Several recent events over last week have put the spotlight on the relationship between Goa’s Catholic populace and the BJP. Last week, the BJP’s Deputy Chief Minister Francis D’Souza expressed his angst at being treated disrespectfully and not consulted on transfers. His complaint was that he has been given multiple officers to deal with, without the simple courtesy of a by-your-leave. Despite the visit by the CM to his house to “sort out the matter”, the mild reprimand that internal matters ought not to have been aired to the media, and the rejoinder `the-media-asked-me-I “don’t-know-how-to-lie’, are interesting but superficial manoeuvres. Subsurface, there’s more to the episode than the media and public will ever know. After all, critical land use plans are being finalised in the Regional Plan. The stakes around the Plan have always been high and it won’t be the first time governments have convulsed during its processing.
Rumours of a revolt by Catholic legislators who just happened to be holidaying together with their families in Kochi, turned out not to be the big political coup it was imagined to be. But there is a clear disquiet around the episode. Also running in the news simultaneously was the public spat, name calling and effigy burning between the RSS chief Subhash Velingker and the BBSM on one hand and the BJP on the other, over the government’s decision to continue grants to Church run English mediums. One explanation is that the rift was stage managed, to ensure, as it did, that the government could wriggle out of cementing the grant process in an MOI Bill, that FORCE (the PTA organisation, backing grants for English) was demanding and still come out smelling like roses, like it was protecting the interests of the schools concerned. It did wriggle out. The decision to drop the Bill has been announced, with hardly a protest from the BJP MLAs who intervened to stop the FORCE hunger strike some months back. The status quo on grants continues; so does the uncertainty, along with a strange acquiescence.
Party men told the RSS head in no uncertain terms that he had to face elections to understand the reality of managing a government, balancing multifarious interests and keeping societal peace. The difference in the BJP’s approach to Sangh hardliners elsewhere and in Goa, reflects the political and electoral arithmetic in Goa, where Catholics comprise over a quarter of the state’s population and still hold the key to assembly segments and ascending to power in Altinho.
To onlookers, Goa’s bizarre language and script politics and the MOI conundrum defy understanding. The RSS has never made any bones about its belief in and intent to actualise a Hindutva cultural supremacy in the country. Historian Ramchandra Guha, who lectured here recently, has in a recent column said he believed the RSS was firmly entrenched in New Delhi. Which explains the violent rise of beef and cow hate crimes, anti“Muslim and anti-minority targeting, and a divisive chauvinism that is erroneously going by the misnomer of “nationalism” and “patriotism”, even as it threatens to Balkanise the nation and the idea of India.
Historically, religious and cultural supremacists build their dominance on the subservience, if not annihilation, of other cultural ideas and institutions. In Goa, some would point to the incident where even the Diocesan Board of Education’s attempt to explain to legislators how permissions were denied to open new divisions and schools was met with a rebuff and the BJP MLAs who attended reprimanded. The current MOI negotiation restricts the opening of new English medium schools --- which will curtail school expansion, and is hardly considered beneficial to the DSE. This is a long distance from the frequent photo ops with the Archbishop that marked relations between the government and the Church in the initial years of this government.
On the economic front, the gloves are off. A minister like Alina Saldanha, whose espousal of environmental causes dates to the years when she joined Matanhy on the streets to fight those causes --- was divested of the portfolio. Since then, the government has risked considerable opprobrium to pursue its economic path. The purpose is a fast-tracking of infrastructure to facilitate industrialisation, corporatisation and urbanisation of Goa and its villages, particularly dear to some sections. Opposition, whether in Betul/Naqueri, Tiracol, Cavrem, Mopa, or Tuem, has faced a determined government response that the opposition has dubbed fascism. Here, distinctions of tribal, Catholic or Hindu hold no play. The project displaced opponents all find themselves in the same boat. The economic transformation from scenic villages to townships, from traditional occupations of fishing and farming to the demands of industrial growth, mass tourism and real estate construction, has little time for negotiation with democratic norms of consultation with local people, or allowing them time to adjust and benefit from change.
The difference is that the politically connected benefit from contracts, licenses, permissions and government jobs. Administrations eager to buy peace find it easier to blunt criticism this way. Government largesse in the form of schemes and payouts can bleed the exchequer, but they make for good vote bank politics. A media shroud ensures that beneficiaries do not realise that high taxation, reduces payouts to putting into the beneficiaries’ left pocket, what the government has taken out from his/her right. With multiple opposition groups getting into poll mode, the party in power will find the going less smooth.
Pamela D’mello is an independent journalist
