In a plea of a minor rape survivor seeking termination of pregnancy, Justice Samir Dave of the Gujarat High Court pushed the ancient Sanskrit legal text ‘Manusmriti’ almost to clothe marriages of minor girls with sanctity and suggested to the petitioner to read the ‘Manusmriti’ at least once. Citing the archaic and obsolete text, Justice Dave expounded that it was normal for girls to get married at the age of 14 to 16 and deliver a child before they turn 17. In another case, where a man was accused of rape on the promise of marriage, the Allahabad High Court instructed the Astrology Department of the Lucknow University to look into the horoscope of the woman to verify the claim of the man whether the woman was a ‘manglik’. It is a superstition that a ‘manglik’ will bring misery, ill-health and even death to a non-manglik spouse. We have now judges and legal ‘luminaries’ in the higher judiciary seeking astrological evidence to decide on material and legal issues. We have now ruling powers and the educational elite who offer the pedestal of science to superstition, beliefs and mythology. We have a new breed of finance ministers who allocate public funds for cow-dung and cow urine. There is also a new crop of health ministers and health professionals glorifying untested and unresearched traditional prescriptions as the future of Indian medicine.
Flogging Dead Horses
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These clouds of reviving the obsolete, unscientific and discriminatory past as the agenda for the present and the future are hovering in the three exalted pillars of Indian democracy. For a decade now, we see these reflections in some state legislatures and the Parliament. The Executive is vigorously promoting this agenda through the ministries of education, health, information and culture. It looks that the bacteria is entering the judiciary and the all-India services.
Coming closer home, Goa’s Chief Minister uses every platform to rake up and keeps burning a non-existent issue of rebuilding of temples ‘demolished’ by the Portuguese. The assumption is that the Portuguese demolished only Hindu temples. The Chief Minister recently planted the new agenda of wiping out all signs of Portuguese rule in Goa. The general public does not see any such open or secret signs on the ground. However, the Chief Minister speaking for the BJP and the right-wing brigade makes it as the priority agenda, 62 years after the Liberation of Goa.
Why is the Chief Minister raking up 450 years of Portuguese rule? Is it to appease and placate the Hindu majority by throwing the bait of temples? Is it to further strengthen communal polarisation on the belief that the roar for wiping out all signs of Portuguese will be taken as teaching a lesson to Goan Christians as it is a propaganda by right-wing forces that the Christians are loyal and oriented towards the Portuguese? Actually, the percentage numbers of Goan freedom fighters from the Christian community outnumber from that of the majority community. This is hardly projected in public domain. Is this the most convenient tool of keeping the Goans drowned in the wrongs of the past by colonial rulers, for the BJP to have a safe passage from the failures of the present?
Indelible Signs
The 450 years colonisation of Goa (1510-1961) has left many indelible signs and there is nothing hostile in them inviting reversal. The Portuguese government returned all the gold held by the Banco Nacional Ultramarino. The introduction of community land ownership, Asia’s first medical college, Asia’s first printing press, the elaborate system of documentation of land and other records, the heritage monuments, the architectural marvels, all that goes today as Goa’s cuisine and music. We are all milking this to promote Goa as an exclusive and unique tourist destination. The Uniform Civil Code, a flagship Portuguese sign is eulogised and trumpeted by the BJP hate warriors to have a dig at Muslims.
Colonisation is a part of history. Its merits and demerits are to be understood from the context of those times of mercantilism. No colonised locations in the world attempt to destroy the signs and signatures after they emerge as independent nations. These get stored in libraries, laboratories, museums and form a part of heritage. Many in Goa, to prove their patriotism and nationalism, shower abuses at Portugal and the Portuguese people. They know little that when Goa was a colony, Portugal was under dictatorship and the locals there had to struggle for freedom and civil liberties. They were equally oppressed and suppressed. Some have allergy to anything Portuguese and even the sweet Portuguese language. There are many words which have become an integral and inseparable part, blended well in our Konkani language. The tourism minister in Dr. Pramod Sawant’s cabinet tours Portugal to widen Goa’s tourism appeal in Europe.
This is not to say that the picture during the colonial rule was all rosy. The Goa Inquisition (up to 1820) was a major blot. There was compulsion on converts to follow Christian lifestyle; persecution of non-converts whether Hindus or Muslims; torture and execution as per the verdicts of Inquisition; religious intolerance and displacement of non-Christian religious sites were existent. The colonial rule was marked by absence of civil liberties and suppression of the local language, Konkani. The villages were utterly neglected.
Mining leases along with the royalty for mining concessions has been a colonial signature. Every government post-Liberation actively protected this colonial autograph. The land ownership was in the hands of the forward castes in the Hindu and Catholic communities. Saraswats and other forward castes which did not exceed 15% of the population were the only beneficiaries. The rest categorised as tribals and Bahujan Samaj were exploited socially, economically and politically during the colonial rule.
Mr Chief Minister, historical truths and wrongs should remain buried in history. Their value is archival and archaeological. No civilised modern society re-writes, re-builds, re-corrects and repeats history. It may be the colonial history or of the Maratha warrior Shivaji.
(The writer is an educationist and political commentator)
