Through the editorial ‘Let us bring home our warrior Bismarque & give him farewell’ (Herald, 23 November), the Editor called upon the family of the warrior priest Fr. Bismarque Dias to give him a hero’s farewell by burying his mortal remains which are rotting in the morgue at GMC due to hide and seek the electricity playing and the rodents feasting on his flesh. Fr. Bismarque’s war was against the land sharks for grabbing our lands in Goa, his campaign was against the government for selling our Goa to the builders and destroying our Goa and its natural heritage. He saw the nexus between the political figures and the local authorities and led a movement to save the lands and conserve that natural wealth for our future generation of children. While defending our Goan natural heritage he has fallen victim to the conspiracy which took away our warrior.
It is more than a year now that his body is lying in the morgue and waits for a farewell. How long a body can be kept as an object for further investigations? He is not a thing but a person of human dignity, a subject and not an object or thing to be kept lingering for such a long period for investigations. In the course of time the body would decompose completely and reduce to mere bones and would not be able to subject it to further investigations. If the body be given a decent burial, is it that the truth and justice too will be buried along with? Never, the battle to give justice to the hero and warrior from our soil will continue till the culprits are exposed of their crime if it is a foul play. If some wicked persons have done this heinous crime, even all the perfumes from Arabia will not be able to sweeten their blood stained hands. The day will dawn and the guilty will be exposed and weighed on the scale of justice. It is our appeal to the family of Bismarque to pay homage to his body by giving him a hero’s farewell and continue the battle of seeking justice to him.
(The author is a priest of the Society of Missionaries of St. Francis Xavier based at Pilar, Goa and former editor of Vavraddeancho Ixtt, Konkani newsweekly of Pilar Society. Presently Fr. Eusebio is serving at a mission centre in Mauritania, north-west of Africa)
