Floriano Lobo
Yatish Naik, being a blued eyed boy of the present day Congress, now, has done a favour to the Congress in praising Pandit Jawaharlal Nehru for keeping his pre-liberation of Goa promises to the Goan people. However it is the opposite. It was Pandit Jawaharlal Nehru who reneged on all the promises he made to the Goan people since 1954-56.
For one, he had gone public with his statement in his public meeting at Bombay in 1956 stating “I shall not want to coerse Goans to join the Indian Union if they deliberately want to maintain their separate identity, but minus the Portuguese”. This promise flew in the winds in 1962 when, through the act of the Parliament, India promulgated the citizen’s act to include Goans as citizens of India.
This was ‘coercion’ and it makes him a U-turn master of them all. He even invited this from President J.K. Kennedy in the aftermath of India’s invasion of Goa against the UN Charter. Quote, “You spend the last fifteen years preaching morality to us, and then you go ahead and act the way any normal country would behave…. the preacher was caught coming out of a brothel”. So much for Nehru’s much preached policy of non-violence, worldwide.
Pandit Jawaharlal Nehru died in 1964. And all this time he did not raise a finger to keep his pre-invasion promises to Goa and Goans. Why? Because our freedolefarters never thought of holding him accountable to his promises. This includes Cardinal Gracias of Bombay, who even got Nehru the audition with the Pope at the Vatican. If this was done, Goa would have got the much demanded and refused Special Status in 1961 itself and Goans would not be busy clicking photographs of Indian tourists making Goa’s open spaces their hotel rooms, toilets, kitchens and laundry.
Yatish says Indira Gandhi fulfilled her father’s promises to Goans by sanctioning the Opinion Poll. We would say ‘yes’ to this if the terms of reference of this OP were 3 instead of just two i.e. Stay as Union Territory or merge with Maharashtra. The third option should have been ‘Remain Seperate’. How was Indira Gandhi fulfilling her father’s promises if Goa did merge with Maharashtra? Did she have a dream that OP would be won by Goans to protect their identity when she knew that the mighty Maharashtra and Dayanand Bandodkar were working overtime to merge Goa into Maharashtra? It is a miracle that Goa was saved through the OP. We Goans need to cheer ourselves but not these imposter Goans like Vijai Sardesai and his ilk.
