THE CASUAL CASTEISM OF THE HOMELESS COSMOPOLITAN

A curious figure keeps showing up in Goa (and also in certain liberal pockets of the Northeast): the homeless cosmopolitan. You have come across them many times. They have hopped between metros all their lives, enjoyed cushy middle-class lives, studied in the UK or US, floated through well-upholstered childhoods, and now, usually in their late twenties or thirties, decide it’s time to “move” somewhere decent: Goa.

They are not really homeless. They just don’t want to live in most parts of India. Once here, they appoint themselves brokers of culture (or real estate) and good taste. Some arrive as artists, filmmakers, designers (“Goa-based” is a brand not a description); others simply log in to their corporate jobs and ‘work from home’. They are hyper-mobile, hyper-credentialed, and cushioned by inherited privilege. Yet the talent they bring and the cultural authority they assume is questionable to say the least.

Take the new wave of homeless cosmopolitan “artists” who descend on Goa. Scroll through their exhibitions, installations, residencies, and you start to wonder: where is the depth, meaning, and beauty in their art? (I am sure one of them will lecture me about ‘art’—good for them!).

Before I talk about the casual casteism of the homeless cosmopolitan, let me admit something: I feel a certain sympathy for them. I have lived in eight different cities in the last fifteen years. I consider three of them, Washington DC, Lisbon, and Doha, as places like Goa or my home. These travels have impressed upon me the possibility of rootedness or the act of place-making that does not come from entitlement. So I know the joy of finding your home and the heartache of not belonging. I understand that uprooted through childhood, of moving from one city to another, shifting schools, never quite belonging leaves behind crushing emptiness. To not have a home to return to, a place that anchors you no matter how far you travel, is a genuine psychological wound. I get that. I don’t mock it.

But this is India and casteism has to pop up everywhere. The truth is that most of these wanderers can relocate to Goa because they carry caste capital in their deliberately modest tote bags. Their mobility is not magical, it is the gift of Indian society. They are privileged but strangely unaware of the means that facilitate their mobility in the first place. They want to hide this privilege by saying they cannot belong anywhere largely because the locals don’t accept them.

And here lies the rub: despite all the talk of cosmopolitanism, global citizenship, worldliness, art, anti-casteism, the homeless cosmopolitan has rarely examined their own position. There is no soul-searching, no discomfort, no ethical pause, and certainly no examination of the conscience. Just a seamless, thoughtless, and entitled slide into Aldona, Moira, Assagao, and Siolim; those promised lands for outsider salvation.

What emerges from this is not explicit bigotry but something subtler, slipperier, and far more common: casual casteism. It is casteism of the hip and meritorious.

The outpourings of the homeless cosmopolitan are not new. For about two decades, I’ve watched the same script unfold: homeless cosmopolitans arrive in Goa and immediately style themselves as custodians of culture and good taste. They settle in, throw around words like “community,” “healing,” and “creative ecosystem,” and then, within months, begin lamenting that Goa has “gone to the dogs”: the internet is slow, the governance chaotic, and the locals are difficult. Or, as the notorious Dilliwali novelist, Deepti Kapoor, they bounce to some other exotic location.

Two decades of this cycle and no one seems to learn the obvious lesson: the problem is not Goa. The problem is you.

But say this aloud and immediately a familiar deflection appears: “But aren’t Goans also contributing to the problem? Aren’t Goans selling land? Aren’t Goans, especially Catholics, also casteist?”

Of course Goans, like any community, have internal contradictions and pressures. But the question here isn’t about Goans. The question is about you. And the moment the spotlight turns to your role, why the instinct to weasel out? Why the sudden high-falutin sociological analysis when all that’s being asked for is a moment of honesty?

There must be a reason why Goa is the preferred destination. It is certainly not the natural beauty, for you get that aplenty in Maharashtra and Kerala, for instance. The reason is something that only Goa offers: a respectful, decent, and free life, or at least the only chance of such a life in India. Freedom is what they seek, a feeling best captured by numerous Bollywood and South Indian films.

