Goa was yet to fully recover from the pain of MLAs crossing sides and yet another batch of 8 Congress MLAs crossed over to the BJP taking the number of these defections into BJP to 20 if we care to count this jumping Jacks of the last term as well as the present term respectively. Everyone has condemned the treacherous chicanery and greed for wealth and power. But most of us have stopped with the MLAs who did the immoral defection. Very few seem to have questioned the impropriety of the BJP that received those that are rightly described as the traitors by the people. The issue that is standing before us is bigger and complex and cannot be reduced to the crossing over of some apparently commodified legislators. Hence, we are forced to raise a question that asks: How are we to understand this precarious condition that is affecting our life in Goa?
Perhaps, we may have to hesitatingly agree that our present condition may be best described in the light of book, titled, The Parasite by a French thinker Michel Serres. In this book, Serres outlines the basis of human relations as parasitic whereby human groups are organised with one-way relations where one eats the other and while the other cannot benefit at all from the first. This simplest irreversible unidirectional exchange is the most basic unit among all beings. Serres employs this theoretical framework to build his theory beyond the individual and extends it to the construction and organization of society at large where different groups come together and feed of each other under the great mythical beast that is evoked as the Leviathan.
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Serres thinks that from the dawn of time, there was no prey but only a parasite (a relation of eating on the side- parra sitos). We humans are parasites. Our entire existence is unidirectional. We have our life and being in the earth and its resources. We are only takers of the resources of our planet earth and hardly give back or leave anything for other beings. This relation of consummation extends beyond death of the prey as the animal that is eaten is also made to become coat that protects us from winter. The parasitic relation is uneven and unbalanced and tilts on the side of humanity.
Parasitism is everywhere. It defines the relations between animal to animal as well as humans to humans and human and other beings. Now it also seems to have come to include even God. Some of our politicians had sworn in the name of God not to defect to the ruling BJP but it seems that they too did it unidirectionly to benefit themselves. This direction is a one-way street and the ruling BJP will be parasitic on them and benefit their cronies who will prey on the power of BJP. What does it leave for the voters? What is in it there for Goa, Goans and our God? These questions are themselves parasitic in character. One of the MLAs even had the audacity to use God to justify his act of betrayal. Thus, does this mean that even God betrayed the voters?
We can only discern a clear self-interested line of a parasite working all through this dirty politics that has come to haunt Goa. Some among us can see how some of the chamchas of the jumping jacks were eagerly waiting to draw their pound of flesh when their masters get rewarded by the top brass of the BJP, offering those that entered in the BJP some perks of ministries and positions of power. But these rewards are again parasitic and unidirectional as they will come at cost of demotion and dislocation of some of the reining BJP ministers and the karyakartas. We seem to be threatened by proverbial Leviathan even as some voters had made their vote count the cash that came into their hands during elections. This is why it is difficult to put the blame unilaterally on any one of the parasites in this chain. We need to somehow break this parasitic chain.
Our pathetic condition, therefore, calls for a profound soul searching. There is more to this unidirectional parasitic line that is animating our politics today. Maybe we have to understand its ambiguity. The chain is unidirectional and composes a web that makes each individual in the chain both a host and parasite. We can discern the parasite/host depending on the lens of focus that we may choose to analyse our condition of any given relation down the chain. Here again, Serres becomes insightful. He teaches that what determines who is host and who is parasite at any given time is the interruption that pushes an exchange from an equilibrium. Perhaps, money bags, promises of cabinet berths, other perks, desire to dismantle Congress in Goa etc., disturbed the equilibrium in Goan Politics. We have to note that no system is ever in a static equilibrium.
How are we to redeem ourselves from this chain that produces nothing but a simulacra of hosts and parasites? Will this take us on the path of civil war in the image and likeness of Hobbes’ state of nature? Will we need a new social contract to get out of this hole? The answers to these questions are not so simple.
Mere change in anti-defection law has brought us where we are right now. Things are never really perfect. If we could only have perfect harmonies, we will have dreamless sleep. But that’s not the case. We dream and long for better democracy to come. We have to have the courage to dream even in this dark night of our souls. We can change our condition but the change has to begin with each of us. Although, the parasite/host does have hostility attached to it, that hostility also can melt into hospitality. Hence, beginning with ourselves, we can become what Gandhi says; ‘be the change that you want to see in the world’. While we curse the darkness that is covering us for now, let us not forget to light a candle that will dispel the clouds of darkness that hover over us. Let’s once again pray the eternal payer, ‘lead us from falsehood to truth, from darkness to light, and from death to life’.
(Fr Victor Ferrao is an independent researcher)
