Gomantak Times, October 11, 2007
Vidyadhar Gadgil
Twenty years ago, when I first lived and worked in Goa, I attended a workshop on threats to Goa’s environment and culture. It was there that I first heard the term ‘bhaille’ (outsiders). It was one of the recurring motifs of the workshop that the ‘bhaille’ were the biggest threats to Goa’s environment. I was taken aback, as this was an event attended by liberals and activists, where one would not have expected such viewpoints. Another term I heard was ‘ghati’. There was clearly a negative value attached to the term, which in Maharashtra is used to describe rustics. Intrigued, I devoted a fair bit of time to examining the issue. It seemed contradictory that I – ‘bhaillo’ and ‘ghati’ – never felt any particular hostility directed towards myself; in fact, I met with an easy acceptance. Was this because of my class/caste background? Not entirely, I discovered – Goans are truly among the most tolerant and easygoing of people, not easily given to prejudice.
It was not only me, there was no overt hostility towards the people from outside Goa who lived and worked in Goa. When talking about ‘outsiders’, what people were protesting was a phenomenon – their perceived lack of control over the development process – rather than individuals. There was also a genuine anger against the tourism industry’s despoilation of Goa and against the anti-people pattern of development that people felt, with some justice, was being imposed upon them from outside Goa.
Those were heady times – there was a churning in Goa as the masses began to assert their identity and demand their rights. The Konkani agitation, the movement against tourism spearheaded by the Jagrut Goenkaranchi Fauz (JGF), the movement for statehood – they all redefined the political landscape of Goa. At a public meeting on 30 May 1987, the day Goa attained statehood, the mood was one of jubiliation: it was the dawn of hope.
Over the next ten years, my involvement with Goa continued, albeit somewhat intermittently, so I was aware that these hopes were being largely crushed. Yet, in 1997, when my family and I shifted to Goa to settle here permanently, it came as a bit of shock to see the change in the public mood; it was as if the churning of the mid-80s had never happened. The movement for genuine change had been sidetracked, marginalized or co-opted by the political class and corporate interests, and it was business as usual. A cynicism and tiredness had set in amongst the no-longer-so-young activists I knew in the mid-80s.
But around 2005 the churning process began once again, as globalization and neo-liberalization began to be revealed for the chimeras that they were. People looked around them and discovered to their horror that the development process had been hijacked and turned against the people. The beaches had become privatized concrete jungles, Goa’s forests were facing the axe as the construction boom reached ridiculous proportions, and Goa’s politicans fattened themselves at the expense of the masses. Once again, the common man was feeling marginalized and threatened.
One response to this has been a questioning of the very concept of development. The people’s movement which crystallised around the Goa Bachao Abhiyan has redefined the way development is perceived. Development which enriches a few at the expense of the masses and destroys Goa’s environment is not true development, this strand of thought avers. It is not the mass of people – of Goan descent or otherwise – who are the problem. It is those who heedlessly plunder Goa’s resources – politicians, industrialists and various kinds of middlemen – and sell them to the highest bidder that are the problem. To paraphrase the speech of Dr. Oscar Rebello, the convenor of the GBA, at the massive public rally in Panjim on 19 December 2006: “It is not non-Goans who are the problem; it is the anti-Goans.”
There is however, another response to Goa’s current crisis. This seeks to externalise the problem and, following a xenophobic and reactionary line of thought, blames the workers who come to Goa from other parts of India to earn their living. Ignoring the fact that these workers make a vital contribution to Goa’s economy, they are despised and condemned on the basis of the fact that they are poor and come from different cultures and traditions. Rather than look at their relationship with the community and the environment, their ethnic, cultural and religious backgrounds are focused upon.
The stigmatization of the ‘ghatis’ and bhaille’ has now reached frightening proportions. The worst example of this was when the Sanvordem-Curchorem communal violence of March 2006 was sought to be justified on the grounds that its targets were ‘outsiders’. The growing communalization of the Goan polity and society provides a fertile ground in which such thought patterns acquire particular virulence, and find expression in terms of active discrimination and even violence against minorities, who can easily be cast in the role of the ‘other’.
But at a subtler level, this trend of thought is beginning to pervade everyday social discourse in Goa. Workers from Orissa, Karnataka and other ‘backward’ states are vilified for defecating in the open and described as ‘unclean’ (that they are in this position because their employers do not provide them even basic facilities is conveniently forgotten). Even in the urbane drawing rooms of Goa’s educated and well-off classes, such a prejudice has begun to take hold, and all kinds of derogatory comments about ‘ghatis’ are routine, being allowed to pass without any criticism of the social attitudes that underlie them.
Goa is at a crossroads today: it is obvious that we cannot follow the existing pattern of development without social and environmental disaster. But there are two options. Do we question what ‘development’ means, and insist that, rather than merely enriching a few and destroying natural resources, it is framed and practiced in a manner that benefits all and respects the environment? Or do we seek convenient scapegoats for our problems, and further marginalize and victimize them, thereby exacerbating social tensions and furthering communal agendas? The choice is ours to make.
|
