As we enter 2019, we need a different gratitude, honour, and hope than that which is being thrust on us.
We need to welcome the New Year with gratitude to those who have stood up against injustice in Goa, those who have made whatever effort it takes to help concretise people’s aspirations, those on account of whom Goa is not yet completely destroyed. With gratitude to those who have cared and shared. They are too many to name.
Broadly speaking, they are the ones who have spoken up, stood out there with a banner, marched through the streets, organised or attended meetings, participated in intensive discussions, carefully listened to people around, drafted right-to-information applications and/or followed up on them, worked on documentation, silently did back-up work like housekeeping. We need to be grateful also to those who have raised pertinent questions, even in the context of a Goa that is small and where so many people standing up are so many other complicit people’s relatives or dear ones or acquaintances, and therefore where taking a position would mean getting on the wrong side of them.
Gratitude is not about: You scratch my back, I scratch yours in return. I should be able to say, your back doesn’t need scratching, but someone else’s does. And that maybe mine doesn’t need scratching either. So you appoint some of my people in jobs that come within your portfolio, and I appoint some of your people in jobs that come within my portfolio. You or your folks get to acquire land or get some contracts for works in my constituency, and I and my folks get to acquire land or get some contracts for works in your constituency. All thanks to Private Public Partnership models that are conveniently floated for this very reason. This is gratitude of the most decadent order, and, in this New Year, may a different politics rise like a phoenix from the reduction of this kind of politics to ashes.
We also need to say we carried ourselves with honour in the New Year. Not the honour that comes from sweeping our faults under the carpet to present a false sheen. Not the honour that comes from saying we had a glorious past – a glorious Vedic past or a glorious Portuguese past, even though we know that certain sections of society were treated then with disregard and dishonor – different sections under different regimes and different feudatories. No, we do not want to make Goa great again, the way Trump wants to make America great again. There has always been a dark underbelly during all past regimes. And how this could continue if we became hero-worshippers was well captured by B R Ambedkar in his last address to the Constituent Assembly, where he quoted John Stuart Mill in calling upon all who are interested in the maintenance of democracy, not “to lay their liberties at the feet of even a great man, or to trust him with power which enables him to subvert their institutions”. Goa has seen governance hopelessly crumbling in 2018, it has seen its institutions that are supposed to be the checks and balances being crippled..
Rather, it is important to seek for honour where one can hold one’s head high in defiance of oppressive and exploitative norms). We need to acquit ourselves with honour, by engaging with every section of society.
But, as we enter the New Year, we certainly need to enter it with hope rather than resignation to Fate, saying we cannot do anything about it and it is too big to handle, and letting the powerful take and keep the floor. Yes, times are overwhelming for Goa, when one sees the highways, bridges and big roads, which seem to be leading to nowhere for the people, but are in fact tearing us apart, when one sees the demographic turn that Goa is taking thanks to the policies of those that Goa brings to power, when one sees the accentuating of discrimination and dishonouring of the mandates of the Constitution of India by way of liberty, substantive equality, reservations, and secularism, when one sees the gross intolerance towards migrants, who, like Goan migrants to other locations, are turning to Goa for want of appropriate livelihood options in their own land, when one sees the gross intolerance to the minority Muslim community, where a woman wearing a hijab is turned away at a competitive exam.
But we still need to enter with hope that we can make a just and equitable transition from a mining – or tourism – or alcohol-dependent economy, to a sustainable one, where ALL people have a place under the sun, and where people who have been marginalised, minoritised and discriminated against for generations have a special place. We need to work with hope towards ensuring sustainable public transport. We need to aim and work and hope for every city and village to be a smart city and model village that is rights-upholding. We need to enter with hope that we can organise despite the obstacles to such visions posed by those who fear the loss of the kickbacks and commissions they were used to.
We see some signs of hope. People resisting the onslaught of maldevelopment. Aspiring school teachers fighting the Government’s deliberate oversight of reservations. People speaking truth to power. People speaking out about experiences of sexual harassment over the years with the hash tag #MeToo. At a recent meeting organised by Goa Sudharop and Goanet, there were people who shared their anxieties as well as initiatives against the status quo. Something that the Goans are always associated with, the ‘pao’ (Goan bread), and which needs to be celebrated for both itself and the people who make it, is now being captured in a film on the subject. A Konkani wiktionary is being worked on, and the good thing about this wiktionary is its recognition of the officially-discriminated-against Romi Konkani.
Hence, with gratitude, honour and hope…2019, here we come.
(Albertina Almeida is a lawyer.)
