banana republic would be a step up for Goa governance, considering the dire pits of lawlessness and lack of shame characterizing the current state of affairs in India’s smallest state. Earlier this year, I spent some time in Uganda, which has languished in the Least Developed Countries classification of the United Nations since 1971, and the authoritarian Yoveri Museveni has presided over systematic kleptocracy for almost forty years, where I was shocked - and then deeply depressed - to discover many aspects of governance are far superior there, because some kind of accountability still persists.
Kampala roads are much better than Panjim, but there’s also more respect for the rule of law. We all know Goa is abysmally governed in comparison to every other state in South India, but the painful truth is things are now very bad even compared to Sub-Saharan Africa.
How did things reach this incredible nadir, in a state with such an outstanding record after decolonization in 1961, initially under the visionary policies of its first chief minister Bhausaheb Bandodkar – who focused on far-reaching land reforms, health care and education – and where, more recently, the current political era was initiated with great promise by the highly competent technocrat Manohar Parrikar?
It is clear the current debacle is the result of several convergent factors, but above all is the collapse of accountability across the political, economic and social landscape. The state has become almost lawless, and an astonishing public brazenness has come to permeate its reputation. People who toe the line elsewhere come here to transgress, knowing they will get away with it.
A few years ago, Justice Gautam Patel – who was especially excellent in his brief tenures on the High Court in Goa – had this to say at the first JB D’Souza Memorial Lecture in Mumbai: “In a country as apparently chaotic as ours, where individual liberty seems to have become an elitist side-salad, the broader, overarching principle of accountability requires a closer look. There is, first, the accountability of the individual to the law, and, second, the accountability of the enforcers in the implementation of the law. The individual must be answerable to the law for his daily conduct. The State must be answerable to the law for the manner of its enforcement.” He warned that “when we believe that we are unshackled from the law — that the law, whatever its form — does not apply to us as individuals, and, second, that there is no one to enforce it effectively, that is when we begin to witness the breakdown of the rule of law. We begin the dismantling of the republic; of a society governed by, and only by, the rule of law. We return to an era of subjects and rulers.”
This is precisely what is happening in Goa, and if the dismal track record of this all-time-worst year extends much further there can be no doubt the damage will be permanent. Justice Patel’s definition of misgovernance is all too familiar: “Bad governors have identifiable traits.
There is, first, their unwillingness to accept that anyone else has anything at all to contribute, any knowledge, skill or domain expertise. Only they have all the answers, on everything from traffic congestion in our cities to agrarian reform. The truth is many do not even know what the questions are, and they are certainly out of touch with contemporary knowledge from elsewhere.
This leads to what I call the bubble-ization of governance, proposals and policies unmoored from reason, logic, common sense and contemporary knowledge and experience. Nothing else can explain the completely madcap proposals we see emanating one after the after in the name of development. Should we propose an interlinking of the nation’s rivers? Of course. Should we allow a thermal power plant in an ecologically sensitive area known for its fruit orchards? Certainly. Should we rely on a completely flawed Environmental Impact Assessment report backing a wholly unnecessary airport at Mopa in Goa, and accept false environmental statistics? Why not?”
For many years, the oft-repeated refrain in Goa has been “it’s like this all over the country, so what can we do?” It may be a somewhat comforting sentiment, but it is not true. You only need to travel a bit to realize that much of the country is governed much better, most glaringly including every state directly across the borders, but also across significant swathes of the oft-disparaged so-called BIMARU states. For instance, I was bowled over by my experience of Bhopal and its environs in Madhya Pradesh, where generations of excellent stewardship by the famous Begums, and good administrative decisions made over decades after 1947, have endowed a most progressive and productive city, with an enviable spick-and-span runs-like-clockwork quality of life.
The contrast with Panjim and Goa in its desperate downward spiral could not be more stark, which begs the obvious question: If it can happen there, why does it seem impossible here?
As it happens, on that same eye-opening trip to Bhopal, I met the star bureaucrat Anthony “Tino” de Sa for the first time, although we share roots and many family connections from the Mandovi river island of Divar. An especially accomplished member of the 1980 batch of the Indian Administrative Service (IAS), with a Master in Public Administration degree from the Harvard Kennedy School of Government, and a more recent PhD to boot, this distinguished former Chief Secretary of Madhya Pradesh returned “home” to Goa with his wife after retirement a few years ago, where he is steadily building yet another impressive resume as writer and poet.
I reached out to Dr de Sa earlier this week, to help me understand the cataclysmic year of maladministration that was 2024 in Goa, and he responded thoughtfully that “without accountability, democracy is reduced to a hollow ritual of voting every five years. It is accountability that gives substance and meaning to democracy on a continuing basis. The first essential step to accountability is transparency. If citizens don't have information, they can't hold their representatives and public officials accountable. In that sense, the RTI Act was groundbreaking. But it isn't enough. Ideally, a citizen should not have to ask for information; it should be readily available and accessible on digital platforms of the government.
Anything that is not secret should be publicly available. When accountability disappears, so does democracy - and economic progress. There is a mistaken belief that "we have to give up a bit of our freedom in order to have discipline and prosperity". This reasoning is wrong. If we give up our freedom to know what administrators are doing, to question our rulers, then very soon vested interests flourish unchecked.”
(Vivek Menezes is a writer and co-founder of the Goa Arts
and Literature Festival)