Not many of us recollect the man who was Goa’s one-man army against illegal sale of Goan lands to foreigners. He dared to take a tow tractor and ploughed the illicitly usurped land and sowed seeds of the liberation of Goan lands. That is the man who has been starving for the past nine days to get Goa a healthy, visible and transparent Chief Minister at Azad Maidan. That is the man who BJP State president wants to deride as “a so-called RTI activist is sitting on a hunger strike” who “has no right to ask for CM’s resignation in 48 hours”. What, however, absolutely abhorred was the level of insensitivity demonstrated where the State BJP top brass said “Let him sit on hunger strike for as many days as he wants. It will have no effect on the government and the BJP”.
Since when did Goans become so insensitive to someone willing to sacrifice his life for ensuring that his State has a tangible Chief Minister? If demanding what is right for the people of Goa, for this land is not Goenkarponn, then what is? Is insensitivity to the people’s demands Goenkarponn then?
Ironically, it was a stand-up comedienne (Nikki Glaser) who said, “People are just so insensitive because they’re ignorant; they don’t understand, so they’re scared of what they’re ignorant of”. The present times are the best measure of that insensitivity. Hundreds and thousands of Goans in Goa, in India and abroad show their daily dose of insensitivity to just every onslaught that Bangarachem Goem faces every day from its selfish elected representatives, hidden-agenda-pursuing government and the select capitalist cronies who seem to be in harvest season wherever the economy goes. An interesting battle online that often breaks out is between the Goan who stayed back and the Goan who chased the rainbow to grab his pot of gold overseas. Each one extols his concern for his land, his Goem but where is the commitment? And what a demand and supply gap it is.
The battle to save Goa under the present government can be won only in the courts as no law enforcing agency including the ACB, the Police, the CBI, the ED and even the Lokayukta remains beyond the control of the current ruling dispensation. The Goan out here is scared of his own elected representative and his own government and does not have the resources to take on him in the courts. Is this fear, this loathing to fight against systemic corruption turning out to be Goenkarponn?
For the Goan who is out there overseas, his land looks alien as his own country does. There is deep-rooted disgust fuelled by ignorance and anxiety. Everything back home in Goa is suspect, pathetic and questionable. Those who remained back seem responsible for the sorry state of affairs. As they hold desperately on to the easiest way out ‘culture, music, arts, cuisine’ and show it off, the worry that there are huge parcels of ancestral land that may be usurped the friendly, neighbourhood, cunning and conniving politician, run subconsciously. With exploits of how they still speak the lingo from back home, play Lorna and Chris Perry, dance and picnic together dotting their social media accounts, is that what Goenkarponn is about? Or is Goenkarponn the deep-rooted fear that each one of us nurtures within us about returning back to our land one day and finding it swamped by hordes of migrants who have overrun our uniqueness?
These are difficult times. These are testing times as well as we seek to understand what is Goem, who is a Goenkar and what is Goenkarponn all about. The land whose self-assertive people gave India’s first referendum – the Opinion Poll, is now begging to be heard of its own leaders. Its grassroots leaders, its media – all caught in a whirlpool of partisan opportunism. As the traditional gaunkaris and comunidades die as painful a death as its purpose and vision, Goa slips away from its traditions as much as it does from its values. Those fading comunidades whose rich land resources your panch members and your government eyes is Goenkarponn. Those khazan lands that are being indiscriminately filled up for creating real estate wealth and roads and highways are the Goenkarponn that we are losing fast. Those Alvara lands that made Goans autonomous and independent in an incredible India is the Goenkarponn that slips out of our hands.
In neighbouring Maharastra, migrants get thrashed for stealing the locals’ jobs; in Goa, they run a significant part of the economy. Is that Goenkarponn then? For the past decade, we have been struggling to find ourselves in a rapidly changing landscape. Makes one wonder – were we always like this? Not exactly. Old timers would tell of how Gujarati seafaring merchants loaded with coconuts and Mangalorean entrepreneurs with tiles would not just land but usher in a rich multicultural milieu. How was it different then? Now the migrant class wants Goa to be a colony, a ghetto of metropolitan culture; then they would be absorbed to add to the growing ranks of the Goenkar. Goenkarponn was inclusive then; now it struggles to decide whether to be exclusive or unique.
There is something alien about the Goem that we live in. This week we had the mining-affected promising violence if mining was not restarted and then there were carefully crafted efforts to ensure that a Hindu-Muslim communal riot was engineered. This intolerance, this restiveness, this partisanism; this wasn’t Goenkarponn, was it? There is a protest breaking, a threat to disrupt erupting – every day. Did we Goenkars have to resort to such forms of extremism to make ourselves be heard, ever? Goa had rulers and representatives who hung around with the people. They were not cocooned in their own ivory towers of isolation and would heed to what the people wanted. Is this insensitivity of the powers that be in the present times then what Goenkarponn shouldn’t have been in the first place?
You can recruit party cadres, you can’t buy votes. Yet we reduced the land into a marketplace of mandate peddling where voters would come at Rs 500 per vote and the MLA would come at Rs 50 crore or more. Was this peddling of our conscience, our mandate – the shame of our Goenkarponn that was hauled upon us then? As Goenkars, we chose to sulk and shout behind backs but let this disease push us to the state of siege that we live in today. We don’t complain about the finding of fish in our formalin, we don’t find fault if we don’t see ailing ministers in office, we have no problems if the party that we voted out hijack our mandate to form the government, we are fine if our lands are converted to be offered to the highest bidder and above all we are quite comfortable when our unwanted leaders in league with a willing fourth estate – dish out oodles of misleads. Is that how bizarre was Goenkarponn pushed to the wall to eventually turn out to be?
