www.thehindu.com/society/who-belongs-to-goa-this-question-resurfaces-as-the-state-battles-the-raging-pandemic/article34554870.ece

On May 1, India’s smallest State crested a milestone: a record 54 people
died from COVID-19. Social media erupted with anger about how the number of
casualties in Goa was higher than in entire countries such as Tanzania,
Vietnam, and Taiwan. On its front page, the iconic *oHeraldo* newspaper —
once the last Portuguese daily in Asia — headlined another shocking fact:
on that day, the tiny territory moved past China in cumulative infections.

At that point, Goa’s positivity rate had reached 50%, one of the highest in
the world. It has stayed in that range, even as mortality figures continue
to climb. On May 11, an astonishing 75 people died from the virus, at which
point it was discovered that dozens were succumbing every night due to
interrupted oxygen supply in the main Covid hospital at the Goa Medical
College (GMC).

That revelation triggered vicious internecine sniping between the Chief
Minister Pramod Sawant (an RSS loyalist appointed to succeed the late
Manohar Parrikar) and his health minister Vishwajit Rane (the former
Congress MLA). Earlier this week, Sawant made a show of being “probably the
first CM in the country to visit a COVID-19 ward” at the GMC, where he
announced, “we have 100% oxygen. The problem will be resolved in a day.”
But the situation remained unchanged, and Rane went to the extent of
demanding “a High Court-monitored inquiry” into his own portfolio, “to find
out why so many are dying”.

Separately, in a widely ridiculed empty gesture, Rane also insisted every
citizen above the age of 18 should begin taking Ivermectin — an
anti-parasite drug that its own manufacturer says is ineffective against
COVID-19 — because “all our doctors and experts, the Chief Minister have
unanimously decided to go ahead with this.”

All this back and forth has occurred in just the first few days of an
astonishingly lax State-wide curfew that followed a threadbare four-day
lockdown in which hotels, bars and restaurants stayed open. On the
lockdown’s first day, Sawant himself inaugurated a bridge in the midst of a
dense crowd of supporters. Even the normally docile North Goa collector was
moved to admonish the CM for “wilful disobedience likely to pose a grave
risk to public health and safety.”

Exactly these kinds of cavalier antics have come to characterise the
distinctly schizophrenic pandemic atmosphere in Goa. On the one hand, the
healthcare infrastructure is stretched to breaking point. On the other,
hordes of escapees from worse-off locations keep pouring in. It is as if
two parallel universes co-exist: one is pandemic-stricken, the other keeps
on partying like it’s 2019.

This grotesque dichotomy has played out — until the second wave slowed
things somewhat — every evening in front of my home, next to Miramar beach
in the pocket-sized capital of Panaji. Like all our neighbours, my family
carefully masks up for our strictly socially-distanced breather on the
sands, where we invariably encounter droves of tourists streaming out from
the luxury hotel next door, most of whom refuse to follow safety protocols.
They turn belligerent when requested to do so. Their collective attitude is
perfectly clear: rules don’t apply in Goa; we can do what we want.

The always-simmering discordance between locals and *bhaille* — the
derisive Konkani term for “outsiders” — has turned bitter during the
pandemic. One illustrative exchange recently played out on singer Chrystal
Farrell’s Facebook timeline, when she posted “a humble request” to all Goa
helpline services: “Guys I know you have Goa’s best interest at heart but
please refrain from allowing posts from people who want to come and hang
around. Once things get better, we will welcome everybody with open arms.
Till then show some sensitivity, and encourage them to stay in their own
states, and let us heal in ours.”

That appeal ignited fraught debate on who genuinely has Goa’s interests at
heart. Veteran travel professional John Buckenham complained, “We get the
really badly behaved ones that refuse to follow instructions and throw
their weight around.” Farrell added, “Don’t get me started on locals
offering accommodation and transport, when the rest of the State is
pleading for the government to close borders.” Then, the journalist Nigel
Britto commented about “neo-Goans and other settlers who can and will just
leave, if things get really bad. [I don’t] think they’re actually concerned
about Goa and Goans.”

Britto broke an unwritten rule by speaking out about the anxieties that
plague long-term residents and natives of Goa. The facts are stark: Goans
today represent less than 50% of the permanent population, and the pandemic
has greatly accelerated this imbalance. There is immense concern about an
unstoppable tsunami of disaffected urbanites decamping en masse from other
cities to pursue their newly-minted Goa dreams.

“Immediately after the 2020 national lockdown was lifted, we started
receiving a lot of enquiries from buyers looking to settle in Goa,” says
Denzil Xavier, president of the Goa Association of Realtors. The demand has
been unrelenting, he says, “especially from high-net-worth individuals
looking to get away from the crisis in their hometowns. This rising demand
for a piece of paradise will only translate into higher land prices, and
could put land and home ownership permanently beyond the reach of the
average Goan.”

The pressure on limited resources has extended to every aspect of life
during the pandemic. On May 1, the Goa Association of Resident Doctors
issued an uncharacteristically dramatic public letter stating, “Even in
these times, VIP culture is still very much prevalent. [Doctors] who are
managing more than 30 new patients at a time are told to see ‘VIP’ patients
and get them admitted fast, even if many times they don’t require
admission. The other critical patients who have been waiting for 2-3 hours
then fight with us.” An anonymous but widely circulated WhatsApp message
claimed that several such incidents involved “outsiders” who used political
connections to “throw their weight around.”

“When we moved [from New Delhi to the river island of Corjuem] in 1998, our
neighbours were initially mystified,” says Orijit Sen, the pioneering
graphic novelist. “Back then there were no particular negative connotations
to being ‘Delhi people’, as there are now. Bernard, the seller, even told
us he was happy that people from outside were buying his house because new
people bring new ideas, and Goa needed new ideas. But he also urged us to
always maintain siesta hours, because he wanted outsiders to respect the
Goan way of life. Bernard was a wise man!”

