There’s a touch of artifice in the photo with Chief Minister Manohar Parrikar garlanding the new larger-than-life statue of Dayanand Bandodkar at the secretariat complex in Porvorim. The logic in honouring Goa’s first chief minister in this manner on the 41st anniversary
of his death is somewhat baffling. The hundredth anniversary of his birth that fell two years ago would have been a more appropriate date,
though it is unlikely the Congress would have wanted to immortalise for posterity the first leader of the Maharashtrawadi Gomantak Party, given his political ideology and their rivalry. Mr Bandodkar’s sombre presence etched in stone now dominates the visual space between the state secretariat and the legislative assembly. There’s a subtle irony to this that will not be lost on most Goans, especially those who were a part of and witnessed the 1967 Opinion Poll. Gurudas Singbal, former correspondent of Indian Express, had a front-row view of the politics unfolding in the early post-Liberation years. An amalgamation of five groups that had cropped up at the time, were pushing for a pro-Marathi, pro-Maharashtra agenda for Goa. But they had no intention of getting into politics. In the beginning, it seemed neither had Bandodkar. “He was not even in the contest,” recalls Singbal. But Bandodkar who had begun to amass wealth as a mineowner was made president of the new Maharashtrawadi Gomantak Party created in 1963 just ahead of Goa’s first ever democratic election in December of that year. The election
was held on December 9, the votes
were counted the next day and there
were just 3,28,071 voters at the time,
less than a third of the current number
of voters in the state.
With a “galaxy” of freedom fighters
like Rama Hegde, Purshottam Kakodkar,
Pandurang Mulgaonkar and Joe
Martins in its ranks, the Congress assumed
it was set for a clean sweep of
the Goa election. So convinced were
Congressmen that victory was theirs
to be had, that their wives had already
begun to look for appropriate accommodation
in the capital, Singbal says.
Nehru, who relied on Purshottam
Kakodkar’s advice as the last word on
all matters Goan, believed “grateful
Goans” (grateful for being liberated,
that is) were bound to vote the Congress
in.
There was shock and disbelief in the
election result. It catapulted Bandodkar
into politics, brought the MGP to
power, the United Goans Party to head
the opposition, and the Congress to
an absolute rout (it managed only the
Daman seat in the 30-member House).
“Even the victors must have been surprised
at their success because the
leaders of both opposition parties had,
in their last minute assessments, conceded
a majority to the Congress” (The
General Elections in Goa, Ram Joshi,
Asian Survey, Oct., 1964).
So many years since his death, is
Bandodkar’s legacy being overhyped
for political expedience? Singbal believes
the MGP founder’s most notable
achievements are his very genuine advancement
of education in Goa and
the land reforms.
“Bandodkar was a great admirer of
Mahatma Phule. Post Liberation, he
wanted to bring about the parivartan
of the bahujan samaj. He saw examples
of how education and employment
were helping in the fight against
poverty in Maharashtra.” But his land
reforms heritage came to be “milked
dry by the party under his daughter”.
Her “egotistical approach” made matters
worse for the Lion, its roar now
on the wane, as “people distanced
themselves from the MGP,” he says.
Sixteen years of uninterrupted
power ended abruptly for the MGP in
1979. By 1980 a political and social
realignment chapter seemed to be
closing for Goa with the emergence of
the Congress at its centre. At the heart
of this was the resurgence of what
many saw as the upper castes dominance
with Dr Wilfred de Souza and
AN Naik leading the charge. That picture
though began to be reshaped with
the Pratapsingh Rane era.
The divide
The 1967 Opinion Poll would leave an
unbreachable rift between the
Konkaniwadis and the Marathiwadis
that resonates to this day among ethnic
Goans. The Opinion Poll took place
on January 16, with Goans unequivocally
rejecting merger with Maharashtra.
Yet its most vocal purveyor/advocate/
promoter Dayanand Bandodkar
was returned to power not three
months later in the next general election
in 1967, accentuating the deep
fractures within the post-Liberation
Goan society. The MGP retained 16
seats. The Jack Sequeira UGP would
never cross the tantalising halfway
mark to power.
Churchill Alemao was perhaps the
first mass-based Christian leader to
recognise the abiding connect between
DB Bandodkar and Goa’s bahujan
samaj and attempt to harness it
politically in campaigns in the past,
particularly in Canacona and other
Hindu-dominant talukas (publicity
craver Michael Lobo is attempting a
re-enactment of this in Calangute).
By the 1990s, politicians like Ravi
Naik were taking chunks of bahujan
samaj support away from the MGP and
into the Congress. Though under Ramakant
Khalap the MGP came within
grasp of the finish line in 1989, tying
19-19 seats with the Congress, the
politics of defections—started ironically
by Bandodkar, according to
Singbal—had taken a strong hold with
powerbrokers calling the shots. Khalap
would himself abandon the MGP
for the Congress and national pastures
in the early 2000s.
Ramakant Khalap argues that the
“roots of the MGP are secular” and
Bandodkar was in fact a “true Congressman”.
The MGP, he says, has unfortunately
been appropriated by the
“right-wing with an ideology that is
anathema to the Constitution”. He
points out rather significantly that the
BJP has not distanced itself from the
current MGP’s viewpoint.
“The once non-vegetarian party has
been turned vegetarian,” says Ravi
Naik succinctly, in obvious reference
to the Brahmin moorings of the Dhavlikar
brothers, Sudin and Deepak who
have turned the once vibrant regional
outfit into their private holding. “This
is the party that lost the merger issue
(the raison d’etre for its existence) and
should wind up,” he says.
It is obviously now the BJP’s turn to
appropriate the Bandodkar legacy. But
what this represents is hard to define,
given the stark absence of any worthwhile
critical analysis of contemporary
political history in Goa. What one
gets currently on the MG leader is unmitigated
gush, including a doctoral
thesis that has been shamefully conferred
by Goa University.
On the other hand are attempts to
play down DB Bandodkar’s role in the
merger issue and the brazen move to
submerge Goa into Maharashtra
which had the backing of Marathi
chauvinists. Some theories have it that
Bandodkar even tried to go slow on
merger, having realised the “folly of it”
toward the end. These are nothing
more than a ruse to camouflage a blot
that will forever mar the legacy of a
politician who could have otherwise
outshone all others. Because if that
was indeed so, why didn’t Bandodkar
ever own up to it? He was after all a
politician, and a very astute one at
that.
History will in the end put in perspective
the Bandodkar legacy. Because
no political play can ever wish
away the contradiction in honouring
a man who tried to deny Goa its own
identity. That too with a statue within
the grounds of the state legislative assembly
that exists only because he and
the MGP lost the Opinion Poll.
