The police detained a group of villagers from Karapur-Sarvan, most of them women, while they were marching to Azad Maidan in Panaji to protest the luxury housing project promoted by a Mumbai realty major in their village. Twenty-five villagers had attempted to reach the designated protest site when police stopped them; thereafter, they were forced into a rickety police bus and taken to the Old Goa police station. The village folk were later released following threats of a larger protest outside the police station.
The detention was not carried out on the basis of any written order from judicial authorities; it was simply a verbal order issued by the mamlatdar. Law enforcement agencies are being used these days only to advance authoritarianism; this is a shameful assault on democracy. Salazar used censorship and his secret police to quell opposition and suppress Goan voices during Portuguese rule, and that work is being admirably continued by the state government today. It seems that ordinary Goans shall forever remain an oppressed entity.
Misha, Varca
