The political clock is ticking fast. We all feel the heat. We are drawn into the battle against the clock. The time is running out and we are also running out of ideas and visions. We seem to be almost trapped into a frozen time and are being pushed to the future much like the famous science fiction of the 1980s, Back to the Future. The illustrious science fiction depicts the hero Marty McFly as thrown back fifty years behind time when an experiment by his scientist friend, Doc Brown goes awry. Marty finds that he is placed fifty years behind and has to make sure that all events that brought him into being have to fall in place so that he can safely return to normal life. Travelling through time in a modified DeLorean car, Marty meets the younger versions of his parents, his father, George and his mother, Loraine. The plot thickens and shows that he has the task to make sure that his parents fall in love so that they marry and he is born. Otherwise, his very existence is in danger. Besides, Marty has an even more daunting mission to return back to normal time to save his scientist friend, Doc Brown.
We in Goa seem to be trapped like Marty. All political parties and politicians understand our condition and are promising us a future. There is no one future that is placed before us. There are competing futures. Each of them is almost promising the moon so to say. Much like the hero Marty of the science fiction, Back to the Future, who is condemned to a life that is fifty years out of time with normal time, we too feel that time is out of joint. Like Marty who had to align the events of the past that had brought him where he was before being trapped by the time machine, we also feel that we have to align everything so that our precious Goa is saved from destruction. Our plight seems to align with the fate of Marty who has to engineer events to make his parents meet so that he is born and is set free from the trap of the time machine. Unfortunately, much like Marty who inadvertently prevents his parents from meeting, and thus jeopardising his own birth and existence, we in Goa also seem to be setting up a politics that seems to threaten the future that we all like to belong to in Goa. Our condition is akin to that of the famous Shakeschilli of our Hindi textbook of yesteryears who we know happily sat on the branch that he was cutting. Therefore, without being cynical, we have the challenge to introspect and come to a realisation that asks whether we are digging the grave of our own future.
We seem to have refused to learn our lessons from the past and are only mesmerised by the glitter of the promised future. What we lack is the scrutiny of the promised future and the critical ability to separate the grain from the chaff. Our desire to alter the present is praiseworthy. We have been struggling to get back to a future for a long time. Like Marty, we have been trying to join the dots so that the future of promise that is dreamed by us becomes real. This future ties together our survival as well as that of Goa. Drawn by the weight of this future, we had put faith both in the Congress and the BJP in the past but the future of promise that we all aspire seemed to remain a distant dream. Unfortunately, even when we tried to change things and tried to send BJP packing during the last election, we had to put up with a rude shock when BJP robbed people’s mandate playing the number game faster than the winning horse of those days that was close to the finishing line.
The congressification of the BJP through the import of the Congress MLAs applied salt on our already bruised wounds. Even today things do not seem to align for the future of our dreams and like the hero of the fiction, we are in desperation as our options are fast running out.
The Goa of our dreams appears to be more threatened than ever before. Everything appears to be fast aligning and coming together only for the destruction of Goa, Goans and Goan-ness. What masquerades as development has reduced Goa into a corridor for the economic elite to prey on our natural resources to accumulate wealth. Unfortunately, Goans are not just facing a development-induced displacement that leaves us behind as what is called ‘progress’s marches ahead, we are indeed facing prospects of a tragic extinction of what is left of Goa. Hence, we feel the imperative of a lost future.
Several among us are claiming that this is the last real chance that we have to save Goa. We can clearly discern that this sense of loss and urgency of shaping a future that will save Goa is felt by all right-thinking Goans. We cannot see the same in all the political parties. What Goa needs for now is a good alliance among the political forces. Only an alliance might block the anti-Goa forces that are preying on our resources. If the political alliance fails, maybe all that we as people are left with is a challenge to build a profound unity among us Goans so that we can truly act as enlightened voters. Maybe we have to adopt strategic voting that we see people of Bengal do in recent days. Hence, we have the challenge to choose unity on the essentials, liberty on the non-essentials and charity and honesty on everything else so that we can belong together as Goans for Goa. This means we have to honestly unite around Goa-centric issues and have a large heart to let liberty prevail on issues that can wait.
(Fr Victor Ferrao is an independent researcher attached to St Francis Xavier Church, Borim)
