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View From The Outer
Harbour
By: Thalmann Pradeep Pereira
WHO DONE IT ?
On 2nd October 2005, the nation paid grateful homage to Mahatma Gandhi, on his
136th birth anniversary. The Congress party, which heads the Govt.
of Goa, knows only the current Gandhi family. So never mind that they thought
it was the Mahatma's death anniversary. The state BJP leadership, which does
not have any people's issues on their agenda to make noise about, made a lot
of noise about this faux-pas. Trust the BJP to know the difference between
Gandhiji's birth-date and his death-date. After all how CAN they ever forget
30th January 1948?
Every year on Gandhi Jayanti, the various statues of Gandhiji get a neckful of
garlands. Enthusiastic youth leaders, who are otherwise busy positioning
themselves as future ticket-aspirants, pose for newspaper cameras with brooms
in hands at 10 a.m. that day, on streets that have already been cleaned and
swept early in the morning, as usual, by the hundreds of Harijans who make up
the sweeper roll of our Municipalities. And enterprising bar-owners sell
liquor through their side-windows or their back-doors, on what is supposed to
be a dry-day as per government directives.
This year some of our gambling establishments literally went overboard. They
remembered Gandhiji on 15th August itself. One casino establishment got its
waiters to wear Gandhi-caps while serving liquor to their gambler-customers on
that day, and never mind that 15th August is also supposed to be a
dry-day.
Gandhiji used to say that the Golden Talisman to judge any governmental action
is to find out whether it brings some relief to the poorest of the poor in
this country. But the policies being actually implemented by the Congress-led
governments both at the centre and in Goa, seem to be designed to accord with
some other benchmark in as much as that the effort seems to be solely to bring
broader smiles on the faces of those who already have a surfeit of things. How
else can one understand the Goa Govt.'s stand that they have no money to pay
the computer teachers in the schools or to improve the facilities in the
various Govt. hospitals, even as thousands of crores of Rupees are earmarked
for a fantasy airport at Mopa in respect of which not a single
passenger-traffic estimation study has been done?
The Congress party in Goa seems to be bent on outdoing all the dubious records
set by the erstwhile Manohar Parrikar regime of the BJP. Already Parrikar
himself has started howling that while he presided over only a 100-crore IFFI,
the Rane Govt. is presiding over a 3000-crore new airport at Mopa. One is
tempted to recall the pot and the kettle. But the point is that all the black
soot will have to be suffered by the general
public.
Parrikar's IFFI was nothing but the cosmetic beautification of one road in
Panjim. The flooding of Panjim's streets this year exposed his trickle-down
strategy that the hosting of the IFFI will spell economic spin-offs for the
whole of Goa. Under the Congress party's rule, the indiscriminate re-zoning of
some selected properties from 'Agricultural' to 'Settlement' to
'Commercial-2', under the garb of "Town & Country Planning" will only
bring Goa's middle classes to their knees in the near future, much as Mumbai's
smug middle classes have already started realizing the enormity of the
builder-lobby's clout which drowned them twice in the last
monsoon.
And if anyone still thinks that a secular Congress-NCP-MGP government is
different from a communal BJP-MGP-UGDP government, well then he better get
ready with pen-and paper to stroll down the Congress-organized IFFI-2005 and
compare it with the BJP-organized IFFI-2004. There will be much to ruminate
over.
Sometimes the slip of the tongue betrays the real beat of the heart. The
BJP knows very well that Gandhiji was assassinated on 30th January 1948.
It was a Freudian slip that made the Congress party kill Gandhiji on 2nd
October.
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| 1st Young Goans International Essay contest 2005 |
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| Theme: WHAT CAN I DO FOR GOA |
| More details at |
| http://shire.symonds.net/pipermail/goanet/2005-October/034190.html |
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