, and a deepening of casteism is the spread of Hindu majoritarianism. Any attempts at realizing democracy and equality in India have to confront the juggernaut of religious majoritarianism—whether under the guise of secularism or a theocratic ideology.

The Indian Republic, emerging after the transfer of power from the British Raj, faced a crisis in the sharing of power with marginalized caste and minoritized religious groups. The elite Hindu groups, who controlled politics after the departure of the British, kept most of the power for themselves and their kin, while there were thousands of religious and caste communities, socially subordinated to the Hindu upper-castes, who expected to share power and influence in a new Republic. In such a scenario, the elite groups of the country, mostly Hindu, nurtured a political illusion of equal rights for all, while they maintained their hegemony. In other words, the Indian polity was actually based not on equality but clientelism. Most of the marginalized caste and religious communities have to play second fiddle to one or more upper-caste Hindu communities.

The contradictory nature of the Indian Republic whereby the elites sought (and seek) to hold on to power while employing a language of liberalism, secularism, and democracy obstructed any meaningful changes in terms of social justice. The culture of the new Republic too was overwhelmingly upper-caste Hindu. Thus, communities which did not emerge out of an upper-caste Hindu location had to change their culture to make it compatible with Hindu, or euphemistically, Indian cultural forms. The public culture in the new Republic was also marked by those cultural forms deemed appropriate by Hindu culture in terms of food, drink, and dress.

With their hold on power, elite Hindus (as well as non-Hindu elites), ensure that insignificant social and economic mobility for marginalized caste and religious communities. True, the constitution of India provides many safeguards against oppression and promotes affirmative action, but the push-back from the elite sections has resulted in the dilution of the progressive vision of the constitution. In publicly-funded universities and government employ, persons such as Tadvi and Vemula face constant and vicious harassment. It is not an exaggeration to say that persons from marginalized castes and minority religions are often unwelcome in the public institutions of the Indian Republic.

The problem of an equal, or at least a fair, sharing of power has dogged the Republic since the beginning. If one thinks about politics—and not just elections alone—in the Indian Republic, the elites shared power only on limited occasions. They have done so begrudgingly if at all power has been shared in the first place. One could think of the recommendations of the Mandal Commission and the deep-seated resentment that many elites in the country feel even today, as an example. The resulting concentration of power within the hands of a few is the cause of the continued crisis facing the Republic.

The crisis that confronts the Indian Republic is an old one: How to eradicate the deep-seated inequalities to build a community that looks after its own and nurtures its citizenry to its full potential? It is this question that most public intellectuals do not confront. Of late, there is the talk of the fundamental ethos of the Indian Republic being in danger. There is no doubt that it is in danger. However, one must bear in mind that the progressive ethos of the Republic has always been in danger. There has always been strong opposition to any progressive politics that goes beyond just words, that actually empowers the weak and shares power with the downtrodden.

The way out of the crisis of inequality, violence, and minoritization is to recognize that chest-thumping nationalism—of any shade—only diverts attention from the real issues. It allows those in power to engage in further polarizing the polity and permit the wholesale diversion of resources to crony capitalists from those who need them the most.

(First published in O Heraldo, dt: 4 June, 2019)

CONVERSATIONS FOR OUR FUTURE

2019-04-30T22:10:00.000-04:00

In the Lok Sabha elections 2019, most voters faced the proverbial horns of a dilemma. These voters who want a non-communal, non-corrupt government have, on the one hand, voted for a particular party whose record in combating communalism and corruption belies its lofty rhetoric of upholding values of honest politics and secularism. On the other hand, some may have voted for a new party, whose unique selling pitch is its tirade against corruption, and whose new-ness has ensured that it has no real record of malfeasance.

However, these two choices—though made in desperation—have a fatal flaw built into them: they are stopgap solutions and have consequences for the future of the polity, society, and the environment for the next 10 or 20 years. As far as electoral representation is concerned, if the abovementioned dilemma gets resolved momentarily by choosing the lesser evil, throughout the next several decades, we shall only be electing the lesser evil.

One can appreciate why many voters are desperate. The Indian first-past-the-post electoral system with the minoritization of thousands of communities often leaves people with little choices other than the short-term, stopgap ones. Often, voters operate based on guesswork over how best not to waste one’s vote, and also get some short-term benefit by choosing the lesser evil. More often, one hopes that the short-term choices have no long-term destructive consequences.

It is crucial, therefore, to have a new type of political conversations, which ensures long-term solutions to our current problems. Our powerless-ness and hopeless-ness during elections should encourage debates over long-term changes in politics, society, and environment. As many have started to recognize, deepening democracy and combating communalism and corruption cannot happen during elections alone. What we do and say after an election, anticipating the next, buffers us from powerless-ness and can truly give us a choice. Accordingly, we can think of education, workers’ rights, and environmental protection as part of a multi-pronged strategy for providing us with better choices during elections.

We must have political conversations over issues that are useful in the long-term. Education is fundamental if one is to live in an empowered society. In recent times, Goa has seen the demand for government aid for English as a medium of instruction at the primary schooling level. In terms of higher education, we are witness to spirited fights for securing the right for education and employment in universities through affirmative action.

The importance of education and the discrimination therein should impress upon all the need for affirmative action in our schools and universities. The empowerment of a generation of young persons, otherwise excluded from these spaces, will create a citizenry that contributes to equal or equitable social relations. Currently, schools and universities are battlegrounds where the marginalized lose out to the privileged. The reason is that schools and universities have not provided equal opportunity for all. By leveling the field through education, the electoral process will see the participation of young voters who are not easily swayed by demagoguery or false promises.

Another theme for a political conversation is migrant workers and the bogey of ‘vote-banks’. Some of us get enraged by ‘vote-bank’ politics when the truth is that it denies a large section of the population their basic rights. These workers provide vital labor and hence, rather than rail against the ‘vote-bank’, we need to be sensitive to the matter of their fundamental rights. Securing the rights of workers such as minimum wage, health insurance, housing and enforcing these rights in good faith empowers a constituency to be not exploited by the vote-bank politics of the national and regional parties.

Protecting the fundamental rights of migrants have advantages for locals as it strengthens the rule of law internally. One can see an interesting parallel with the denial of basic rights to migrant labor and the crisis facing Goa’s mining-dependent, or the locals. In the case of the mining-dependent, the government had no safeguards against rampant illegalities and the economic fluctuations of an industry based on the whims of the global capitalist players. The mining-dependent, much like the migrant labor, are expendable in the larger scheme of the capitalist-party politics nexus. The mining dependents form a large group of people whose destiny depends on the goodwill of politicians and big businesses. They, too, vote but hardly control their destiny.

Thinking of workers’ rights and mining dependents, we can easily see the connections with environmental degradations. More and more people are pushed into doing the work for large, capital-intensive industries like mining and construction in the name of ‘development’. This ‘development’ often occurs by flattening forests or filling prime agrarian land. Every successive election sees an intensification of the destruction of the forests and the communities that call these forests their home. Together with the communities which depend on agriculture and mining, the forest-dwelling communities form another chunk of voters. It is best if the electoral process does not deny these communities an independent say, so they also contribute to the common good.

In each of the issues I have discussed above, there is currently a tremendous opposition from privileged members of our society, blinded by the caste and class privileges they enjoy. In such a context, a change in political conversations emphasizing social justice above everything else will alter the rules of the electoral game. Taken together, then, an emphasis on equal access to education, securing rights and protection for workers, and preventing environmental degradation promotes the empowerment of many voters who vote due to powerless-ness rather than out of free choice. Without truly empowered voters there are no democratic choices.

(First published in O Heraldo, dt: 1 May, 2019)