The truth is simple: the homeless cosmopolitan votes with their feet. There is no other state in mainland India that offers the freedoms and decency that Goa does, except perhaps a few pockets in the Northeast. Even Kerala, despite its high HDI numbers, is not good enough.

Yet, there is no effort to imbibe Goan culture. No attempt to change one’s heart and soul. The homeless cosmopolitan simply occupies Goan space and jacks up the prices of rent and real estate?

Many homeless cosmopolitans ironically cling tightly to the cultures they arrived with. They hold on to a cultural identity that is steeped in caste privilege. And that unexamined self manifests effortlessly through the everyday and casual casteism of the homeless cosmopolitan.

But is there a solution?

One option is brutally simple. You can vote with your feet one last time. Pack your bags and go elsewhere. Try improving that place instead of extracting from Goa while complaining about Goans. Perhaps you can turn your Delhis into the Goa of your dreams! (Those who want to “move” to Goa and open a café must reconsider or delay that decision).

Goans have lived, lost, thrived, and fought their battles for five centuries without you. Whatever our problems, we have figured out our ways of living, our internal negotiations—our convivências. Goans will be fine without your art, without your good taste, without your self-appointed cultural authority, without your money, and without your casual casteism.

But there is a second option. And it is harder. You can choose to stay and surrender to Goan culture.

Apart from reading Ambedkar to get rid of the intrinsic and casual casteism, a homeless cosmopolitan needs to understand what Goa is. Goan culture is not a vibe, a beach aesthetic, a curated dinner, tourism “beyond its beaches,” an escape from India, or a “creative community.” The social and intellectual culture of Goa is a historical formation shaped by two deep, intertwined streams over five hundred years: Roman Catholicism and a specific Iberian liberal tradition—this is what made the freedom so desperately desired by the homeless cosmopolitan.

With these resources, Goans turned themselves into a people who are open, joyous, and fiercely protective of the good life—not the luxury life, but the moral good life. These values were accessible to the high and the low. Through our history, we have never been defined by money, even the bhatcars never had enough of that. Goans are a people who respect leisure without making it a commodity, who value freedom without turning it into individualism, who treasure conviviality as a civic principle. “Susegad” is a philosophy of the common good.

Catholicism is not as an exotic religion at odds with Indian culture, but a lived moral community. It is the base that defines Goan culture, whether or not one professes that faith. Further, Goans practiced secularism and engaged with liberalism (think the Uniform Civil Code) almost a century before rudimentary municipal elections took place in British India to teach Indians how to become good liberal subjects. Goans were modern much before the rest of India. (I understand the Bhadralok might protest—good for them!).

Allow Goa to change you: your being, your soul, your whole life.

Otherwise that rootlessness, not your mobility, not your career, not your origin, will sustain your casual, unexamined, and so effortlessly reproduced casteism. There is a way out of being a homeless cosmopolitan, a person forever drifting, always extracting, and never belonging.

TRACTORS OR CATTLE?

 

No matter your feelings are regarding the farmer protests, one thing is certain, the tractor is the symbol and icon of the protests. Farmers marching from all over Punjab and other neighboring states first used their tractors to barge through the barricades erected by the police. Once camped at the borders of Delhi, farmers marched inside Delhi along with their tractors to assert their demands. This is the first time that tractors have been used in farmer protests. So, why did tractors become symbolic of the protests?

 

The answer might lie in India’s modernization of agriculture, especially in the Punjab and Haryana, starting from the 1960s. A newly-independent India faced a crisis of grain shortage and hunger. The Nehruvian vision of modern India, led to a policy wherein chemical fertilizers, pesticides, and mechanization was promoted in these traditionally agrarian spaces. The American agroscientist Norman Borlaug was roped in to implement the new vision. The resulting ‘Green Revolution’ not only created a grain surplus, especially of wheat from the granaries of Punjab and Haryana, but, over time, a situation where much of this grain would rot in poorly managed and ill-equipped storage facilities.

