How Goa is getting colonised, one mega-project at a time
Sunday, 31 May 2015 - 3:15pm IST | Agency: dna webdesk
Dale Luis Menezes
Albertina Almeida
Jason Keith Fernandes
Amita Kanekar
A narrowly framed conception of
'development' is being used by
the Goan government in
collusion with corporates to
push the people of Goa off
their land.
dna Research & Archives
Goa is constantly framed as the holiday capital of India.
However, there is a good amount of violence that underwrites
this project of providing fun. The recent incidents in
Tiracol, a village in the northern-most tip of the state,
highlight this clearly.
Sometime around the midnight of 14 May, residents
of the village were awakened by the arrival of men
and machinery hired by M/s Leading Hotels Pvt.
Ltd., a five-star hotel company, who went on to
bulldoze a large part of the orchard lands of the
village as part of their plan to build a PGA
standard golf course and resort. The villagers
have been strongly opposing this project for the
last several years, with the result that the
project has now been virtually stayed by the
courts. Leading Hotels’ response to this legal and
popular opposition was to sneak their men and
machinery in at the dead of night, protected by
50-odd bouncers.
Work was halted only when the vigilant villagers alerted the
police. However, when local reporters reached the scene, the
bouncers were still there. Diana Fernandes, a journalist
writing for O Heraldo (16 May, 2015), reported that the area
was still swarming with 20-odd musclemen the next day.
This instance of violent land grab is not confined to the
village of Tiracol. In fact, as a result of the boom in
mining, real estate and tourism industries in Goa, it has
become a trend over the last couple of decades.
In most cases, the chief victims are agricultural tenants who
tilled the land belonging to landlords, and mundkars living
on this land, with various obligations towards its upkeep.
The problem of land-grab in Goa needs to be
understood through the existing feudal land
relations in Goa -- the relation between the
mundkars and agricultural tenants (henceforth
tenants), and the bhatkar (landlord) -- have been
supplemented by the feudal-like powers of global
capital that work in alliance with the feudal
lords. Additionally, we also suggest that the
existing sorry state of affairs that Goa finds
itself in, due to excesses of 'development' in the
real estate market and other industries that gobble
huge chunks of land, can only be correctly
understood and effectively addressed, if one
approaches the issue from the perspective of the
tenants and their experiences.
In Goa, land was traditionally appropriated and tightly
controlled by the bhatkars. In addition to being a class,
these bhatkars were also upper-caste. The caste equation is
important as the bhatkars could be of any religious
background, but were invariably from the upper-castes.
Relief to the mundkars and tenants came in the form of the
Goa Agricultural Tenancy Act, 1964 and the Goa Mundkar Act,
1975, but this relief was eventually thwarted by a new and
developing economic system that no longer made it
economically viable to cultivate land and made it seem more
alluring to sell land to the highest bidder and share the
spoils, albeit disproportionately between the bhatkar and the
tenants.
But Tiracol was different. The bhatkarial rights
were held by the Khalap family, said to be a branch
of the Deshprabhu family who still are the bhatkars
of most of Pernem taluka. The bhatkar here was an
absentee one who had long broken contact with the
village, to the extent of not collecting either
mundkarial services or tenant revenues. This,
coupled with the relative homogeneity of the tenant
population -- a small village of about 50 Catholic
households living off cashew orchards, fishing and
the production of urrack and feni, along with some
rice farming and coconut plantations -- made the
village a relatively egalitarian and developing
space where caste hierarchy was not strongly
evident and where many were making the
socio-economic shift from tenants to entrepreneurs
and workers in the modern economy.
Hence it is not surprising that the proposed golf course
project by M/s Leading Hotels, which first hit the news in
2007-08, was vehemently opposed by the St. Anthony Tenant
and Mundkar Association (SATMA) of Tiracol. It is also
interesting, though again not surprising, that the local
spokesperson of Leading Hotels, Gerson Rebelo, viewed the
company that he represents as a bhatkar saying, "The land
belongs to us, we are... the bhatkars in the traditional
sense, and whatever claims that are there on the land will be
settled in the appropriate fora. We have every permission in
place".
Goa's tenancy law echoes this outlook where it is clear that
if a land parcel, which includes mundkars and agricultural
tenants, is sold, then the purchaser buys the land with the
obligations to comply with the provisions of the mundkar and
agricultural tenancy laws. Normally, the practice is that
when a bhatkar sells that land, the purchaser simultaneously
settles the claims of existing tenants, creating in this
process an unencumbered right to the property. But what the
law, as well as the Leading Hotels' spokesperson, hides is
the fact that the clout of the new bhatkar in the form of a
big powerful corporate entity makes it possible for both
money and muscle to be flexed to take over physical
possession of the land.
