Goa Can(nes)?
In a little over a week, the next edition of the International Film Festival of India will be underway, marking the 19th year of its Goan avtaar. So, nearly two decades since Goa began hosting it, has the festival today attained the promised stature of the one at Cannes?
Obviously not it seems from the utterances of Union Minister of State for Information and Broadcasting L Murugan who was in Goa earlier this week to take stock of the preparations this year.
"IFFI will be held from November 20 to 28. This time we are focusing on film bazaars and other things. National Film Development Corporation (NFDC), government of India and Goa are organising IFFI this time like Cannes film festival," is what Murugan told the media in Panaji.
Sounds familiar?
It certainly does for people like us who were in the thick of things in the run-up to the festival hosted for the first time in Goa in 2004.
"Goa is very similar. We will make the IFFI in Goa as good as the Cannes festival," were the words of the late Manohar Parrikar, unarguably the architect of bringing the festival to Goa then.
Parrikar even acted on his words. Soon after that first Goa edition of 2004, he packed off a team of trusted lieutenants including IAS officer Sanjit Rodrigues to a world tour including to France, to study the Cannes template so it can be replicated in Goa. It is another matter that before the team could return, Parrikar was no longer the CM by mid-2005 and the grandiose plan of replicating Cannes in Goa got dumped.
Meanwhile, the cameras at IFFI continued to roll on year after year with no significant change either in quality or quantity and 20 years later we are back to square one: a burning desire to replicate Cannes, as per Murugan.
Meanwhile members of Tollywood, Mollywood, Sandalwood and all the other South Indian 'woods' will continue grudgingly participate in the IFFI hurling abuses at the organisers for transforming the Goa avtaar of the festival all about Bollywood!
'Ram Rajya already here'
Not too long ago, the ruling Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) was enigma to a sizeable chunk of the Goan populace. In its early days since it made its debut in the Goa legislative assembly back in 1994, we had both its top leaders then -- late Manohar Parrikar and Union Minister Shripad Naik -- spent hours and hours with us journos at the press room in the Old Secretariat, trying to convince us that the BJP in Goa is not hardcore like the BJP in the rest of India.
Indeed over the following years, the BJP in Goa did try a few experiments to show itself different from the parent. Giving large number of tickets to 'Catholic' candidates et al. But while it did that, they lost no opportunity to flaunt its core ideology off and on to keep its core constituency intact, the film on Goa's freedom struggle in the early 2000s, the aborted bid to cancel the 'Good Friday' and St Francis Xavier Feast holiday among a few examples.
Earlier this week, Chief Minister Pramod Sawant who whispers tell us is at cross-hairs with the RSS unit in Goa over the inclusion of a large number of minority members in his cabinet, got the opportunity to flaunt his Hindutva credentials. And boy, he latched on to it!
"Ram rajya is already here since 2014," Sawant thundered at one of the halts the Santha Samiti's Digvijaya Rath Yatra made in Goa.
The yatra being taken out as a branding exercise for the construction of the Ram temple in Ayodhya made a pit stop in Goa and Sawant and a band of his ministers joined it.
Sawant in his speech at that event was at pains to explain that every "bold step" taken by Prime Minister Narendra Modi since he took over reigns in 2014 were aimed at ensuring Ram Rajya.
"When the pandemic hit, Modiji developed the vaccine which benefited not only India but many other countries. In the case of other pandemics of the past, polio for instance, it took 20 years for the vaccine to come," Sawant said arguing that now under Modi the times of ram rajya are already being lived.
It couldn't have been a better opportunity for Sawant to assuage the hardliners within, especially when he is straddled with the task of juggling his cabinet team to accommodate the Congress entrants and could antagonise them more by inducting another 'Catholic' minister.
Better said than done?
Will the Staff Selection Commission ensure that government jobs are not sold or given under political influence?
This is the question that must be on the mind of many a deserving, educated unemployed youth who are yet to land a government job either because they did not have the money to buy it or lacked the political godfathers to facilitate it, after Chief Minister Pramod Sawant made the statement at the mega 'Job Fair'.
But will anything change now, when the current BJP government consists of former Congress MLAs who have openly stated that they joined the BJP for development and government jobs.
Certainly its going to be a tall order for Sawant who, despite having a clear majority, has to deal with a lot of pulls and strings from within his own ruling party.
Will he be able to override the demand from his own Ministers, MLAs and party office-bearers to get jobs for candidates of their choice?
Time will tell whether Sawant's latest posturing will actually turn into action or will it be a case of 'better said than done' given that a similar proposal had been mooted in the runup to the 2017 elections but had failed to materialise.
Compiled by Ashley do Rosario with inputs from Manuel Vaz