For Sen, the emergence of a new Goa evokes mixed feelings. “While the
depredations of the past decade — with successive waves of newcomers
investing larger sums of money — are well known, there are quieter and
better changes also happening. Many people moving here value community
life, are sensitive to ecological concerns, have creative skills, and are
interested in contributing to Goa. But it’s a delicate balance that can
turn exploitative, ugly and commercialised in a short time.”

Heta Pandit, chairperson of Goa Heritage Action Group, came to Goa in the
early 90s during the communal riots in Mumbai, “which is not unlike how
people now are coming for respite from the pandemic or from the congestion
and oppression of city life. Some writers, artists and performers are
coming because Goa is conducive to creativity. Goa is a refuge for many
reasons,” she says.

I asked Pandit whether Goa is being irrevocably changed, and she shared
this anecdote: “I was in a car with a Goan friend and someone from Mumbai.
My Goan friend was talking about how things happen at their own pace in Goa
and how that needs to be respected. The Bombay friend laughed and said,
‘They’ll have to learn to change. They’ll have to learn to do things our
way.’ I think that illustrates the attitude that some people come with."

Back when Norma Alvares moved to Goa from Mumbai in 1977 with her husband
Claude, “There was absolutely no concept of outsiders nor were there hordes
of people looking for a second home. Goa was considered quite a backward
place, from where people were trying to go elsewhere for jobs.” From that
vantage, Alvares has witnessed the spectacular rise of the former backwater
into one of the richest corners of South Asia.

“When we came, it was because we were interested in rural development
work,” says Alvares. “Today’s neo-Goans are simply looking for sanity, a
place away from the madness of the cities. They are looking for a better
life.”

Alvares says she sees many newcomers start off on the wrong foot. “The
first thing they do is build a big wall around their property, insulate
themselves from the village. This is absolutely the worst way to get
integrated. In cities, each is for himself but village life is the
opposite. All ceremonies and customs, from festivals to marriages, mean the
involvement of neighbours. The villagers are your larger family, be they of
your faith or another.”

But there are parallel, and welcome, phenomena at play as well. New
entrants are very active in environmental issues, as they have bought their
slice of heaven and now want to protect further damage to their investment,
as Alvares says. “They also appear to have the time to attend meetings and
speak up on social media. This must be appreciated. I recently spoke at an
event organised to save Assagao in North Goa, and all the attendees were
‘outsiders’ with only a handful of Goans. It hit home hard.”

In fact, if there is a ground zero for the explosive growth of new
settlers, it is Assagao, which is now uncomfortably reminiscent of an
extension of New Delhi, with its uneasy mix of cosmopolitanism,
cliquishness and unlimited cash. In this ghetto of gentrification, some of
the country’s best restaurants shelter in old Goan houses, including the
superb Edible Archives, described by food writer Vikram Doctor (himself a
new migrant to Goa) as “a model for how a restaurant can also be a catalyst
for awareness on environmental issues, sustainability and preservation of
local food traditions.”

Edible Archives is the creation of the scholarly and thoughtful duo, chef
Anumitra Ghosh Dastidar and Shalini Krishnan. Krishnan gave me an
interesting insight: “People are often not sure if I’m a Goan, so I see
things from both sides, and definitely see a change in perception when
people think I’m from here versus when they know I’m not. I’d say it’s
quite a strong feeling. But I also think it is easier here for a large
variety of people to learn to fit in and feel at home in a relatively short
time than in many other places I’ve lived.”

Who belongs to Goa? Who does Goa belong to? These fundamental questions now
hang over the social imagination and collective mindscape of residents like
permanently massed monsoon clouds.

The brilliant Panaji-based architect Raya Shankhwalker, whose sensitive,
minimalist work is popular with wealthy would-be migrants, says, “The
problem is that we are a very small population with a distinct lifestyle
and culture, different from other parts of the country. The current pace of
influx is very rapid, and it’s not always the case that the new people who
are moving in really understand, or want to understand, the underlying
ethos.” The problem, says Shankhwalker, is when a large number of people
move in for the love of the place but not necessarily to be a part of its
people.”

This existential conundrum isn’t exclusive to Goa, but it does strike home
viscerally hard in a territory where the collective cultural identity has
been partly defined by waves of migration for at least 200 years. Since
Britain temporarily occupied the territory at the cusp of the 19th century,
waves of locals have cascaded out of their ancestral land to become
“subaltern elites” (the term was coined by historian Cristiana Bastos) in
the British and Portuguese empires and later, a swathe of post-colonial
nations from Macau to Mozambique. Today, the Prime Minister of Portugal is
a Goan, and so is the attorney general of the U.K. Can there be any place
for nativism in a place like this?

“The motivation of new arrivals in Goa is primarily to escape the misery of
their own hometowns, to get away from the miasma that urban India has
become,” says Rajan Parrikar, one of the staunchest defenders of Goa’s
cultural ethos. By contrast, “Goans migrate only for professional or
financial reasons, and Goa remains ‘home’ in every sense regardless of
their physical location. I think this is a crucial difference.”

Parrikar says, “This was not the compact Goans made with India. In the
Opinion Poll of 1967 [in which the prospect of merger with Maharashtra was
defeated], Goans spoke clearly on this matter. We wanted our identity, our
way of life, and the character of our land protected, and not be washed
away in the Indian tidal wave. This transformation is fundamentally illegal
and undemocratic since it runs counter to the wishes of the host populace.
Is there a State or community in India that would welcome liquidation of
its identity and a takeover by people from without? No group of humans
likes to be overtaken overnight by another. That is just the way we are
wired.”

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