No need to wait for history to judge this disgracefully incompetent government, and its catastrophic mismanagement of India’s smallest state. The evidence is everywhere: ravaged hillsides, grossly overbuilt coastlines, an utterly wrecked capital, and the shameful dereliction of duty to maintain law and order. There is no silver lining. On the contrary, it’s painfully clear that everything Goans know, love and recognize about their homeland – the blessings of generations of ancestors who chose more wisely – is being rapidly extinguished in front of our eyes.
Make no mistake: there will be no recovery, because every system of redressal is broken. Constitutional democracy has ceased to function in Goa, as evident from this week’s latest truth-telling (to Karan Thapar of The Wire) by Satya Pal Malik, the BJP’s own Governor during the Covid-19 “second wave”, who said he complained to Narendra Modi directly about corruption in our state: “you can ask even small children in Goa what everyone knows about the chief minister [and now] I can confidently say that [even] the prime minister does not have a strong aversion to corruption.”
Even such blatant criminality is only one aspect of the comprehensive failure of governance in Goa, as highlighted by the shockingly destructive, wasteful and trashy “makeover” of Panjim in order to host G20. We’re being told to celebrate “a watershed moment in [India’s] history as it seeks to play an important role by finding pragmatic global solutions for the wellbeing of all” but that is just delusional rhetoric compared to the reality on the streets: untrained, under-equipped – and often visibly underaged – labourers erecting a grotesque, haphazard, less-than-skin-deep simulacrum of an actual working state which cares about its citizens.
I visited the memorial to Tristão de Bragança Cunha at Azad Maidan this week, in pondering what the “father of Goan nationalism” might have said about this deeply troubling juncture in his beloved homeland. For those who do not know, this fearless man of principle was – as per diplomat/historian K M Pannikar – “nationalist India’s first ambassador [to Europe] who, single-handed, was able to break through the news blockade which Britain established in respect of the Jallianwala Bagh massacre.”
Cunha alerted the likes of Romain Rolland and Henri Barbusse to iniquities visited upon his fellow Indians, and always had the guts to speak out when others were silent. Pannikar particularly praises his “great and historic fight against a system of indentured labour under which Kunbi labourers from Goa were recruited and sent to the plantations in Assam. It was almost a single-handed fight but he was able to awaken the conscience of his countrymen both in India and Goa to the injustices of this system, and get it abolished.”
Re-reading Cunha’s own writings on this, I got a painful shock of recognition: “the government did not take the least step to help those unfortunate people. On the contrary, its passivity went to the extent of conniving with the people responsible for the cruel treatment inflicted on our countrymen.” That was almost 100 years ago, with the Portuguese and British colonialists as familiar villains, but in 2023 the identical horror has come directly to Goa, where the most vulnerable young Indians are being compelled to toil in inhuman – indeed, totally illegal – conditions, in the total absence of protective equipment, with the overseer our own state. How far have we fallen.
Of course, it is not just citizens’ rights being bulldozed, because Goa’s environment is also being destroyed at high speed with full connivance by the state administration. This is especially evident at Reis Magos – thus directly in the view of many G20 venues – where monstrously inappropriate giant buildings are rising to obliterate the ancient landscape. Who approved these egregiously dodgy projects? What happened to the Real Estate (Regulation and Development) Act, passed in 2016 “to infuse transparency and credibility” into the building sector, which specifically encourages “construction of environmentally sustainable and affordable housing”? For just one obvious question: where is the water going to come from, when Reis Magos has been suffering literal drought each summer over the past few years? And what about demographic displacement- has anyone bothered to ask the villagers what they think about a thousand new neighbours on that one hillside?
Yes, these are largely rhetorical questions. And it’s also true Goa appears helpless to correct the disgraceful state of current affairs, but we must nonetheless note that most Goans are fully cognizant of what is being done to them by their own so-called “leaders”. In this regard, I really appreciated what Suraj Shenai – the founder and CEO of Goa Brewing Co. – wrote on the Goa Speaks forum on Facebook earlier this week on April 12, to accompany roughly the same photograph that appears on this page: “This is how they sell Goa? Can you believe that this is happening in 2023! At this precise time in our human existence when everything is vulnerable to climate change, with temperatures soaring upwards of 40 degrees & its effects on crop cycles pushing millions of Indians into food poverty?”
In palpable anguish, Shenai wrote “as far as your eyes can stretch the entire mountain across the Mandovi in Reis Magos has been razed, its forest and green cover completely destroyed! Imagine all the wildlife killed for what? Is this environmental destruction [and] the death of an entire ecosystem for any purpose that will serve people? Is it build schools or hospitals or to generate mass employment? No! It is to build luxury villas! Villas are a new buzz word in Goan vocabulary! There is a price the Urban Indian settlers pay to “convert”/ravage a forest into settlement/villa. To those who were paid the “price” for this project let me do some math for you! To accommodate 50 villas & their 50 insensitive buyers you killed at least 1 kilometer of hill forest, 3,000 large trees, 1,000 wild animals, 10,000 birds and their nests, 100,000 small plants & bushes. Countless insects. How can you do this for money! It breaks my heart.”
(Vivek Menezes is a writer and co-founder of the Goa Arts and
Literature Festival)