FRIDAY, MAY 10, 2024
Albertina Almeida
What are the concerns that have been articulated by people in Goa in the last five years since the 2019 elections? Many. Have they been addressed? No. They have simply been either bypassed or overlooked in the march towards so-called development.
Whether it is tourism or mining or port development or any development for that matter, it is the stakeholders in the land and the resources, who must have control over what happens with the land. But if we go to see, there is no new legislation does not seek to restore controlling power to the more marginalized sections.
In the family laws of Goa, the management of the properties is the prerogative of the male spouse even if both the spouses are the owners of the marital properties. While tom tomming about Goa’s Uniform Civil Code, there has been no effort to retract this gender discriminatory provision. On the other hand, the positive aspects of matrimonial property have not been incorporated in Uttarakhand’s Uniform Civil Code, which is a forerunner of India’s Uniform Civil Code.
Similarly, there has been no effort to bring mining within the control of the local stakeholders. For instance, efforts to allow for mining by a local tribal led cooperative has not only not been encouraged, they have been stymied at every stage. This also holds for tourism where the deeds of a few local taxi drivers have been made a pretext to scapegoat all the taxi drivers, when in fact providing enabling supports to the taxi drivers and recognizing their autonomy was what needed to be foregrounded.
A host-friendly tourism and not one where the customer is always king, has to be promoted. There are enough people in the world, who are conscientious and will be sustainable tourism enthusiasts. But for this, the participation of local people in shaping tourism is again absent. Consulting agencies who have no sense of local ethos or ecology are paid a hefty fee and deployed to develop tourism policies which are completely out of sync with sustainable livelihoods of people and their right to self determination.
But for this we need to clean out the Augean stables that are antithetic to people-centric development and are tainted by incentives from those few who stand to gain huge profits from the unparticipatory development. The electoral bond scam exposed how development and even pandemic treatment were being guided by those who contributed to the ruling alliance’s lead Bharatiya Janata Party? That can only happen if voters and the media raise all these questions with candidates who come around at election time. As a matter of fact that is happening. When media questioned the BJP’s South Goa candidate as to what was her position on double tracking, coal and other issues that South Goa was facing, she simply had no answer apart from stating that positions are preliminary.
That does bring us to the expression of women empowerment that is loosely bandied about. It is not simply that the women’s movement had sought reservations for women with special emphasis on the women from the suppressed sections of society. There are enough and more women who have engaged with society and work at the grassroots and would not be alluding to positions as preliminary positions when they are already in the election fray. Women’s empowerment cannot be reduced to fielding women candidates in elections as mere tokenism.
Not only has nothing been specially done to empower the marginalized sections, but on the contrary, even the hard won power that was there has been wrested from them. Even acts of people who are political dissenters are being criminalized.
Take the Major Port Authorities Act, 2021. The people having their housing and livelihood in the area that comes within the jurisdiction of the port have been deprived of their power through the gram sabha at the Panchayat or through the Municipality, to take planning decisions, which are now the prerogative of the Mormugao Port Authority. A peek into their website will show how they look at fisherpeople and fishing as an obstacle to development. This kind of perspective does not augur well for the inhabitants and those eking their livelihood within 53 kms out of Goa’s 160 km coastline.
We must not forget that the Mormugao Port Authority has jurisdiction from Cortalim Jetty to Raj Bhavan, Dona Paula, to the entire coast line of Mormugao Taluka and up to and including Arossim beach and extending and including the coastline on both sides of the Betul beach. The Major Port Authorities Act, 2021, along with the previous consent for nationalization of rivers, as per which six stretches of Goa’s rivers have been included in the declared waterways under the National Waterways Act, 2016 must be repealed. The candidates must be asked whether they are assuring this.
For people’s power to be retained, both the 73rd and 74th amendments, must be actively implemented. And to boost the same, with small and historico-spatially different states like Goa, there has to be a respect for the difference to the extent that it can pave the way for justice. But the issue of the citizenship of Goa’s Overseas Citizens of India, which merited special consideration, and active lobbying at the national level continues to hang in balance. Everyone is kept dangling with assurances. This has happened before. This is happening again.
As a matter of fact, difference has often been perceived to the detriment of the marginalized sections in Goa. At one point of time, the Union Minister for Tribal Affairs Ramdas Athawale was heard saying that a political quota for Scheduled Tribes in Goa’s Legislative Assembly was not possible, and it was a sharp reaction from Goa that got him to say that he was not aware that Scheduled Tribes comprise 12% of Goa’s population and that nobody had brought the same to his notice.
And at another level, difference has been used to trump up false charges against the minorities with the active support of the majoritarian Government. A fact finding report by Citizens’ Initiatives for Communal Harmony effectively exposed how there was an orchestrated attack against Muslims by playing victim card as a Ram Navami rally provocatively wound its way detouring from the scheduled route.
The difference that Goa is, must be galvanized in the interests of Goa, not to deny Goa and Goans and people in Goa, particularly the marginalized sections, their rightful place under the sun. What the turnaround of the Union Tribal Affairs Minister drives home to us is that if we as voters speak up, organize, question, and challenge, change towards equity, pluralism, federalism and participatory social justice is possible.
(Albertina Almeida is a lawyer and human rights activist)
