I happened to browse the net for the meaning of bouncers and it was one definition of bouncers particularly that drove the point home. It said someone engaged to stand at the doorway and keep everyone who is not on the “list”, out.
When Leading Hotels Pvt. Ltd. introduced bouncers in the middle of night to be able to cut down trees and bull-doze a road, I was thinking who are all the persons that must not be on the list that these bouncers must have. I fathomed it must be the local people who have lived on the land and have an engagement with the land, the people who support the local people, those who oppose a model of development that stomps and bulldozes for the benefit of a corporate select few. And then there are those others who will get a few pieces of silver from that development. The latter may or may not figure in THE list or the to-be-kept-out list.
Observing how this bouncing happens, one has come to understand that the nature of the list of exclusion that the bouncers are provided with and the permutations and combinations based on which such lists are drawn varies at different points of time and in different circumstances. Sometimes the bouncers come in physical form, sometimes they are introduced or attempted to be introduced by law (remember that version of Goa Police Bill which wanted to have private police? And who knows it may still be on the cards). But always, yes always, bouncers are enabled by the system.
The corporate mafia cannot function without the active support of the system. Unless the State presses the enable button, no set of people however thuggish can operate with such confidence. This button was pressed long ago, but now it stands pressed with added vigour.
The amendments to the Public Gambling Act, allowing for gambling at casinos in five star hotels and offshore, paved the way for reinforcement of a Mafiosi culture. When there are oasis of wealth in a pool of increasing challenges to make ends meet despite increased earnings even for the middle class, there is bound to be an earthshaking experience. And in such cases the casino industry can only protect itself with bouncers and the tacit support of the State in suppressing or quelling resistance.
Not long ago, this writer drew attention to the fact that even in the face of the Goa SEZ policy being scrapped due to focussed agitation, the power of corporate real estate giants to bully people into giving up their lands using bouncers and goons and the State’s policing machinery, could not be underestimated, SEZ policy or no SEZ policy. This was attempted and in some instances done with the support of the State. Then there is the other figurative way to complement and bounce off protests. Simply make the files disappear. Remember Aldeia de Goa?
So what is different? We now find ourselves in an environment where the right to resist is increasingly being clipped in a bold daredevil fashion where it is made to seem natural and normal. The people on the margins of society have faced this repression for eons. But the Government has now made it bold to add the middle class to its list. At the Central level, we have seen the much publicised repression attempts. Teesta Setalvad and Javed Anand who have been active in the struggles of the survivors of the genocide in Gujarat for justice, have been facing repression. What they hope to do in this manner is to insulate the perpetrators of the 2002 violence from the processes of law, as political analysts have so appropriately expressed. This, considering that these processes of law have seen a couple of prominent perpetrators of the pogrom convicted. Strangely, much like the protests after the hounding of Teesta, at the very start of the protests against the invasion into Tiracol by bouncers at the behest of Leading Hotels, there is an attempt to profile the activists, as Judith Almeida reflects.
The right to resist often involves exposure of the problem, and this might mean swinging international support and may involve travel. The Modi Government is starkly aware of this. Therefore they offloaded Priya Pillai as she was set to travel to UK for a meeting with British MPs. Of course, this was a much more sophisticated bouncing. With a look out list prepared of people who cannot travel.
Greenpeace International’s Priya Pillai who was proceeding to the UK was stopped from going there as the Government made out that representing the concerns of the people of Singrauli in Madhya Pradesh was an anti-national activity. As Priya Pillai pertinently stated, “The government’s so-called case against me is dangerous and dishonest. It says that by informing British MPs about a British-registered company’s activities in Singrauli. I am somehow acting against India’s national interest. But our laws, Indian laws, are being flouted in Mahan, to the detriment of thousands of Indians, all to benefit a coal mining project. How is raising awareness of this anti-national?”.
Another strategy to silence a powerful opposition is to fragment it by manufacturing consent , to use Noam Chomsky’s words. Sometimes some local people are given offers which they may fall for (no criticism of them given their circumstances), in a bid to make it seem that ALL are not involved. Sometimes local power mongers are enlisted in this exercise. But the Government of Goa would do well to remember that repression begets revolt. That getting bouncers and bull dozing can only bounce back on the future of Leading Hotels and on the political future of the incumbent BJP Government which clearly supports the Resort and Golf Course Project of Leading Hotels at the cost of the long standing residents of the village. It is indeed a telling advertisement of the Tourism and Hospitality project of the Government of India’s Make in India strategy that is designed to make profits in/from India for a select designated few by stomping on the local people.
(Albertina Almeida is a lawyer, human rights activist and an independent researcher.)