 

It is obvious, then, that the ‘Green Revolution’ agriculture was not possible without mechanization. Machines like tractors were necessary to plough the thousands of acres that a farmer would own. The use of draught animals was no longer economically viable, not that it was earlier if the deficit of agrarian production is given due consideration. While farmers needed to invest in more and more tractors, the use of draught animals was perhaps confined to smaller farms and on a much-reduced scale.

 

The Green Revolution, as one knows, had a catastrophic fall out, especially in the Punjab. The use of large quantities of pesticides and chemical fertilizers has led to an increased number of cancer cases. The high yield varieties of crops need greater amounts of water and this has led to a decrease of the ground water table level. The increased investment has only led the farmers into greater debts. Add to this, and the trigger of protest of decades of hardships, was the government’s plan to increase privatization of grain distribution. The farmers could lose their last option of earning a fair and minimum price for their produce.

 

For some time now, especially after the present government came to power, the ban on cow, and now in some areas buffalo, slaughter has been promoted as a way out of the Green Revolution mess. In fact, persons and NGOs associated with the ruling party, the BJP, or its parent the RSS, have been at the forefront in promoting ‘traditional’ agriculture. Of course, the laws banning cow slaughter predates the BJP: Goa’s Maharashtrawadi Gomantak Party was one of the earliest regional outfits to legislate on the matter, in addition to the Congress. While it is only now that the rhetoric has shifted to banning the consumption of beef, earlier these laws were enacted ostensibly to protect the cattle for agrarian purposes.

 

The argument for promoting ‘traditional’ agriculture seems to promote a caste order in rural India. In 2015 when Maharashtra imposed a stringent ban on the consumption of beef, the Viniyog Parivar Trust, a Jain NGO instrumental in promoting the law, claimed that agriculture would be the main beneficiary of the beef ban. One of its leaders then claimed that more cattle will be available to farmers and consequently there will be more work for ‘untouchable’ communities traditionally forced to clear dead cattle and leather workers.

 

It then appears that farmers in North India have two options: continue with the mechanized agriculture (and ensure that the government fixes prices and makes proper policies) or go back to an older traditional form of agriculture—the bucolic idyll of Gandhi—and make a greater use of cattle and other such animals. The farmers have chosen neither and the choice is significant. After all the choice between Scylla and Charybdis is not choice at all!

 

By focusing on the need for a fair price, the farmers are not supporting either of the agricultural visions. Rather than choose between a modern, future-oriented Green Revolution or rooting for village-based traditionalism, the farmers are shifting the debate to fairness and just economic practices. It is unlikely that big farms would be economically viable through village-based traditionalism. The farmers know that mechanization is still necessary to earn their livelihood, or even profit from farming. Thus, the appeal of tractors as symbols of the protests.

 

As much as the tractors help to plough, they also are useful to push through police barricades. With a segment of the protests going out of control on Republic Day this year, and following the propaganda of news channels, the tractor as a symbol of the protests had a quiet exit from the scene. But not the protests: the farmers continue to ask for a fair minimum price that would save them from ruin and immiseration.

 

Following the farmer’s protest, many commentators believed the protests were crucial for the future of the Indian Republic. How exactly do the farmer protests stop the downward trend of India’s democratic institutions is something that, as the cliché goes, only time will tell. But one thing is for certain: the visions of both, traditionalism and modernization have utterly failed the small and large farmers in the country.

(First published in O Heraldo, dt: 3 March, 2021)

ELECTION WINS ARE NOT VOTES FOR DEVELOPMENT

The cancellation of the IIT project in Melaulim is a clear indication that the government can heed the wishes of the people. The cancellation further suggests that all development that the government sees fit to impose on Goans and the Goan land is reversible. The decision to cancel the IIT project came after much chest-thumping bravado by ministers in the ruling government, especially after the Zilla Parishad elections that the BJP swept, that they had the mandate and support of the electorate.

