A Dialogue On Special Status
Selma Carvalho
Sometime in the autumn of 2014, the Scots will be answering the most important question to be asked in 300 years, “Should Scotland be an independent country?” The response to this referendum will define its fate. It’s a question Scotland to the North of Britain and Wales to the South-West have been asking in one form or another for centuries, ever since historical collisions decided their fate and forged them all into one nation. But there are some people, some clans, some identities that can never really forge with fire between the hammer of history and the anvil of assimilation; they see themselves as different ideologically, culturally, historically and politically. To what extent the Scots feel differently about themselves will be decided next year, and if the answer is adequately different enough, then we could be looking at an independent Scotland as early as March 2016. The chances are it won’t happen. There isn’t enough ground-swell support for such a separation from the United Kingdom, although there is support for more devolution and decentralization of power to Scotland.
This is the same conversation Quebec has always had with Canada, and despite failed referendums in 1980 and 1995 to resolve the issue, maintains a statut particulier (special status) and is understood to be a “nation” within Canada. It’s the same question British Prime Minister David Cameron wants to have with the European Union; promising the UK an in-or-out referendum in 2017 to continue or opt out of the EU. Wanting to redefine a relationship is a primal clan instinct and a fundamental right. It is an issue, mature democracies settle through listening intently to the vox populi, through dialogue, negotiation, the ballot box and the occasional referendum. Mature democracies do not send troops in to occupy lands, and breed generation after generation of young men who grow up listening to the sound of machine guns and petrol-bombs, and despairing mothers who live in perpetual hopelessness. Let’s not kid ourselves that these are hard choices nations have to make in the name of nationalism. These are shameful choices nations make in the name of nationalism.
This same question, of a relationship with the nation-state of India, has plagued Goa since 1961.Was it liberation or annexation? Should there have been a plebiscite? Should Goa have been accorded some measure of autonomy? For a long time, these debates were the domain of aging armchair activists, Goa’s own Dad’s Army with a special affection for Salazar and Portugal. Not anymore.
The call for Special Status is the surge of an entirely new movement and not a hangover of a dubious attachment to Portugal.
India has completely misunderstood Goa’s environmental needs, tacitly supporting a policy of unrelenting environmental degradation both in the mining and real-estate sectors. Nowhere has it shown any muscle in reining in elements which forage wider and wider swathes of land in the name of cowboy development as if Goa was a frontier town. The Congress at the Centre has for decades propped up politicos, like latter-day sheriffs, who have assured all sorts of illegalities with summary disregard for the meagre protections built into the law. The ousting of the Congress, and the election of Manohar Parrikar seen by many as a truly independent chief minister, itself is a re-emergence of regionalism in Goa, in the absence of a strong regional party.
But Goa is faced with another reality with respect to India ~ that is India’s demographic time-bomb. The spill-over into Goa, a State with a low birth rate, makes Goans extremely uncomfortable, particularly when displacement of people from highly populous regions or a prosperous Indian middle-class prone to conspicuous spending for whom buying a home in Goa is a fashion-statement, puts undue strain on land resources. A struggle for resources is the primary reason Goans now want to protect their State with Special Status.
Re-examining a relationship within the nation-state can take place calmly in the face of economic and political realities. A nation-state must allow for these discussions within the federation without getting unduly defensive. The question is just how mature a democracy is India?
