when he was Chief Minister of Goa, in the Assembly, all political parties have been consistently hypocritical when it comes to gambling and allied activity which is eating into the sanity and the finances of hundreds of families in Goa.
The priority of the current Director General of Police Muktesh Chander to launch a severe crackdown on drug and prostitution rackets is well placed. But unless he adds the war on gambling to his list of priorities, he will fall short of addressing the single biggest reason for the breakdown and ruin of families in Goa. Taking nothing away from the need to go after the kingpins behind prostitution rackets, an effort which is still in its early stages, the hard and perhaps the harsh reality is that, prostitution rackets do not harm or affect local Goan society as much as gambling, and to a lesser extent drugs do.
While Manohar Parrikar, made those sounds of driving casinos away and even linked the rise of abortions to casinos, in a manner he alone knows, they remained completely hollow when he left Goa, with casinos very much on the Mandovi and not on the high seas and the hopes of so many Goans, that casinos would be driven out, high and dry. Now of course Casinos are valuable allies and investors and they cannot be touched and so it doesn’t matter to Messers Parrikar & Parsekar, if Goan families are getting destroyed as homes, jewellery, land and assets are being sold to fund their gambling habit. While there is indeed a policy of keeping Goans out of casinos, which has been framed, we are yet to see the rules which define who is a Goan and who is not.
But you do not need any rules to be framed to see the daily destruction, loss of family life and livelihoods, in small cubby holes called gambling clubs. They are every-where but perhaps more in towns like Vasco, where there is a large section of employees working for central and state government institutions with steady incomes. In fact when we decided to stake out and keep a watch on some of the places we suspected, where gambling activities were taking place, we were advised by those in the know, to wait till the first week, after pay day. Some even told us that on the 1st or 2nd of each month, every gambling den is so full that there is hardly any space for the players. On this day, many gamblers don’t just come and play afresh, but return loans they were forced to take the previous month to fuel the habit. And on the same day fresh loans with interest are taken again for the month and the vicious cycle goes on.
Therefore when your newspaper decided to raid the gambling dens of Vasco (our report on Page 1), it was not done to name and shame any one. We did not even name the clubs or zero in too specifically on their location. That wasn’t the intention. It was purely to record evidence of the rampant nature of such activities so that the authorities could take over and stop them. If they don’t now, public pressure will force them to.
It gave us no pleasure to see the faces of horror when we caught the gamblers with playing cards and wards of cash on a Wednesday evening. But we dedicate our decision to the mothers, wives and daughters of families whose men could be anyone in the den we raided or in any one of the hundreds all over Goa. If there is one thing that saddened our team of brave hearts, who covered the story for Herald, it was the realisation that the gamblers were horrified not at what they were doing to their lives, but of getting caught and exposed.
This is not the time to play blame games. It is vital for our civic society, our police and perhaps even our politicians to make the war on gambling a priority and use both force and kindness to treat this disease at various levels. No one wins in this gamble. And Goans suffer a heavy defeat.
