Let the villagers decide Mobocracy then and democracy now By Cecil Pinto
I do not have the gift of prophecy. Forget 25 years, I can't even predict tomorrow's matka number. But I can look into the past. Join me in my Past-Time-Pass Machine as we shuttle between 15th century Goa and the present. It was a humid night but young Shyam shivered on the cowdung floor of his mud house. Tomorrow the Village Council would decide his fate. He had been caught romancing the lovely Shalini from the lower caste ward. What would the headman order? Would they be stripped naked, stoned and thrown out of the village? Would his father's tenancy rights over that small rice field be revoked? Would his family be ostracised? Shyam plucked at his kashti cord as he pondered these dark thoughts. Jose dreamed of mud houses but woke up, pajama clad, in the air-conditioned bedroom of his Margao apartment. The Gram Sabha meeting of the Velim Panchayat yesterday had been quite unnerving. They revoked permission for a wading pool Jose was planning for his kids in the garden of his ancestral house. The water table would be depleted, that's what the villagers had said. Not the villagers actually, it was these new Gram Sabha Activists who dominated all the meetings. Jose had taken a whole lot of charts filled with statistics to prove that a tiny wading pool would consume less water per year than what poured out from any one of the Gram Sabha Activists' terrace tank overflow pipes in a month. Yet they denied him permission. Jose, a civil engineer, also pointed out that all the appropriate authorities, including the Panchayat, had already granted him permission. No, they claimed, the Gram Sabha was the final authority. Last year Shyam's sister had got a marriage proposal from a very good family from the neigbouring village but the village headman had rejected it. Shyam's father had argued that the union was perfect and would not break any of the unwritten caste laws, but the headman was unrelenting. Little did Shyam's father know that the headman was trying to settle political scores with the headman of the other village over a long back family slur. In fifteenth century Goa the Gaunkars, the earlier settlers who ruled the Village Council, pretty much decided everything. Jose was wondering what transformed his otherwise peaceful fellow villagers into an informal mob at Gram Sabha time. What were the powers and politics at play? Weren't these the same people who had elected the members of the Panchayat? Why were they opposing their own representatives now? Their reasoning was going from unreasonable to absurd. A new International School coming up in the village had been stopped. We locals cannot afford to send our children to such expensive schools, so why should rich people benefit from our village's convenient location? Some of the richer new locals though could afford to send their children to the new expensive school. They objected to the objection. Another suggestion that was being seriously discussed was that one ward of the village could be designated as the only one where 'outsiders' could buy property and reside. So they could mix and mingle with their own and not pollute the rest of the village. Even that ward would have strict restrictions on architecture so that the heritage character would not change. Regular inspections would also be held to see that at least one meal contained fish-curry and rice. Shyam thought the whole system was unfair. I mean why should the Gaunkars decide who marries who, and who can till what land. Ok, maybe with land it was a different matter as it belonged to the whole village and so its use had to be regulated. But how could they regulate love? Shyam loved Shalini very deeply. Every day as he took the cattle to graze on the village plains she was all that he thought about. How they would marry and have a family and a mud house of their own. But would the council allow it? Would they be allotted village land to build a house, even on the outskirts. Or would they have to search for land in another village which was not so caste conscious? Or maybe they could move to the city of Chandor where he had heard there were places to stay for anyone willing to work. Jose was in a philosophical mood. The system of governance has broken down. Nobody trusted their own elected representatives – be they in the Assembly or in the Panchayat. The mob now ruled. Rules didn't matter, loud voices did. Even to get something legal done you had to drum up activist support, or else they would object to it. Every citizen now had to be a calculating politician of sorts. Why had this happened in the last two years only? Was it because land values had gone up so dramatically that the locals were frightened? Was the Gram Sabha a weapon of the weak to hit out at the powerful. Had civic society gone wrong because the state institutions had failed? Would we be seeing vigilantism again? A tyranny of self-appointed 'protectors' of our heritage and our land? It was about Goa and Goans was it not? Or was it? Shyam's father had approached the village temple priest who was one person the village council dared not cross. The priest had given Shyam's father a patient hearing and promised to attend the village meeting tomorrow. But he had not promised much. People were no longer as much in awe of religion as they used to be and so although he still had a lot of clout the village temple priest wasn't sure he could intervene in an inter-caste issue. What bothered Jose even more is that his religion, or lack of religion, came up at the Gram Sabha. Apparently Jose had said blasphemous thing about the parish priest at a local bar and had been overheard. Religion apparently is an important marker in these confusing times of identity. As we step out of my Past-Time-Pass Machine I think how retrospective prophecy is as easy as the juvenile 'I told you so!' Learning from our past, and being open to criticism, is far more difficult. --------- The column above appeared in Gomantak Times dated 23rd October 2008 Older columns archived at: http://www.goanet.org/modules.php?name=News&file=article&sid=607 ====
