View From The Outer Harbour By: Thalmann Pradeep Pereira
SORROWING LIES LAMBERT Mr. Lambert Mascarenhas, well known freedom fighter, novelist, music critic and a former editor of "The Navhind Times" and the "Goa Today", has written a two-part article entitled "Goa's Passage To Freedom" which has been published in the Sunday editions of "The Navhind Times" on the 1st and 8th January, 2006. The self-proclaimed objective of the articles is "to enlighten the post-Liberation-born Goans of the beatings, arrest, imprisonment of those many men, women and girls who had the courage to defy the Portuguese authority in Goa and face their terrorism for just one collectively conceived purpose: Freedom of Goa". A nice way to begin the New Year, one must say. Indeed it is vitally necessary to remind the post-Liberation-born Goans of the sacrifices made by thousands of freedom-fighters to gift us with our primary freedoms of thought, speech and expression which we almost take for granted today. The fighters for Goa's freedom were not confined to Goans alone. The Portuguese Communists and Socialists were espousing the cause of Goa's freedom in the course of their day-to-day work among the common folk of Portugal. They were of the view that the freedom of the Portuguese people from the yoke of the fascist military dictatorship headed by Dr. Antonio da Oliveira Salazar and Marcelo Caetano, was inseparable from the freedom of the Goan people from the yoke of Portuguese Colonialism. The struggle for Goa's freedom was supported by the progressive thinkers and activists, especially the Communists from the other Portuguese colonies of Angola, Mozambique, Guinea-Bissau and Cabo Verde. Each of these countries had strong Communist parties and each of them achieved their respective freedom from the yoke of Portuguese colonialism through indigenous armed struggles. And after achieving freedom, each one of them embarked on the path of socialist development in which the emancipation of the peasants from the feudal bondage was the key element of economic and political policy. Thousands of Satyagrahis from all over India participated in the peaceful Satyagrahas held on the Goa borders and many of them laid down their lives as victims of the Portuguese firings. The plaque at the Martyrs' Memorial at Azad Maidan will testify to the sheer pan-Indian identity of these Martyrs. Lambert Mascarenhas has ably narrated the broad flow of events leading to Goa's Freedom in his articles. He certainly deserves to be complimented for this. One wishes that he had thought of writing a full- fledged book on the subject in greater details, with copious references and footnotes, since he is eminently suited for the job given his first-hand experiences and his writing skills. There are however some points made by Lambert Mascarenhas in one particular paragraph of his articles, with which we wish to join issue. He writes: " Whatever the composition and strength of the Goan political parties, they were considered quibbling, trivial by Prime Minister Nehru who wanted to hear just one voice, not many voices, even if these many voices, had actually pleaded for just one thing: The Government of India's dispatch of the Indian Army to liberate Goa. Jawaharlal Nehru did not also understand Goan nature which the Editor of the Bombay Sentinel the Englishman B.G.Horniman did, when he stated "three Goans four political parties". Indeed, unity does not come easy to Goans, because each Goan individual believes he knows better than the other Goan, is cleverer than the other. Were Jawaharlal Nehru alive he would have realized that the rest of Indians are no different from the Goans for the multiplicity of political parties existing in India today." A close reading of the above paragraph, quoted in full from the articles in question, throws up some crucial questions. In the first place, if Lambert Mascarenhas is seriously propounding his crucial observation that each Goan individual believes that he knows better than the other Goan, than it would mean shutting out all critical appraisals of each other's thoughts by fellow Goans. We do not think Lambert the Editor ever adopted such an approach throughout his journalistic career. Or else, the papers that he edited would have been no better than Salazar's gazettes. And if really each Goan believes what Lambert imputes to him, then where would that leave Lambert himself with his own views on art, music, culture or the Freedom Struggle? We are inclined to classify that particular observation of Lambert about the individualism of Goans as being a manifestation more of the general frustration which many freedom fighters feel today when they compare their ideals which led them into the freedom struggle and the actual reality of Goa after Liberation, rather than being the result of some deep study of the Goan psyche. There is also the other observation about Pandit Nehru ruing the disunity of the Goan freedom fighters. Pandit Nehru had no reason to rue about anything. As Lambert himself points out in the above-quoted passage from his article, all the Goan freedom fighters were most definitely united in demanding that the Indian Army should be despatched to liberate Goa. Pandit Nehru, who was a brilliant analyst of India's history as evidenced by his various books, was definitely aware that India was never one country in the past. He was acutely aware through his own experience in the Freedom Movement of India that there was a multiplicity of parties in India even during the British rule. Indeed, the Indian National Congress was never designed to be a political party itself, but just an umbrella for all these various political parties. Gandhiji himself recognised the need to fold up this umbrella and let a thousand flowers bloom, when he advocated after Independence that the Indian National Congress should be disbanded. But Nehru, knowing fully well that India was not one country but had to be fashioned to be so, envisaged the Indian National Congress to carry out this new role. The quintessential big- brotherly attitude of all Congressmen in any coalition emanates principally from this Nehruvian mould of thought. Nehru himself was acutely aware that "India" as a single political and economic entity was a creation of the 190 years of British rule since 1757. Nehru was keenly aware that there were thousands