Father Bismark isn’t really someone who would vanish into the dead of the night with beer bottles and with two other fellows and dive into the waters off St Estevam and simply slink into the dark and not to be found. Therefore his mysterious disappearance is a matter of not just alarm, intense worry and yes, fear, but raises several disturbing nightmares about the way our Goa has become.
Even as this is being written, it is a struggle to delete the past tense when we refer to him and change it to present, making our hearts believe in eternal hope that he will be found. That he will be there as a comrade, standing shoulder to shoulder, singing songs of protest, marching through villages, giving speeches, taking on the powerful, fighting cases and yes, increasingly defending them. At the time of his disappearance, the cases he was immediately involved in was one he filed in the National Green Tribunal, again on an issue of environmental violation and then he was getting ready to defend a Rs 2 crore defamation case slapped on him by someone in the village for calling him a “robber” or some such banality. And if he was not missing, he would, on this Saturday morning be getting ready for his trip on Sunday to Tuem to sing and shout in support of Amarnath Naik, the villager from Tuem whose land was cruelly taken away by the state headed by a Chief Minister who has been a local boy. Hopefully Father will still make it.
A peoples priest and now a people’s fighter, Father Bismark has moved from praying and healing to a straight path of fighting and confrontation to snatch justice for the people if their prayers for justice are not being answered. Yes he irritates many, but he never causes a tear to be shed from the eyes of those who love Goa and are pained at its destruction. He fights to wipe the tears of those whose hearts bleed at the Goa of today.
Now we cast no aspersions, blame no one, point fingers at none because we are and we need to be responsible. Yes there are enemies of the state who are always there to get those who fight for the state but those who pass judgments or jump to conclusions should divert their energies to what is needed now. And here is what is needed. a) A thorough police search and rescue operation to find him. If he is found and it’s a case of an accidental calamity, we move on heartbroken b) But if the worst does happen (and we pray that is not the case) the probe has to be handed over to an outside agency c) If he is found in good health or otherwise, but it is found that that there was attempt at foul play, the task of getting to the bottom of this should be again given to outside investigating agencies.
The state should accept this because in this milieu of suspicion and mis-trust- for absolutely obvious reasons-the state is not expected to be on the side of the victim.
As we put yet another edition of Herald to bed, we pray, on behalf of all of Goa that our beloved soldier Father comes back to us at the crack of dawn with his fists clenched, his head held high, shouting “I am back”. And we will then tell him “But you were never gone Father”.
