Revisiting Baina: a forgotten chapter
Most Goans remained unaware of
it, pretended it didn't exist,
or just thought it was not
"their" problem. But -- till
it was speedily and brutally
demolished -- this squalid and
sleezy underbelly of this
touristic State showed up
another side of Goa.
Bang on a once-scenic beach -- only one of two prominent
beaches near Goa's most-populous Vasco da Gama town -- a slum
sat alongside the squalid red-light quarter. As one visited,
two young women probably just out of their teens, wore garish
skirts and two-inch heels, forcing a smile on their
tension-writ faces.
Many of these `girls' were rural women from coastal Andhra
Pradesh, and quite a few from Karnataka. Their lives uprooted
by poverty, probably cyclones, and waves of disastrous
famines, their hope was to making a better living in this
slum on the country's other coast.
It was a life of bondage. Even if they earned more, they
could hardly save. One rule that dominated Baina is that you
pay back two thousand rupees for every thousand you borrow.
Often prostituted women went in for small loans, of a few
thousand. But repayment-calculations were kept by the
brothel-keepers, deliberately calculated to keep the women
sunk in perpetual debt.
Finally, when the Goa government clamped down on this area,
demolishing it out of existance, it was an even worse
disaster -- sex-workers were left without a living. And the
problem now shows signs of having spread across the State.
In most Goan discourse over the subject, the `girls' were
seen as `non-Goans', and got little sympathy. Since the
clientele themselves were believed to also be largely
`non-Goan' -- including single-residents of the port town
that houses large industrial, naval, ship-building and other
commercial activities -- this further hardened the
this-is-not-our-problem attitude many Goans adopted.
Says Arun Pande, a Tata Institute of Social
Science-trained social worker who worked long in
the area: "People stigmatised entire Baina as a
place for prostitution. Actually the (red-light)
area was only a small part of what is called Baina
beach."
One local resident agreed: "People thought that the whole of
the Baina locality is notorious. But there were quite a
number of middle-class residents living there (some who
settled even before the trafficking in women picked-up in the
boom that came after the 'sixties)."
Out of some 6000 people who lived in and around the slum
area, there were an estimated 1500-2000 in prostitution.
In recent years, Pande, along with social worker Zarine
Chinvalla and others who were part of the organisation,
worked from the midst of Baina's Jannat Gali. Lanes in this
crowded and neglected area were sometimes named after the
madams of the area.
They say the red-light area itself had four clear groups
there -- victims of prostitution (including women and
children), perpetrators who cause it and allow it to
continue, persons vulnerable to prostitution and groups not
in any way directly connected with prostitution.
Holding the key to this problem were the traffickers. This
small, well-organised, barely-known to the outside world
network made it possible for Baina's operations to continue
and for men to prey on poverty-striken women some of whom
came from nearly a thousand kilometres away. Traffickers not
just transported and brought in the `girls'. By keeping these
women in debt-bondage, they played a key role in ensuring
their continued stay at Baina.
Traffickers were agents who recruited -- under various
promises -- and transported the women. Sometimes they could
be even a relative, uncle or mother. At times, they were
brothel-keepers, customers and pimps. There are also mards,
the male-figures who lived off the earnings of the women.
For those who landed up at Baina, the situation was bleak.
Goa unfortunately has had no clear stand on trafficking. Till
recently, Goa lacked a functional State protective home for
rescued women -- not just a bal-niketan that looks after
children. So the women were portrayed as the villains, with
little effort made to highlight the factors that kept them
there in the first place.
Occasional moral outrage in Goa had focussed on shunting back
the women to their home State. "Yet it is the trafficker
who's in control of the business. In the Immoral Traffic Act,
some 90 per cent of the provisions say the traffickers should
be punished," says Pande.
Added to this, the women from this slum or red light area
carried multiple burdens. Not only were they illiterate, but
they were also migrant and low-caste.
Efforts to come to grips with the problem were mostly
hamstrung. Few, if any, understood the political roots of
this situation. Earlier this decade, the Goa government went
on a high-profile `shut-down and clear-up' drive. Police
cordoned off the area, harassing anyone getting through.
