https://www.livemint.com/politics/news/inside-the-intriguing-quest-for-goa-11636560398078.html
An incredible carnival is playing out in Panjim, the tiny riverside capital of Goa. Every morning the main thoroughfares are festooned anew with banners, placards and flags to herald the arrival of some fresh political bigwig. When the roads themselves were re-tarred overnight, it was to smooth the passage of Amit Shah, but it was Arvind Kejriwal whose smile was ubiquitous on all the hoardings. Soon afterwards, I was startled to recognize Rahul Gandhi outside my window. He was perched on the pillion of a motorcycle “pilot” who deposited him right on my doorstep. Why these surreal shenanigans in India’s smallest state? It’s because polls are scheduled for next February, and everyone is aware the incumbent BJP – which has ruled since 2012 – is vulnerable under its notably weak chief minister, Pramod Sawant. Party sources say prime minister Narendra Modi intends to go all out to retain Goa, which he regards as talismanic. But for the exact same reason, and fresh from its drubbing of the Modi-Shah combine in West Bengal, the All India Trinamool Congress (TMC) has leapfrogged the country to set up shop in the Konkan, promising to repeat the same feat here as well. Several senior TMC officials have taken up residence, accompanied by hundreds of bushy-tailed young functionaries of Prashant Kishore’s heavily touted Indian Political Action Committee. Thousands more are expected to follow, but their advance cohort has made an unmistakable impact. Shaken out of familiar bucolic paradigms, Goa’s political arena is charged with energy, intrigue and bombast. No one has seen anything like it before. To be sure, much of the megawatt back-and-forth remains at the level of farce, strongly reminiscent of V. S. Naipaul’s 1958 comic classic *The Suffrage of Elvira*. In that early novel, the Nobel Laureate skewered the emergence of modern politicking in rural Trinidad: strutting blowhards, vote-banks, Hindu-Muslim (and Christian) animosities, cynicism, pandering and corruption. At one point, the comparatively aloof Mrs. Baksh warns with prophetic portent: “Everybody just washing their foot and jumping in this democracy business. But I promising you, for all the sweet it begin sweet, it going to end damn sour.” In an identically slapstick vein, the first Konkani advertisements TMC blanketed across Goa cartoonishly misspelled the word for Goa itself, severely hampering its quest for local authenticity. Then, its initial recruit, the deeply dubious Congress veteran Luizinho Faleiro kept talking up Mamata Banerjee’s street-fighting credentials, which had the effect of menacing an electorate that treasures its hard-won peace and harmony. After that, the newly poached member of parliament Babul Supriyo was helicoptered in to explain why Goans should vote for TMC, but could only manage meaningless (and widely ridiculed) drivel about Bengalis liking fish and football just like the Goans. The limit to fun and games has already been reached, however, because all the frenzied jockeying also cleared an opening for regressive phenomena that were previously absent in Goa. For example, Aam Admi Party president and New Delhi chief minister Arvind Kejriwal seriously offended Goans by offering them something which no one had asked for or expected: “we will facilitate an Ayodhya pilgrimage for Hindus. For the Christians, we will give a free Velankanni pilgrimage, and for the Muslims, we will give a free Ajmer Sharif pilgrimage.” Meanwhile, the BJP keeps on telegraphing mixed signals. On the one hand, prime minister Narendra Modi was photographed embracing Pope Francis in Rome, which his party strategists intend to salve his relationship with Goa’s sizable Catholic minority. At the same time, the beleaguered Sawant lifted Parrikar’s informal – but nonetheless rigorously enforced in his lifetime– ban on the Bajrang Dal, and also invited the flamboyantly extremist Tejasvi Surya to campaign on his behalf. The controversial 30-year-old member of parliament from Bangalore South promptly plumbed vitriolic depths that Goa is entirely unaccustomed to experiencing in its public sphere: “We cannot let Mamata Begum enter the land of Parashuram and the land of Shivaji Maharaj. TMC stands for terrorism, mafia and corruption. In Goa, they have no leader, no cadre, no voter and no future.” Damodar Mauzo, the giant of contemporary Konkani literature, says “the new forces entering Goan politics have realized the BJP is very weak. Each one now seems to think they are the saviors the people of Goa are waiting for, and splash money around to make an impression. I think the people are basically amused by these national leaders entering one after another, making the same old promises. So, what’s new about it, exactly?” Mauzo has seen it all in Goa, from colonial rule to the swift decapitation of the 450-year-old Estado da India in 1961, and the all-important 1967 Opinion Poll that rejected merger with Maharashtra and resulted in Union Territory status. In the 1980s, he was in the vanguard of fiery language agitations that led to Konkani becoming a national language, and paved the way for statehood. But in his fictional ouevre as well as “real life”, the 75-year-old embodies *vegllench munisponn*, the universalistic Goan humanism which tends to thwart the agenda of bigots and bullies. That is why, in 2018, his name was discovered on a hitlist maintained by the killers of Bangalore-based journalist Gauri Lankesh, and this gentlest of souls is now compelled to move everywhere with state-supplied bodyguards. Looking back to Goa’s debut in the Indian union, Mauzo says “Nehru was surprised when great opportunities were offered on a platter, but Goans would shun them. Scholars wanted independent language status for Konkani, yet our own people claimed it was a dialect of Marathi. Funds were available for development, and our government took pride in sending the money back unused. Things haven’t changed much. Goa’s people are still unpredictable, and[in Nehru’s infamous phrasing] *ajeeb*.” That home truth may prove the fatal stumbling block to high-octane attempts to corral Goa’s voters. The historian Parag Porobo summarizes this essential historical context very well in his *2015 India’s First Democratic Revolution: Dayanand Bandodkar and