In the backwaters of St Estevam, where little rivulets flow into the Mandovi, the songs of the village minstrel can still be heard. Songs that were sung in his beloved St Estevam and reverberated throughout Goa. Tiracol, Carmona, Vanxim, Canacona, all hotspots of injustice. He swam the rivers, walked along the paths of red soil in the mining areas, stood with those in Rivona in solidarity as they blocked mining trucks in protest, protested at Azad Maidan against Goa’s destruction, stayed up with the fisher-folk in Kharewado and promised to be with them as their homes got demolished. During other times, he planned and plotted, filed RTI applications, went to court, travelled on buses, walked, rode on bicycles, built teams and became an intrinsic part of the only opposition Goa knows, the people’s opposition.
To say that Father Bismarque Dias was an activist, does, in a big way shrink the canvas he had created, a canvas which kept on stretching with each cause he took up. But he had a rare quality which fuelled the activist movement in Goa – rage. As Vishal Rawley, an architect and teacher who moved to Goa three years ago and has been documenting, studying and campaigning for a better Panjim through a better planning process, said as he heard of his death, “Bismarque came as an electric shock. He stirred you, made you want to do more”.
Like Rawley, many others, including hardened activists have been moved by this phenomenon called Bismarque. A solidarity meeting called in the morning, a day after his death, by Sabina Martins had thousands of people crossing the St Estevam ferry by evening to be at the St Estevam Church grounds. It was the most spontaneous outpouring of grief, felt and shared by all who still love this land and die little deaths each day as Goa suffers a hundred cuts. But his spirit lives on. South Goa based activist Siddharth Karapurkar, who has laid bare the grave injustices and betrayal of the people in the manner in which the Regional Plans have been manipulated, narrated one incident that highlighted the zeal of Father Bismarque. When Canacona was inundated during the floods of a few years ago, when homes and life stock were lost and fertile fields were submerged and crops destroyed, Father Bismarque left his island of St Estevam and arrived at Canacona deep into the night. To his surprise, Karapurkar, who was waiting for him, saw that the jeep Fr Bismarque brought was laden with rice, wheat, flour and pulses for the people of Canacona. He reached much before the government could. Taking Karapurkar with him he reached the flooded areas where he saw people weeping. He wept with them and then meditated and prayed with them. At the end of it with renewed energy and freshness he asked everyone to get up and start working. Soon an army of local volunteers was created and rescue and relief operations started.
While the Bismarque spirit will continue to linger, his death has led to the divide between those who fight for just causes and the government which finds itself at the opposite end of people’s movements, increasing. His fellow Warrior Sudeep Dalvi (whose interview is below) had made an interesting and very valid point in an earlier panel discussion on HCN (Herald’s TV arm). He had said, “A politician takes votes from the public and money from the businessman. So when he comes to power, he is very clear in his mind whom to serve and his master is the casino lobby, the mining lobby and the builder lobby. So the government is running on an agenda which is being decided by the various lobbies”.
These lobbies will most certainly brand this as a “No movement”. Some even call it the “no business”. But having seen, spoken to, mixed with these foot soldiers, the only business that they know is the good of Goa, a business which pays them nothing except goodwill. Environment crusader Claude Alvares makes at times two trips on overnight buses along with his wife, Padmashree Advocate Norma Alvares, to Pune to fight cases in the National Green Tribunal, while his opponents and their fat cat lawyers fly business class. Father Bismarque himelf had to whisper in the years of his lawyer Rohit Bras D’Sa, a couple of days before he died, that he did not have money to fight a malicious petition against him for defamation filed by a man he was fighting in the village. Advocate D’Sa of course said it would be his honour to fight for Bismarque pro bono, for which he received a tight hug as his only fee from his client. Meanwhile, Sudeep Dalvi, the Convenor of the Save Tiracol Save Goa movement, works in a company in Verna, his only source of employment and travels from Mapusa to Verna on a scooter.
And after the death of his comrade Father Bismarque, Dalvi has sent his mother to Mumbai, and has moved to St Estevam, Father Bismarque’s village with his dog to live there next to Bismarque’s family. Only the heartless, can ever call these people businessmen, in the narrow selfish definition of business, most of them who make these accusations, subscribe to.
As yet another day breaks over St Estevam, Father Bismarque’s body still lies in a morgue. Not a single line of condolence has come from any of the political parties or for that matter the Church. But the tears of the people of Goa, borne out by the daily candle lit vigils across the length and breadth of the State, have flown from the eyes of the common man who saw Father Bismarque as a symbol of hope. And in his death, the divide between the Government and those who love Goa has grown only wider.