 

The Chief Minister, Pramod Sawant, assumed that this sweep of the Zilla Parishad elections is people’s approval of his leadership and giving him the go ahead for the recent projects in the Mollem forest reserve. Similarly, the Health Minister, Viswajit Rane, who also tasted success in the Zilla Parishad elections as all the candidates he supported emerged victorious, acted as if the people of his constituency had given him the green light to proceed with the IIT in Melaulim.

 

For the legitimacy of Sawant’s leadership, the stakes at the Zilla Parishad elections may have been indeed high. Sawant became Chief Minister in 2019 after the demise of Manohar Parrikar, but has never been recognized popularly as the leader of the people of Goa. In 2017, the BJP had managed to cobble together an alliance, after the Congress failed to form a government despite winning a majority of 17 seats. The 2017 election thus disregarded the will of the people, in fact it reminded many of the horse trading era of the 1990s. Parrikar and the BJP justified their actions saying that they had a greater share of the polled votes. As a result of the 2017 horse trading fiasco, and the fact that he faced opposition within BJP supporters, Sawant desperately needed an electoral win, where both the vote share and seats would be in his and his party’s favor.

 

One cannot really fault Sawant and Rane for claiming that the Zilla Parishad results meant that Goans were effectively giving consent for the development projects. Perhaps the Chief Minister and the Health Minister jumped the gun because of the victory despite the widespread protests against mega projects, be it the IIT or the infrastructure projects in the Mollem forest. In the months leading up to the Zilla Parishad elections, these protests drummed up support for the anti-people and anti-environmental policies of the government, both through sustained actions on the ground and through social media. The public opposition to development was so strong that the Zilla Parishad sweep had to be a sign that the people were wrong, or so everyone thought.

 

And so, following the results of the Zilla Parishad elections, many, for this or that reason, were deeply dejected that all the protest had amounted to nothing. No matter what one believed, it seemed that everyone accepted the narrative that the victorious side promoted; many tried to make sense of why Goans had effectively voted for the same people who promoted the destruction of their land.

 

But the people of Melaulim seem to have proven everyone wrong! From what one gathers from the core leadership of the Melaulim protests, the primary goal of the protest was ownership of land. The people of Melaulim did not change their demand of land ownership even after most of the BJP-supported candidates won in the Zilla Parishad elections. They stuck to their guns, and in fact are pushing for their demands ever more vociferously these days, despite the IIT project cancellation.

 

While the issue of why Goans vote for pro- destructive development politicians might have to wait for some other day, the Melaulim case forces us to think about the role of elections in Goan society today. What are elections for? Just an occasion for the transfer of power and the gift and favors that are exchanged before voting? What is the value of one vote?

 

The value of a person’s vote comes into serious question when the government blatantly disregards people’s wishes. In this case by promoting destructive and harmful development. If the health of the citizens is jeopardized due to the coal dust, if the land on which citizens and their ancestors have lived and worked on is not legally theirs (as is the case in Melaulim), or forests and other fragile ecological niches are destroyed, or the fact that the government decides that another railway line should be cut through villages and the houses in them, then the government does not serve the interests of the people that voted it to power.

 

While politicians supplicate before the voter before elections, what happens after is that the will of the people is, more often than not, ignored. In fact, as far as the history of Goa is concerned, post 1961, what happens after elections matters much more than the pre-election promises of the politicians. A recent case in point is the private resolution to scrap the three linear projects in Mollem where 11 members voted for the resolution, and nine abstained. The resolution was defeated by 20 votes.

 

An electoral victory is no license for ‘development’. From the Melaulim example, it is quite clear that winning an election, or having a greater vote share, or majority seats, does not give authoritative powers to the elected representatives. But it is also clear that while one can approach politicians for personal favors, one cannot count on them when it comes to issues that determine the collective future of the state. The people then have to protest and put their lives on the line. This unaccountability of elected representatives post elections is fast rendering the electoral process empty.

 

(First published in O Heraldo, dt: 3 February 2021)