BY INVITATION
Vivek Menezes
All this week, as Goa’s already-harried civil society erupted righteously about the proposed Prohibition of Unlawful Conversions of Religion Bill, the Nobel laureate Toni Morrison’s acutely insightful 1975 lecture about intolerance kept resurfacing in my mind
If you enjoyed reading this article, you can help support our journalism by adding OHeraldo as a preferred source.
The crackpot nature of Goa’s contemporary politics is aptly encapsulated by the huge bhagwa dhwaj fluttering ostentatiously from the most vulgarly named floating casino in the Mandovi, with the giant statue of Lord Parashurama looking on from the riverbank. For many years, RSS supremo Mohan Bhagwat has reiterated the assertions of his predecessors K B Hegdewar and MS Golwalkar about the saffron flag as “the role model” and “symbol of our principles” for his legions of swayam-sevaks, so what is implied by flying it proudly above the gambling den? What message does this flagrant charade send to the people, and the police, and who exactly is being fooled?
All this week, as Goa’s already-harried civil society erupted righteously about the proposed Prohibition of Unlawful Conversions of Religion Bill, the Nobel laureate Toni Morrison’s acutely insightful 1975 lecture about intolerance kept resurfacing in my mind. She delineated exactly how systemic bigotries are above all else “monumental fraud” and the real motivation is always “jobs, land, or money.” As we clearly see in Goa, the cynical manipulators are “only and simply interested in acquisition of wealth and the status quo of the poor. It’s important, therefore, to know who the real enemy is, and to know the function, the very serious function of racism, which is distraction. It keeps you from doing your work. It keeps you explaining over and over again, your reason for being.”
All this is highly relevant to what is being attempted to be imposed on India’s smallest state: “You don’t waste your energy fighting the fever; you must only fight the disease. And the disease is not racism. It is greed and the struggle for power. And I urge you to be careful. For there is a deadly prison: the prison that is erected when one spends one’s life fighting phantoms, concentrating on myths, and explaining over and over to [the oppressor] your language, your lifestyle, your history, your habits. And you don’t have to do it anymore. To avoid the prison of reacting to racism is a problem of the very first order. Where the mind dwells on changing the minds of racists is a very dank place.”
Just examine the facts of this farce: the purportedly “anti-conversion” measure was approved by a State cabinet where 8 of 11 ministers have themselves converted former party allegiances to the BJP, with some having switched colours multiple times to get to where they are today. These same turncoats have assiduously pursued the conversion of innumerable tracts of forests, orchards and fields into settlement zones, in the devastating “piecemeal destruction” referred to by Dr. Solano Da Silva (Professor at BITS Pilani Goa) and Tahir Noronha (architect/activist and doctoral student at UC Berkeley) in their devastating analysis in Economic & Political Weekly earlier this year.
Da Silva and Noronha wrote about the genuinely criminal conversions in Goa, which actually plague the state, and the red herring about religion has been specifically engineered to distract from: “Section 39A is the third twist in a persistent effort by the state government, headed by the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), to bypass holistic regional planning in favour of discretionary spot zoning on a case-by-case basis. It has striking parallels to what Boamah and Amoako (2020) described in Ghana as planning by the “(mis)rule of law.” An iterative reworking where the State, as the sovereign keeper of planning law, repeatedly places itself both within and outside legal frameworks to retain discretionary control over land-use change.
Section 39A’s predecessor, Section 16B (2018), first allowed individual plot-level zone changes, but was stalled a year later by judicial interventions. Seeking a new avenue, the government then enacted Section 17(2) (2023), justified as a mechanism to correct “inadvertent mapping errors” and “inconsistent zoning” in the Regional Plan 2021. It was subsequently read down in March 2025 for being unconstitutional…the government then introduced Section 39A to seamlessly continue the same practice.”
Back in April, when EPW published their paper, our two vigilant academics concluded that “Section 39A represents a fundamental dismantling of Goa’s comprehensive regional planning through arbitrary spot zoning that favours private interests. By enabling the systematic conversion of ecological and agricultural lands through opaque, ad hoc practices, the state government has effectively abandoned all commitments to uphold public interest and to safeguard Goa’s ecological lands. On the other hand, this legislation has sparked widespread citizen resistance in the courts and on the ground.”
Since then, however, there has been an extensive backlash, including this latest cynical gambit about religious conversion. It is explicitly meaningless – the record for the 12 states which have such laws is effectively zero percent convictions despite thousands of arrests and accusations, of which there are literally zero in Goa – and exactly as Toni Morrison said, pure distraction, plain and simple.
These games will continue, as Pratap Bhanu Mehta pointed out in his latest newspaper column about “wounded strongmen” in their last gasp of control: “Their authority and capacity to govern may have diminished. But their ruthlessness and stakes in power have not. They are still administratively empowered and have the state apparatus at their disposal. This is a novel challenge for us. The failures that lead to their diminished aura are all real. They are also at a dead end on how to address these failures.”
Mehta is writing about Modi and Trump but everything applies to Goa equally accurately: “[They] have run out of ideas; their paranoia makes their talent pool small; and their administrative style cannot deal with complex governance challenges [and] most importantly, they cannot acknowledge political weakness without that weakness becoming a self-fulfilling reality. But their aura of strength is indispensable; give up on that, and everything else collapses. But what happens when strength cannot be projected through popularity or actual achievement? How do you demonstrate strength when you cannot fix the economy, have failed to navigate the turbulence of world politics, and do not believe in institutions that can actually govern? The only answer is more repression and de-institutionalisation.”
‘Watering Mouths’ by Loretti Pinto (2008)
(Vivek Menezes is a writer and co-founder of the Goa Arts and Literature Festival)