Unsuccessful attempts were made to resettle the sex-workers
in the village of Ribandar, some 25 kms from their location.
Local villagers opposed the idea. Goa BJP's government had
offered a `rehabilitation' package to some 250-odd women.
Power was temporarily cut to the area. Members of the
BJP-appointed Goa State Women's Commission sought to convince
the `gharwalis' and the prostituted women to pack and move
into a State-transport Kadamba bus, to no avail.
* * *
But this sudden and unexplained campaign -- targetting more
the women rather than the networks behind Baina -- led to
suspicions that it was fuelled by a real-estate land-grab,
port-expansion plans or road widening goals. Since the late
'nineties, repeatedly attempts have been made to demolish it.
Mormugao is one of the major ports in India. Congress leaders
charged that the official blitzkrieg was a retribution by the
BJP government as the area had voted for the Congress in the
previous elections.
Researchers Anita Haladi and Shaila DeSouza pointed to press
reports that human rights violations were taking place in
Baina, "due to a lack of an alternative source of income
following the High Court Order in July 2003." Since January
2004, the area was cordoned off by police personnel who deny
entry to potential customers.
Later, on June 14, 2004 in one swift move, the then
Goa government struck and demolished Baina. But not
before residents fought back and eyewitness
accounts described pitiful scenes with women and
children crying for a truce. Some 250 cubicles in a
20,000 square metre area had been demolished.
Activist Sridhar Kamat and women rights campaigners Albertina
Almeida were arrested. "When I was dragged by the police at
Baina in 2004, the police officer Mahesh Gaonkar watched as I
and another woman were threatened with rape by some local
men," commented lawyer-activist Ms Almeida in a public post
on this topic, made recently in October 2008.
Commented the local newspaper Gomantak Times: "What happened
in Baina on Monday was on par with what happened when the
then Chief Minister of Maharashtra Abdul Rehman Antulay razed
the homes of thousands of pavement-dwellers in Mumbai at the
height of the rainy season and banished them to the
furtherest swamps... it also takes us back to the Turkman
Gate during the infamous days of the Emergency."
Commented women's campaigner Sabina Martins: "Never before
in my two-plus decades of social activism did I encounter
such large scale sadism that I witnessed in Baina on June 14,
2004. The mass scale destruction of people's homes in the
midst of the monsoons, all in the name of clearing the red
light area, was a bolt out of the blue for thousands of
residents in the area who in their wildest dreams had not
dreamt that their homes would come down under the
bulldozers."
She added: "The scenes that I witnessed were pathetic.
Scores of women and children lay huddled along the roads with
their meager belongings. Babies, some a few days old, were in
the arms of their mothers who were trying to protect them
under their sari pallo. All along the road as far as your
eyes could see were groups of displaced people looking all
lost, tragedy writ large on their faces. The people did not
have a drop of water or a morsel of food the whole day."
But others saw the issue differently, with the anti-migrant
local sentiment also surfacing sometimes.
"By and large the citizens of Vasco finally have
something to smile about, after today's long
pending action. The blot that brought a bad name to
this beautiful Port Town has finally been wiped out
from the geographical map," commented Vasco da
Gama resident Daniel de Souza. Mormugao councillor
Milton Baretto told journalists that the local
civic body was considering a change in the name of
the Baina locality, obviously to fight off the
stigma it had gained over the years.
"What happened in Baina is a forewarning of what could
happen in Goa especially since the Goa Land (Prohibition of
Construction) Act 1995, (Section 6) allows the Government to
demolish any construction without giving any notice provided
that it is Government land and it is being used for `public
purpose'. In such a scenario the intervention of human rights
organisations and activists is essential so that Emergency is
not repeated under a democratic garb," added researcher
Shaila de Souza.
These perspectives need to be remembered, even if Baina may
seem like a closed chapter.
[This extract is from the book 'Picture-Postcard Poverty:
Unheard voices, forgotten issues from rural Goa' by by
Kalanand Mani and Frederick Noronha, that was released in
November 2008 in Goa. Available from Broadway Book Stall,
Panjim and other outlets. Rs 150, pp 132. International
Sex-Workers' Rights Day was observed this week.]
PHOTO: Children at Baina, pre-demolition.
