If there is half an opportunity to divide and alienate, the RSS machinery never falls behind in putting its foot at the crack of the door and opening it wide open. The lose volley of comments over a one-sided proposal to invite the Portuguese Prime Minister Antonio Costa, first by the MGP and the RSS, proves aptly that the party is long over but the hangover hasn’t quite gone for these two forces.
The Deputy Chief Minister Francis D’ Souza’s desire to felicitate Prime Minister Costa, a Luso-Goan or Portu-Goesas, was a gesture. The sentiment must be understood, in exactly the same manner in which we look at Indians being elected to the House of Lords or Commons or the American Senate. The Chief Minister Mr Parsekar accepted this and the issue should have been laid to rest till an official invitation was sent through the Ministry of External affairs. Lest one forget Mr Costa is the Prime Minister of a country and Goa in not another sovereign country and such an invitation has to be extended by the Prime Minister’s Office. Thus if the MGP’s Sudin Dhavlikar and the RSS’ Subhash Velingkar, want the Prime Minister of Portugal to apologise before accepting the invitation to be felicitated, one wonders what kind of a cuckoo world they live in. Will Mr Velingkar or Mr Dhavlikar place this demand before Prime Minister Modi asking him to invite another sovereign Prime Minister with a condition that the invitation would be subject to an apology for tortures carried out by his country in Goa.
Moreover will Messer’s Dhavlikar and Velingkar, ask economist Lord Meghnad Desai, who has a home in the leafy woods of Loutolim, or Rt Honourable Labour MP Keith Vaz, to apologise for the atrocities committed by the British on Indians, before coming to Goa and spending time here. Both Lord Desai and MP Vaz are Indians who have been elected/nominated to high political office, in a country which had colonized India.
As, Jason Keith Fernandes, Amita Kanekar and Dale Menezes and Benedito Ferrao (all, except Ferrao, are Herald columnists), wrote in an article in Outlook entitled The Goan in Goa, in response to writer Arvind Adiga’s essay, Lusitanian in Hind, “Portugal gave its colonies the right of representation. This was an opportunity that was not available to the sub-continental subjects of the British Crown, not even to Dadabhai Naoroji who even while he may have been the first Asian in the British Parliament, was able to raise issues about British India only while representing a constituency in London. In contradistinction, it was from his position as a representative of Goa in the Portuguese parliament that writer and politician Fransisco Luis Gomes sought to speak about the effects of colonialism on his Goan homeland and about India”
However this inclusive side of Portugal has never been accepted by the saffron brigade. “Since Costa is a Goan, we expect him to be equally sensitive for the religious conversions Portuguese did while trying to destroy Indian culture through Inquisition for 225 years”, roared Velingkar, Goa’s RSS leader.
Velingkar needs to be reminded of some undeniable facts and a bit of reality check. We will again borrow from The Goan in Goa essay:
Yes, under the leadership of Afonso de Albuquerque, there was much bloodshed of the residents of the city of Goa by the Portuguese in the early sixteenth century; strikingly, many of these victims were the soldiers of Adil Shah who, like the Bijapuri ruler of the city, happened to be Muslim. Albuquerque, in fact, was aided in his conquest by the army of Saraswat chieftain Mhal Pai, after being invited by Timayya, agent of Vijayanagara, to capture the city in the first place”
The essay drives home another point. The fact that both upper caste Hindus and Catholics collaborated with the Portuguese, thus defying inquisition and torture as the leitmotif of the Portuguese rule.
“Members of the upper caste echelon who lived on in Goa sought to preserve their authority within the machinations of colonialism. As in other parts of India, Goa too bore witness to the collaboration between colonisers and higher caste groups in order to strengthen domination based on existing hierarchies”, wrote Fernandes, Kanekar, Menezes and Ferrao
Therefore the attempts of the firm of Dhavlikar and Velingkar to polarize with comments such as this made by Velingkar, will actually make right thinking society repulsive
“Let the government also felicitate the Portugal PM to appease a particular section of the Goan society”, said Velingkar.
To reduce this son of the soil who has achieved such an high honour as a community representative shows the hollowness of those making these statements They deserve no attention, but gives an opportunity for us to put the over 500 years of Portuguese rule in correct perspective.
