Among non-ending political debates that characterize Goan political scenario, there is one about garbage disposal plant. Currently more emotionally loaded debates are about Sri Ram Sene’s threat to set up its base of activities in Goa.
This seems to have touched the raw nerves of many Goans who are still recovering from a very recent negative response of the central government to their demand for “special status” for Goa. Sri Ram Sene (SRS) pretends to “help” the Goans to protect the Hindu heritage of Goa. It looks as if the SRS is a self-invited, self-qualified and self-authorized agency that wishes to clean Goa from cultural pollution, a sort of cultural garbage disposal plant.
This threat of SRS has set alarm bells ringing among the Goans belonging to all communities, who are aware of destruction that is being wrought by communal forces around the globe, and that served as a violent midwife for the birth of India and Pakistan as independent nations. The violence of a Hindu fundamentalist outfit was also indirectly responsible for the killing of Mahatma Gandhi. There have been many reported incidents of violence provoked by fundamentalist groups throughout India in the recent past.
All of it boils down to an intolerant concept of national culture, ignoring that different parts of India have gone through centuries of varied cultural influences. It was the British colonial background that moulded it into a single nation, and it can survive as one nation only through a democratic process of recognition and tolerance of mutual cultural differences.
We may have to say good-bye to India that we know if the cultural freaks like SRS are allowed by the short-sighted politicians to serve their political goals. Hopefully, they will see the tragic consequences of such playing with fire in the neighboring Pakistan that is being rapidly dismantled by the jihadist groups that it had promoted for covert strategic operations against its neighbours.
It should not be forgotten that every nation has significant minority groups in diaspora, and just as they can be an asset and source of FDI investments and political lobbying abroad, they can be also turned into tools of foreign interests to destroy a nation if its majority community fails to respect its minorities.
If SRS fails to see these implications, it is the duty of the enlightened politicians to check their misguided zeal for national culture. Some of the recent reports about the BJP interventions in the functioning of the Indian Council of Historical Research suggest just the contrary, namely a tendency of subverting the cultural evolution of India. De-historizing the past may satisfy some short term political interests, but it is bound to alienate the minority communities and fragment the nation.
Coming back to the SRS and its zeal for Hindu culture, they may be have not realized that despite Goa’s small size, its population has proved during its fifty-three years of political liberation that it can take upon its neighbours and resolved its inter-community differences. It did so during the Opinion Poll in 1967, and adopting Konkani as Official State Language in 1986. No amount of external cultural and political pressures were able then to cow down the Goan people. It is time the politicians woke up and paid attention to the historic events when Goans could put aside their differences and rise together to confront an external danger.
The Goan masses used the popular dramatic performances named tiatr to rally against the censorship of the Portuguese dictatorship in the colonial past. They have started doing it again these days with Akantvadi Goeant Naka (We do not want terrorists in Goa). I did not miss the opportunity of watching the performance at Kala Akademi a couple of days ago, and nearly a house full of 1000 audience cheered the performers who denounced the Hindu fundamentalist outfit and threatened to boot it out of Goa if it sought to interfere in the cultural life of Goa in the name of Hindutva ideology.
Goans have not forgotten two centuries of Portuguese inquisition and its tragic impact. Goans do not require, neither will permit a new version of Hindu inquisition in the form of SRS or any other. The Hindu fundamentalist outfits that have not suffered Inquisition experiences in the rest of India should not pretend to teach cultural lessons to Goans.
Mr. Eduardo Faleiro, the former union Minister and till recently the Minister of Goan NRIs, was very right in suggesting to Dr. S.R. Shetye, the Vice-Chancellor of the Goa University, during the function of release of a new book of Dr. Teotonio R. de Souza, entitled Goa Outgrowing Postcolonialism, on 11th of this month, that Goa University should set-up a chair and courses on Postcolonialism that could benefit the whole country. Goa has had the longest colonial experience in India, and it can have much to teach the rest of the country.
(Teotonio R. de Souza – Founder-Director of the Xavier Centre of Historical Research).