It is pertinent to note here that M/s Leading
Hotels is a subsidiary of Asian Hotels (North) Ltd.
and according to the Director's Report of the
latter, the company holds 100% equity as well as
preference capital in Fineline Hospitality Pvt.
Ltd., Mauritius (FHCPL). For its part, FHCPL is a
significant player in the global tourism economy
and holds substantial equity stakes in many other
companies worldwide, including in the company which
has a substantial stake in Leading Hotels. One can
clearly see the power and reach of global capital
that comes to bear on, or invade if you like,
Tiracol.
As has been pointed out, the bhatkar of the village of
Tiracol was absent in the years subsequent to the integration
of Goa into India, giving the tenants the space with which to
craft a relatively egalitarian order and use the benefits of
quasi-land ownership to become small-time agricultural
entrepreneurs. But the bhatkar made a comeback, to make a
killing off the land.
He sold the rights to the land to M/s Leading Hotels in 2007.
Since SATMA questioned the legality of the sale, because the
existence of the tenants was not acknowledged and recognised,
M/s Leading Hotels began to approach individual village
households to buy them off; about 10 families agreed to sell
at varying rates, from Rs 120 per square metre, then Rs 200,
and finally Rs 500, showing how life-sustaining resources can
be robbed from villagers for a pittance because of their
ignorance.
It also shows the complete failure of the Goan
government to protect villagers, even while it
boasts of its support to the farm economy -- and
thus its tacit support to the land-grab. 'Tacit',
however, may be too obtuse a word, given the fact
that newspaper reports of over a year ago claimed
that the state government had actually planned this
golf project under the Central Government's 'Large
Revenue Generating Scheme', in which a state
subsidy of up to Rs 50 crore can be given!
Despite everything, however, the project was unable to take
off for procedural and infrastructural reasons. But things
seem to have changed with Narendra Modi's rise to power at
the Centre. The project obtained environmental clearance
despite the earlier assurances by Environment Minister Alina
Saldanha to the contrary. Although the villagers went to
court against the clearance and with the Goa Foundation,
obtained a stay on further felling of trees, M/s Leading
Hotels apparently felt emboldened enough to try to terrorise
their way into taking over the land and destroying the
orchards there.
While the issue of Tiracol was thus on the boil,
Goan newspapers also reported the opposition of
villagers to a proposed Marina project in Sancoale,
close to the port town of Vasco. The project
proposal had been forwarded by the Investment
Promotion and Facilitation Board to the panchayat
of the village of Sancoale. The company intending
to develop this marina is M/s Yacht Heaven (Pvt)
Ltd, registered in the name of Umaji Vishwasrao
Chowgule and Arjun Ashok Chowgule. The Chowgules,
as is widely known in Goa, made their fortunes
first-and-foremost through mining operations. The
close links that many Goan real estate companies
have with the mining industry is important to note,
as this is how economic, political and social
capital already in possession of such class and
caste elites, get transformed within the real
estate industry, thus pushing tenants out of their lands.
In this context, it was interesting to note the editorial in
O Heraldo (19 May, 2015), which talked about the popular
opposition to such mega projects, taking two of the most
recent examples, the blatant goondaism at Tiracol and the
Marina project at Sancoale, as cases in point. The editorial
revealed how the Investment Promotion and Facilitation Board
(IPFB), which has the current Chief Minister Laxmikant
Parsekar as its chairman, would try to circumvent the locals
as well as government bodies like the Pollution Control Board
and the State Bio-Diversity Board.
One of the members of the IPFB in a private conversation
revealed to the editor of O Heraldo that since the "IP[F]B
has given its approval, the project proponents can go to the
pollution board and tell them to better give permission since
the IP[F]B has the CM [Laxmikant Parsekar] as its chairman".
The editorial further notes that this "shows the mindset of a
body made to clear projects at a rapid pace to meet the very
ambitious investment target of the government". What we can
see here is how a narrowly framed conception of ‘development’
is being used by the Goan government in collusion with
corporates (bhatkars of a different kind) to push the people
of Goa off their land.
So, what we see is that, although the mundkar and
agricultural population in Goa is not able to forge alliances
with similar beleaguered communities across India and the
world, more bhatkars -- in the form of national and global
capitalists -- are getting added to the old ones in Goa.
These national and multi-national corporations have allied
themselves with the local Goan bhatkars and thus combine
modern as well as traditional power to drive out the mundkars
and the agricultural tenants from their ancestral homes and
the lands that they have long tended.
This is the process by which Goa gets colonised,
one mega-project at a time.
About the authors: Jason Keith Fernandes is a post-doctoral
scholar at the University Institute of Lisbon; Dale Menezes
is an MPhil candidate at JNU; Albertina Almeida is a lawyer
and activist; Amita Kanekar is an architectural historian and
a novelist.
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