The virtual blood-letting at the site of the Tiracol Golf Course and Villas project, is soon going to lead to actual blood-letting, as the village has become an all out battle zone. Leading Hotels which has menacingly bulldozed into the village with men, machines and money, now complains of being attacked by villagers who lived in peace and harmony, till Leading Hotels entered their lives and now threatens to destroy their futures.
On Thursday afternoon, locals noticed intense activity taking place in the village with barricades being erected, some portions cutting into or encroaching into their properties. While Leading Hotels, not surprisingly, have filed an FIR complaining that a mob lead by Francis Rodrigues and other prominent faces of the massive people’s agitation against Leading Hotels, brutally attacked their general manager and attacked the site manager and another worker, they need to answer what they were doing there in the first place. They have violated the National Green Tribunal April 16 order to maintain status quo on all activities till permission for felling of trees was granted. On May 14-15, they invaded the village with bouncers and felled trees when they did not (by their own admission) have permission to fell a single tree, and cleared trees to enable them to make a pathway to the project site. While permission to fell trees was dubiously given later by the State Forest Department, which is acting as an extension of the corporate office of Leading Hotels; their act of illegality, which is also a prima facie contempt of the NGT order, has been overlooked by the Parsekar government.
Therefore when they entered the village on Thursday on the back of the permissions that they have now received from the Forest Department, their act was fundamentally illegal. That is simply because the pre- construction activities of laying poles, clearance of access pathway etc, which they tried to undertake in Tiracol on Thursday, was possible because of their act of clearing trees on May 14-15, when they did not have permission to cut trees.
Moreover, the NGT had ordered a status quo of activity “till lawful permission is granted for tree felling”. After they received such permissions on May 20 and June 5, they had to go back to the NGT with the documents and pray for the stay on the “status quo” to be lifted and then touch a single tree. Instead what they did was appalling. They felled trees on May 14-15 with no permission and then they entered the village again on June 25 and started pre-construction activities without going to the NGT to get the stay on any activity vacated.
Moving on from the legal violation, the villagers realised that their properties were being invaded upon, and they (including their women and children) were being intimidated and threatened by the Leading Hotels bouncers, behaving like goons. Will anyone in their right senses believe that in a bloody altercation between villagers and the muscle men of Leading Hotels, the villagers would be the oppressors and the poor “bouncers” victims?
There is no point in expecting a corporate to listen to the voices of villagers. They have decided to forcibly start construction activities for the project and make parallel efforts to prolong legal opposition. The government of Goa is a partner in this project. Which is why, a project proponent which has defied the NGT, has been given tree cutting permissions five days after their act of illegality. Yes the Chief Minister has said that his government has accepted money from the company for land conversions, etc and thus can’t stop the project. This logic flies in the face of the primary responsibility a chief minister has towards his people, respect for law and sensitivity towards the wishes and sentiments of the under privileged. Laxmikant Parsekar has absolutely no idea of these things.
