The annual Parish feast of Mae de Deus is celebrated in the Saligao Sporting club on the first Sunday of May, with a dance which goes on all night. The best couple at the dance is chosen Koli and Kolo. In the village of Saligao and beyond, though, for the past 40 odd years, there was only one political Kolo, Dr Wilfred De Souza. He left his political forest and his beloved land of Goa on September 4.
If politics is all about the thrust for power and retaining it, Dotor Willy was the most passionate devotee of this principle. As he said, “What is the meaning of politics if it is not to obtain the power to govern.” While the good Doctor who became (as claimed by him) the first doctor to perform a surgery in the Gulf before he moved to the UK, studied medicine, he loved and lived his life of a political Machiavelli guided by the renowned political scientists book Il Principe (The Prince). The underlying principle of Il Principe was ‘Acquisition of state power is a legitimate end and any means adopted for the ouster of a ruler to capture power is the essence of statecraft’.
From 1972 when he lost in this baptism by fire elections in Siolim, through to the heartbreaking defeat in the Benaulim by election, after being declared “winner” by two votes to falling short of becoming CM and then past the tumultuous nineties when 12 Chief Ministers were sworn in a decade, Dr Willy has been a central player where he has won and lost with equal elan, either as the man at the centre of events or as the fall guy. But he has never – barring the last few years – been a fringe player in Goan politics. And this is something that even India’s Prime Ministers knew, who Dr Willy dealt with a straight bat. In 1980, he met Mrs Indira Gandhi at the iconic hotel Mandovi and convinced her to give his party Congress (U) 22 seats leaving Congress 6 seats. When Mrs Gandhi took him aside and asked him why the Congress (I) should get only 6 seats, Dr Willy said, “Even that is too much”. Mrs Gandhi realised what Dotor meant when the Dr Willy-led Congress (U) won 20 of the 22 seats it contested and the Congress (I) lost all the six it contested. In 1994, when the Congress came to power and it was widely believed that he would be the next Chief Minister the mantle went to Pratapsingh Rane, but not before Prime Minister Narsimha Rao had to apologise to him and say “Doctor, our people have handled this very wrongly”. He persuaded Dr Willy to become Deputy Chief Minister for a while before he could take over. When that didn’t happen naturally, he pulled the rug from Pratapsingh Rane’s feet by forming the Rajiv Congress, defecting from the Congress and forming the government with 8 MGP defectors and the outside support of 4 BJP MLAs.
But when it came to the art of seizing political power, the Doctor had no permanent friends or enemies. In February 2005, he toppled the Manohar Parrikar government propping Pratapsingh Rane as Chief Minister with him as his Deputy. With virtually every major non-BJP leader, Dr Willy has had a political equation and a political break off. Old timers will remembers the April of 1994, when Governor B P Singh, furious with Dr Willy saying, “It’s not a Governor’s bloody business” (reacting to one of the Governor’s decisions) dismissed him with a message that you can’t call the Governor names. Governor Singh assumed that Dr Willy had called him a “bloody governor”. Governor Singh appointed Ravi Naik as Chief Minister, only to be sacked himself the next day paving the way for the new Governor to appoint Dr Willy again in six days.
But beyond the politics was a man who cared for the fundamentals of Goa – Konkani and statehood. If the Konkani agitation gave rise to the Konknni Porjecho Avaj and leaders like Pundalik Naik and Uday Bhembre and yes Luizinho Faleiro and Churchill Alemao, it was due to the commitment of Dotour, which saw a massive crowd of 70,000 people turn up at the Azad Maidan for the most decisive rally for the cause of Konkani. And as he leaves this world, the leaders he created still have relevance in the Goa of today.
As Dr Willy departs, let us ask what he was often asked, “What is Kolo thinking?” And Dr Willy, from wherever he is, will ask, as he always did, “What do people say that kolo is thinking?” For one last time, hear what the people say what you are thinking and that is, “I may have left the political forest of Goa, but I was always its wiliest fox who really loved Goa.”
(This Obit is based on Dr Daniel Albuquerque’s book Dr Wilfred De Souza, A Journey with an exceptional Leader of Goa)