the Rise of Bahujan in Goa*: “[Ours] is the story of political will. It is the story of a state that, in its very first election, surprised the country by bringing to power a government that, with the Bahujan Samaj as its political base, was the first of its kind.” Could we see another replay of those stunning results from the first big elections in Goa, when the grand eminences of national politics got it terribly wrong? At that time, Nehru’s nominees [note: my grandfather, the poet and academic Armando Menezes, was one, who ran for the South Goa seat in the Lok Sabha] were uniformly thrashed. According to the peerlessly astute observer of Goa politics Radharao Gracias - he was also an independent MLA - “the fact is that Nehru was *ajeeb*, not the Goans, as it was his expectations that were far from reality.” The new entrants could be making precisely the same mistake. Gracias says he understands why all the biggest political players have descended to slug it out in this diminutive arena: “A political party likes to add to the tally of the number of states in which it rules. Goa being so small, it is easier to make an impact. For this reason, the AAP and Trinamool are both here. Besides, a party must win either the prescribed number of representatives or 6% votes in at least four states to be recognised as a National Party, or to retain the recognition previously obtained. Financial implications are also much less here.” Of course, the additional - and game-changing - factor is the BJPs abysmal record, along with its widely reviled platoon of defectors under the hapless Sawant. This too is surreal: of 27 MLAs in the Goa BJP, an astonishing 15 are Catholics. With party ideology jettisoned, there is only license to run amok. It got so bad that the BJP’s own Governor Satya Pal Malik (he is in Meghalaya now) openly admits, “there was corruption in everything the Goa government did. I probed the matter and informed the Prime Minister about it [but nothing happened].” That debacle of misgovernance is why virtually every seat is up for grabs in Goa, and explains why AAP and TMC have unleashed their go-for-broke campaigns. This much is amply evident for them, and the Congress as well: fresh faces and independents stand an unusually wide-open chance to pick up seats, and possibly even sweep the state if they get their acts together in fairly short order. At this point, it hasn’t happened. And yet, there are undeniably salutary side-effects from the unbounded free-for-all. The bracket of election issues has expanded dramatically, and now includes real bones of contention: mining, casinos, the ill-advised Mopa “second airport”, and the threatened Mollem tract of Goa’s vital Western Ghats biosphere. These topics were always been purposefully sidelined from public discussion. But now they’re on the table, and quite likely hold the margin of victory for February. Thus, there can be no doubt we are in an historic moment when Derek O’Brien, the TMC’s chief national spokesman, and the leader of their Parliamentary party in the Rajya Sabha, publicly endorses activists who battled the state in the Supreme Court for decades. He told me, “I admire and appreciate the work being done by Goa Foundation on the mining issue. There has been no recovery of huge losses from state-sponsored mining loot. This wealth of 35,000 crores can enable a dividend for every Goan, today and in the future.” Similarly unprecedented is Rahul Gandhi’s bold assurance: “we will not allow Goa to become a coal hub. The most important thing Goa has is the environment, and that has to be protected at all costs. Mopa is for Adani, port [expansion] is for Adani, and mining is also for Adani. What is happening here for you?” All this is invigoratingly welcome, but where is the next generation of candidates to implement these politics of tomorrow? To see what might be shaping up on the hustings, I looked hard at one significant seat, the Saligao constituency that spans an exceptionally consequential span of North Goa to the banks of the Mandovi river. There are hundreds of traditional farmers and fishermen here, but perhaps just as many dollar millionaires (few of whom are likely to have voting rights) from around the world, who own heritage houses, and newly constructed luxury homes and apartments on the heights, and down the waterline. Saligao provides an excellent snapshot of what’s at stake in contemporary Goa, and is also one of very few battlegrounds where the recent churn has already resulted in the announcement of a debutant campaign: Yatish Naik for TMC. The 36-year-old lawyer – who topped his class at Goa University - is an unquestionably uncommon candidate in a state where the political cadre has more recently fallen in the vein of hustlers, goons, charlatans and career criminals (a full quarter of sitting MLAs face serious charges). He was a protégé of Dr. Wilfred de Souza, the Uganda-born physician who held the Saligao seat for Congress for almost 20 years, and considers himself an admirer of P. V. Narasimha Rao’s “astuteness and political sagacity.” Naik told me, “no one admits it, but the economy of the state has collapsed. There is very little employment. Inflation is sky high. Our existing politicians have no plans to combat these problems, and they lack the competence to even understand them properly. People keep saying ‘outsider party’ but neither the Congress or BJP originated in Goa either. As far as I am concerned, we are in a crisis that has to be solved with an agenda of inclusive, transparent, environmentally friendly good governance. I feel that my fellow Goans fully understand what’s at stake, and will go for the right choice on Election Day.” To outside observers, Goa has come to represent the zenith of middle class Indian aspirations: cosmopolitanism, urbanity, a great quality of life in balance with nature. All those factors still exist, but there’s much more behind the stereotypes, including an array of unresolved issues that have emerged to the fore precisely due to the entry of new political alignments with little to lose. The coming months are going to be filled with spectacle, and at this point only one thing is clear in Goa. This election race is wide open. NOTE: this original text has been changed somewhat (along with the title) in the printed version, which is attached below.
