On 15/02/2008, Philip Thomas <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > I have not been really able to understand what the Goans are agitating > about. OK may be SEZs were pushed through in obscene haste. But I still dont
Goan protest is a very complex phenomenon. It's almost as if we are making up for lost time during the Salazar years ... and that was a long time indeed! To one section, it is a rearguard action against the loss of priviledge they had in colonial times. You can read this in some of the posts on Goanet too. As you would notice, the priviledged sections (both Catholic and Hindu) have a grouse against the military action of 1961, because this, among other things, opened the flood-gates of bahujan empowerment (though with a communal edge at times). It's almost as if sucking-up to the ruling elite (of whatever creed or colour) is no longer the domain of a tiny-elite. There are others who feel the pressures of the decisions of the political elite on their natural resources they have long depended on, on their natural resources-based lifestyle. A few other protests have been spearheaded by a generation of student activists that got their baptism of fire in the 'seventies, when there was a considerable amount of student turmoil here. Quite a bit of 'activism' is also generated by paranoia over a change in the possible demography of the place. Some protest is also fuelled by political parties and the agendas of individual politicians. For instance, the Medium of Instruction and anti-KRC campaigns got an undeniable filip by dissidence within the Congress, and the ambitions of particular politicians to upstage the chief minister(s) of that time. Nowadays, we are seeing some amount of protest being fuelled by the ambitions of one-man (and his backers) to reclaim the chief-ministership that he had claimed using a mix of treachery and deliberately-fuelled ambitions. Needless to say, the corruption-fuelled style of Congress politics will also ensure that it runs into the brakes of protest and agitation sooner or later. But it helps to understand what fuels the agitations here, as you ask. FN -- Frederick Noronha http://fn.goa-india.org