14th May 2013

A Tale Of Two Movements
The indefatigable Dr Oscar Rebello seems to have done it again. With his propensity to call a spade a spade and his undoubted love for Goa and Goans ~ the doc has, wittingly or unwittingly, set the cat among the pigeons. At a meeting on Sunday, where he was called to address the people at a meeting of Goa’s Movement for Special Status attended by BJP minister Alina Saldanha and MLA Caetano Silva in Benaulim, Dr Oscar said squarely that the commissioning of a new airport at Mopa would spell doom for Goa’s call and cause for Special Status.
The Special Status that Goa is demanding under Article 371 to protect its land will be a still-born child if the government goes ahead with its plans to develop the parallel Mopa airport, he warned. With the real estate boom it would engender, besides the vast number of new settlers an economic multiplier like an airport would attract, a new Mopa airport would dilute any special status that Goa was aspiring to, was the burden of his song.
In Salcete ~ the taluka that is seeing the maximum number of meetings on both issues i.e. Special Status and the Dabolim Only movement ~ Dr Oscar’s plainspeak is no doubt a political embarrassment. Environment Minister Alina Saldanha chose to sidestep mentioning Mopa at all ~ which would naturally put her at odds with the government she is part of and that is pursuing Mopa airport vigorously ~ while simultaneously making the right sounds about Special Status. Saldanha, instead, exhorted people to make their call for Special Status heard in Parliament.
How long will Saldanha herself be able to sidestep the inherent contradiction that Dr Oscar so forcefully articulated at the Sunday meeting is anybody’s guess ~ the politics of power has been known to demand far greater compromises from less willing people. But Salcete really should thank Dr Oscar for bringing some clarity and drawing the contradictory link between the two movements that are being pursued vigorously in their neck of the woods, ironically by virtually the same ruling camp and its supporters. Apparently, the battle for the minds and hearts and, might one add, votes of Salcete and by extension of the Catholic community, will not end till the ballots have been counted for the 2014 Lok Sabha election!
It’s not an altogether different point that Parliament once heard the voice of Goa when it amended the Eight Schedule to recognize Konkani and then amended Article 370 to constitute the State of Goa. There’s a point of view that has it that Goan identity, now being sought to be protected by the Special Status demand, was far more intact in an earlier era before local political satraps took the much-needed and hard-won statehood for Goa as a carte blanche to go about acquiring land for themselves and their cronies besides dishing it out liberally to all and (monied) sundry while legislating little to protect Goa for posterity. Has any of that changed in the present, Goans might ask, and the answer would have to be: No. especially, given the accusations of a real estate run that the proposed Mopa airport is charged with perpetuating. There are agencies waiting in the wings, seeking 100-acre parcels of land around Mopa airport, as reported by this newspaper. Can the movement for Special Status ignore this, without seriously compromising its integrity?
Electoral politics casts a strange spell over those in its thrall. But those who put Goa first would have to agree that Dr Oscar has a point. The “bad guy” diluting our identity may not really be “the other”, the migrant. The world is flat, wrote commentator Thomas Friedman. Heftier cultures have been flattened in globalization’s march. And if those who decide for Goa opt to plug into that superhighway, for the glitz of spanking new airports, six-lane highways and steel suspension bridges, then it would stand to reason that the ferry crossings, the verdant green villages and countryside that spawned a treasured and envied way of life and the Konkani culture of the beloved poet Manoharrai Sardessai’s Mankulemchem Goem (Little Goa) of “shetta and bhatta” (fields and plantations) will be more and more a thing of a fabled past.