If prompted, and that happens often enough in our house, my father tells the story, of the Opinion Poll with unexpected alacrity. ‘You see,’ he says, his green eyes alight with a certain fire, ‘they started the counting in the North. And the ballot favoured the Maharasthrawadis. We were all scared.’ The tension in the room mounts. His hands take on a life of their own. ‘And then they started counting the ballots in Salcete; and one by one the ballot fell in our favour. We saved Goa.’ He was a young man, back then, and the importance of that singular moment in Goan history has stayed with his generation.
Ben Antao was a young journalist working for the Navhind Times, post-liberation, and his newly released novel Money and Politics, is a timely reflection on the years leading to the Opinion Poll, in 1967.
Thinly disguised, the two protagonists Babush Fondekar and Gaspar de Souza are in fact Dayanand Bandodkar and Dr. Jack de Sequeira. The story is told through the eyes of the reporter Tony, who Antao admits is himself, making cameo roles at certain junctures in the book. The bitter rivalries between the two men, Bandodkar and Sequeira, and their ideological differences set the stage for decades of communal politics in Goa. Pitted against the rise of regional politics is an ineffectual Congress; utterly corrupt, bankrupt of any progressive ideology and resting on its laurels as the party of independence.
Antao grew up in Margao; he schooled at the Instituto de Educaçao Católica, so renowned in salcete that it was eponymously called ‘Almeida school’ after its strict-disciplinarian headmaster Roque Santana Almeida of Banda. Antao’s familiarity with Goan politics, particularly that of Catholic Goa, becomes obvious right through the book.
The desperate search for a post-colonial identity, the desire to safeguard it against outside influences, the love and recognition of Konkani as a first language, nurtured carefully through the centuries by way of writing and theatre, all set the scene for a clash between Jack Sequeira and Bandodkar. Only the fragmentation of the Hindu vote between the saraswats and the bahujan samaj would eventually swing the merge question in favour of independent statehood.
Bandodkar, Antao depicts as battling with his own inner demons of lineage; driven by a precarious kinship with Marathi-speaking Maharastra, he dives head-first into an ill-thought out plan to merge Goa with its neighbouring state, all the while depending on his bahujan samaj vote bank, and promising them a return of land to the tiller. As one of the characters, Lawande, informs the reader: ‘In Goa, caste is a mark of identity, and we should play it both ways. We appeal to the saraswats’ vanity and tell them how they are superior to the Catholic bamons. And we appeal to the non-saraswats, all the way down to the labour class. We tell the farmers how they’ve been exploited by the bhatkars over the centuries of the Portuguese rule. And now that we are free today, the farmers should own the land they are tilling.’
Jack Sequeira on the other hand interprets the world through the prism of upper-caste privilege and draws much of his political mileage from the Portuguese-speaking, Catholic landed classes of salcete.
With the Maharashtrawadi Gomantak Party headed by Bandodkar and the United Goans party led by Jack Sequeira, Goa marched into the unsettling election of 1963, where a chaotic Congress, caught off-guard, was decimated. The MGP secured 16 seats and went on to form the government; its only credible opposition was the UGP who secured 12 seats. In the latter part of the book, the character of Bandodkar becomes increasingly narcissistic buoyed by adulation bestowed on him by the bahujan samaj vote bank.
Since then, the communal politics of Goa has largely played out along caste and language affiliation. From the on-going conflict to recognise Romi-Konkani to the medium of instruction controversy which seeks to defund, public English medium schools, the battle-lines are drawn along the same loyalties as in 1967.
Bandodkar’s myopic vision for merger did not fully comprehend the extent to which Goa had evolved into a separate entity during the 450 years of Portuguese colonisation, and even preceding that, the Konkan has always been distinct from the Maratha. But perhaps what is even more tragic, is latter-day politicians continuing to prey on these age-old fears of cultural extinction. They fail to understand the contemporary world; to realise that culture, language and religion are borderless and fluid, and should play no role in the making of a nation.
As Antonio Costa, who can trace his links to Margao, takes over the reins of political power in Portugal, what has become of Goa, can best be described by concerns voiced, decades ago, by Professor Armando Menezes: ‘government by the least cultured section of our population.’ Ben Antao has rightly surmised, in his book, the politics of Goa is driven not by principle but by populism and a corrupt soul.
- Selma Carvalho is the author of A Railway Runs Through: Goans of British East Africa, 1865 - 1980. Between 2011 - 2014, she headed the Oral Histories of British Goans project in London