of rajas, maharajas and nawabs in India, each one of whom claimed to be the omnipotent ruler of a sovereign country. Therefore Nehru eulogised Emperor Ashoka and Emperor Akbar as the only two emperors in India's history who ever came close to politically or economically unifying the entire land that we know as India today. Nehru himself had that sense of destiny to understand that it was cast upon him to unify the various disparate units into one nation. Knowing fully well that caste, religion, language and province were all dividers rather than unifiers, Nehru consciously sought to downplay each of these factors by propagating the concept of Unity in Diversity and emphasising the aspects of Secularism, Democracy and Scientific Endeavours as the building bricks of a Modern United India. Therefore to ascribe to Nehru a lack of understanding of the so-called Goan nature, is to unfairly assess Nehru himself. If Nehru understood India and the causes of its perennial conquest by a thousand marauders throughout history, then surely Nehru would not have failed to detect among Goans the same failing which all other Indians had and to remedy which he consciously crafted his Modernist Project. And that leaves us with Lambert's quote from B. G. Horniman about three Goans giving rise to four political parties. We do not think it to be a trivial or sarcastic comment that is best ignored. At best it may reflect an impatience with a motley crowd of persons who keep insisting on their differences with each other to the detriment of some Higher Cause. And at worst, it can be a recipe for a fascistic Unity. But when a serious commentator on Goa and Goans like Lambert Mascarenhas, repeats this observation and embellishes it with his own observation about the multiplicity of political parties in India and Goa, then it merits a serious rebuttal. Apart from the argument that a multiplicity of political parties is welcome per se for its sheer celebration of Democracy, one has to go deeper to find out as to why there is such a multiplicity. One has to recognise that in the present era, when the polity has ruptured on account of economic disparities, each particular Group reinvents its own Identity to secure the interests of its own members. Identity Politics in India, whether based on caste or religion or province, can therefore be understood as an outcome of the failure, at least partially, of the Nehruvian Modernist Project. And we will straightaway put forth the argument that it was not the ideals of Secularism or Democracy which failed us but rather the lack of genuine Socialism which has brought us to the edge of fratricidal conflict. Lambert Mascarenhas most definitely must lament the aspect of fratricidal conflict, but without ruing over the multiplicity of political parties. To do otherwise, would tantamount to throwing out the Democratic baby with the Sectarian bath-water. This aspect of Sectarian politics is, however, a defining hallmark of present-day politics. The same Sectarianism was not present in the various political parties in the pre-Liberation era. So that leaves us with the crucial question as to why were there so many political parties of Goans in Bombay, if all of them were united in demanding that the Indian Army should march into Goa? Neither B. G. Horniman's derisive comment answers this question, nor does Lambert Mascarenhas' own theory of the individualism of "Goans". But a closer look at Nehru's Impatience does give us a clue. Nehru knew of the divisive factors in Indian society. He consciously invented Modernism as a counter to that Divisiveness. He consciously rejected Gandhiji's suggestion to wind up the Congress Party, since he envisaged the Congress as the Vehicle of that Modernist Project. In doing so, Nehru, to a certain extent, trampled upon his own espousal of Democracy. Democracy is not just a clash of political parties. It is also a clash of ideologies. But Nehru was not readily prepared to countenance a clash of ideologies. When it came to the communal ideologies of the Jan Sangh, Muslim League and Akali Dal, Nehru simply ignored them on the presumption that once the Scientific Temper and Secularism take root, these communal ideologies would quietly wither away. Caste ideologies were not so openly prevalent in Nehru's days. But when it came to the Communist ideology, Nehru showed the iron fist. Remember, the world's first democratically elected Communist Government in Kerala in 1957, headed by E.M.S. Namboodiripad, was undemocratically dismissed from office by Nehru by resorting to Article 365 of the Constitution. Nehru was impatient with the plethora of the political parties amongst the Goans in Bombay, precisely because he could not countenance a clash of ideologies. His call to the Goan freedom-fighters was in effect to disband their separate parties and join the Congress Party. A serious study of the various Goan political parties operating in Bombay prior to Liberation, requires a serious study of their diverse ideological perceptions. Trivialising the issue by quoting Horniman's sarcastic comment will most definitely be counter-productive, not only in being untrue to the facts but also in refusing to learn from history. The diversity of those ideological perceptions is evident even today when one compares the subsequent acts and actions of Goa's freedom- fighters. While Nagesh Karmali associates himself with the vandalisers of name- plaques in Mala, Krishnarao Rane is busy defending his ancestral feudal privileges in Saleli. And while Flaviano Dias is now remembered more for his famous defence of Manohar Parrikar's obnoxious CD, there are yet others like George Vaz, Gerald Pereira and Narayan Palekar who spent time in jails after the Liberation of Goa as a consequence of their bold struggles for a better life for Goa's toiling masses. Nehru, unlike what Lambert claims, very well knew and understood these differences of ideological perceptions. Nehru however thought that his act of sending forth the Indian Army would help him to get the Goan masses to his side in the first democratic elections in Goa. And when Goans opted for the communal-casteist brand of politics practised by the MGP and UGP, he was simply taken aback and exclaimed: "Ajeeb log hain Goa- ke". Till the next Monday, then, Happy Thinking! [EMAIL PROTECTED] “Harbour Times” (09-01-2006)