team herald
Panjim: Suddenly he’s gone. Two weeks ago cyclone Nilofer threatened to hit landfall and cause devastation to the coast of Goa. That threat which enveloped, passed as Nilofer decided to turn away, weaken and disappear en route to Karachi. Last weekend Goa was hit by a cyclone, a political one called cyclone Manohar, which came and went, leaving Goa with an uneasy calm and a sense of all round emptiness.
From Thursday to Saturday, Manohar Parrikar’s move out of Goa to the Union cabinet, the acrimonious change of guard, the formation of three groups, which were always there but could not raise their heads, and now, the preparation for life in the new dispensation, under a Chief Minister very few know or understand, was nothing short of a tsunami that came and exposed in its wake fundamental weaknesses that the political system throws up under one powerful head.
Monday morning, Goa – as the clichéd saying goes – was limping back to normalcy, but had only one thing on its mind. In the bazaars and bookshops, in courts and canteens, in medicine shops and malls, the big ask was – “What happened” and “What next?” Sometimes we don’t understand that there’s a world of people beyond political pundits and journalists, who don’t quite understand the way governments or even politics work. Three days ago he was Chief Minister of Goa. Now he’s gone.
In the High Court, the day began as usual with hordes of litigants on a particularly busy day. A Police Inspector of an important police department chatted with another litigant, his buddy, and was overheard saying, “We were used to a system and clear directions. We will be completely at sea. The old days of the Congress will return when we will get calls from several ministers asking us to take action or worse not take action.”
Earlier in the day, a fish market regular sent in this report. A head clerk of a key government department, another daily customer told him, “In the last two-and-half-years, the number of late comers to office had dropped to less than one percent. Now, everyone will stroll in and out as per their free will.”
In a private clinic, where this reporter dropped into for a chat with a doctor friend, two people – who seemed to be patients – were in conversation, with one reading the newspaper. “Who is this new fellow?”. The reference was obviously to the new Chief Minister, who incidentally isn’t new at all. But perceptions are very different from reality.
Another section that has been completely stumped is industry. Mr Parrikar used to work very closely with a key group of industry captains who prepared the contours of the investment policy and the tourism policy. A couple of them requested that they not be named for obvious reasons but felt that while policies are inbuilt in the system and the bureaucracy will deliver, the force driver was Mr Parrikar himself.
“There is a distance that needs to be bridged between a great policy and a presentation and the actual signing of an MOU. This is done by the Chief Executive of the State. In our world, there’s something called the firmness of the handshake, which is more than the actual handshake. We don’t have the one man who could do that handshake now to get investors in.”
While there is much to say for Goa’s most influential Chief Minister’s, non delivery of promises, Goa doesn’t quite know how to handle him not being there, and expect things to fall apart. It’s clear that Manohar Parrikar has got the biggest back handed compliment from his people by going away from them.
