The newly appointed Director-General of Police Indra Dev Shukla has stated that his top priority is to make Goa a safe destination for tourists visiting Goa. The top cop also said that keeping an eye on narcotics trade, ensuring smooth flow of traffic and enforcing a new friendly order in police-citizen relations will be the other focus areas. These are positive goals that Shukla has listed, and by all means important to Goa, however, the bigger areas of concern have been the rising crime graph, brutal murders, the emerging gun culture and lately contract killings that are gradually eroding Goa’s identity as a peaceful State. Bringing about reforms in crime policing is indeed an ardent need of the hour because Goa is currently witnessing murders and contract killings unheard in the State’s history.
If ensuring the safety of tourists is an immediate priority, then protecting the daughters of the soil against gang-rapes and molestation by ‘outsiders’ should be an even greater priority. This is a serious issue that needs police attention because our women and daughters are no longer feeling secure in the State. They have been constantly threatened by rape and physical abuse, and police have been failing to protect them. Our beaches are safe for tourists, but not for locals, and we are appalled by the ghastly gang rapes of Goans on beaches. The recent case of a 19-year-old girl whose semi-nude body was found on Calangute beach has once again exposed the hollowness of policing. A case which police concluded as death by drowning even before investigating, and when the rest of Goa, including the parents of the girl, were seeking a probe into the murder.