After what appeared to be a time of harassment, we saw the arrest of some activists in Goa forcing us to raise the question: Is the space for dissent shrinking in Goa? Dissent is unwelcome in most circles. Often law is weaponised to silence dissent. Policing dissent seems to have become the order of the day. Dissent appears to be criminalised. It seems that the government is using strategic incapacitation of the people to bulldoze its anti-Goa agenda. The space for civil society appears to be closing quickly in our society. Will Goa survive without dissent? Will the killing of dissent end up killing Goa? Perhaps, it is time that we ask these discomforting questions.
The weaponisation of religion and religious symbols have not so much succeeded in dividing the people and hence it appears that the powers that be are trying to use history and the Portuguese colonisation to divert attention from pressing issues that trouble Goa. Will this diversion erode people’s capacity to protest?
If you enjoyed reading this article, you can help support our journalism by adding OHeraldo as a preferred source.
It appears that criminalisation of dissent is not producing a chilling effect and hence the powers that be are trying to divert the teeming tempers over the failures of the government by creating enemies from within. Will that mean that Goans will let Goa go to dogs? Unfortunately, we are ruled through division today. Will that also mean Goans will become blind and submissive to these divisive powers? In order to address the condition that afflicts us Goans, we have the challenge to embrace the ethics of dissensus. We need to embrace politics as a form of dissensus.
Dissensus seems to be deeply embedded in Goan culture. Goans have been called ‘crabs’. While this description is offensive and has painted Goans in bad light, maybe for a moment, we have to critically reconsider this Goan response and bracket the negative semantics of the label. I do not celebrate what we perceive as a response driven by a deep sense of insecurity, self-preservation, and jealousy. But within this dark side, we have shades of resources that we can rely to counter the condition that is afflicting us today.
Maybe we can find a politics of aesthetics that is born out of a redistribution of the sensible.
The distribution of the sensible is the order of things that one finds and becomes familiar and has one’s life and being within it. When this normalised and naturalised order of things is disturbed, the sensible in Goa is disrupted and as a result a Goan is rattled. This displaced order of things is a form of politics. It breaks the normal world of Goans disturbing the field of perception and the sense of belonging as Goans. Goans, then, seem to feel themselves or others as being dislocated from their assigned places, institutionalised hierarchies and freedom of being, speaking and expressing in Goa. This natural tendency to react to the changed order or reordering of (power) relations brought about by an individual or group can indeed become an important resource to develop a politics of dissensus at a time when dissent appears to be criminalised in our society.
Jacques Rancier, a French thinker, has developed a politics of dissensus. Rancier teaches that politics has an essential aesthetic dimension and aesthetics has a natural political dimension. Goans who are naturally responsive to the logic of disruption induced by a changed field of perception and what individual Goan counts as social order can redirect these instincts and develop a politics of dissensus. But to come to this logic of dissensus, we Goans may have to critically consider the logic of consensus that we hold dear to our hearts.
The reactive response to the logic of disruption that Goans display is actually a logic of consensus. It is desirous of the lost stable order. But paradoxically, we can find a resource within this disruptive response to develop politics of dissensus to save Goa and Goan-ness. The logic of consensus is reinforcing the idea of what is imagined as proper. It implies the distribution of the proper and the improper within a society.
When what is imagined and deemed as improper explodes into the society, it transforms the field of perception of the sensible and displaces the ways of belonging for the humans within such a society. ‘Everyone and everything’ is thought to have a proper place and proper function within the field of life in a society. When we live and function in alliance with that order, everything is thought to be in place and society remains peaceful. This is the logic of consensus that works to maintain this politics of status quo in any society.
Logic of dissensus consists in the demonstration of impropriety leading to the disruption of the way of being and belonging to a society. While the logic of consensus policies maintains the solidity of the order of things , the logic of dissensus disrupts that order of things and opens possibilities for the establishment of a regime of things.
Politics as dissensus always questions the boundaries of what is considered proper and what is considered improper in a particular society. Thus, Goan natural responsive attitude driven by the self-preservative logic of consensus can be groomed to be politics of dissensus in its resplendent brilliance.
The activists, social workers, some political leaders and ordinary people in Goa do exhibit dissensus for the sake of Goa. Dissensus for the sake of Goa inclines towards the self-preservative logic of consensus. Hence, the politics of dissensus that can develop in Goa has the power to save Goa and
Goan-ness.
The logic of dissensus is triggered by the logic of conservation of Goa. Hence, the politics of dissensus returns to the logic of consensus where all Goans are challenged to bury their disagreements and differences and work to protect Goa and Goan-ness. It is this Goan consensus for Goa and Goan-ness that will drive Goa’s politics of dissensus with everything and everyone who is anti-Goa and anti-Goan-ness. It is only in the embracing of Goan consensus and rising beyond our disagreement that will enable us to agree to disagree with everything that is destroying Goa and Goan-ness and bring Goa, Goans and Goaness to a port of safety and flourishment.
(Fr Victor Ferrao is an independent researcher attached to St Francis Xavier Church, Borim, Ponda.)
