by Lambert Mascarenhas
WHATEVER be our dislike, opposition to the BJP for its communal temper and effort of saffronising Goa, mine perhaps the most intense for the disruption in Goa of Hindu-Christian-Muslim unity which is its greatest endowment and magnetism and flowering, I have a high regard for its chief in Goa, Manohar Parrikar, in recognition of his talent, competence and capacity for hard work and for many improvements construction and maintenance of roads and bridges and effort at beautification effected in the capital city of Panjim and elsewhere.
Conceding that the International Film Festival (IFFI) which at its very genesis I had disapproved and debunked for its propagated attraction of foreign tourists to Goa when already one too many such visitors were converging on our homeland with no appreciable impact on our economy but on the contrary disrupting our way of life and disequilibrating our youth, and it turned out to be a fiasco, it is suggested that the new Congress coalition government need not only go hammer and tongs at it but begin to work for the purpose it is elected, and that is to provide Goa governance for a happy and contented life of the population.
Without fear or favour I must state that Mr Parrikar is more talented and capable than all Congress leaders in Goa, including Pratapsing Rane in whose many chief ministerships, Goa has not risen beyond a mediocre frame. If Parrikar is accused of dictatorship that must be because he was surrounded in his government and outside by persons that did not come up to his level of thinking and work.
The same charge of dictatorship was also made against Mr Rane by Mr J B Gonsalves, elected MLA from Panjim and Mr Somnath Zuarkar from Taleigao, once Minister in the Pratapsing Rane government, to me; and also by others against Dr Wilfred de Sousa when he was the Chief Minister for the same reason. This should not be called dictatorship but in tolerance.
It is a tragedy that Parrikar is in a political party BJP propped by perverse and diabolic organisation like the RSS, VHP, Bajrang Dal, and thus in a wrong party; which groups are now attacking Mr L K Advani and shaking him when these groups which are after his blood do not know that their days are also numbered. The noble Indian traditions of the triumph of truth over evil represented in some festivals and also in the epics Ramayana and Mahabarata, are clear pointers that those hostile people and groups that believe and propagate that India is only of the Hindus and all others Muslims, Christians, Buddhists and Sikhs who also really Indians and part and parcel of this great country as interlopers, second class citizens who must live in India according to them, on sufferance. This deleterious prejudice will in the long run determine their doom.
As for the new Congress-cum-Nationalist Congress government it is suggested that it must begin to work instead of only bashing Parrikar and his mistakes. Its priorities must also dwell on agriculture and forestry. The whole of Goa must be nutriment productive and wooded like Kerala from where I have just returned after a brief visit and it is really a Gods Own Country which it claims to be.
Its hilly areas are green carpets of tea gardens and its planes covered with coffee, areca, papaya, banana, pepper, cinnamon, cardamom and of course with coconut tree. We may not be able or our land not suitable to the growth of such spices or tea, but we can surely produce papayas and bananas and more paddy (rice) in our fields which are now seen lying fallow, uncultivated in many villages. Great attention, indeed must be paid by the agriculture ministry to this paddy cultivation which on the plea by the private owners of the fields that it is uneconomical to cultivate them due to the high wages of the labour available here, the government must lease or take over these fields and deploy farmers from elsewhere, from the other states, to farm and send them back to their native places after their task is done.
The so called wild trees which yield berries feeding the birds must also be cultivated as birds are also Goas glory. In Kerala I noticed tourism is scientifically and ingeniously planned, not haphazardly dealt as in Goa. The five-star hotels and other hotels are not geared to the sea or ocean as has been done here, but to the interior attractive locations. There is no Calangute-like vulgar, indecorous concentration of hotels, restaurants and the like in any place in Kerala. There is taste, dignity, imagination of whatever they performed for the pleasure and comfort of the tourists and other visitors. If Goa must seek a model it should be Kerala, not Cannes or Las Vegas.
http://www.navhindtimes.com/stories.php?part=news&Story_ID=072325
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