by DALE LUIS MENEZES, ALBERTINA ALMEIDA,
JASON KEITH FERNANDES, AMITA KANEKAR
Goa is constantly framed as the
holiday capital of India. However, there is a good amount of violence that
underwrites this project of providing fun. The recent incidents in Tiracol, a
village in the northern-most tip of the state, highlight this clearly. Sometime
around the midnight of 14 May, the residents of the village were awakened by
the arrival of men and machinery hired by M/s Leading Hotels Pvt. Ltd., a
five-star hotel company, who went on to bulldoze a large part of the orchard
lands of the village as part of their plan to build a PGA standard golf course
and resort. The villagers have been strongly opposing this project for the last
several years, with the result that the project has now been virtually stayed
by the courts; Leading Hotels’ response to this legal and popular opposition
was to sneak their men and machinery in at the dead of night, protected by
fifty-odd bouncers.
Work was halted only when the
vigilant villagers alerted the police. However, when local reporters reached
the scene, the bouncers were still there. Diana Fernandes, a journalist writing
for O Heraldo (16 May, 2015), reported that the area was still swarming with twenty-odd
musclemen the next day.
This instance of violent land grab
is not confined to the village of Tiracol. In fact, as a result of the boom in
mining, real estate, and tourism industries in Goa, it has become a trend over
the last couple of decades. In most cases, the chief victims are agricultural
tenants who tilled the land belonging to landlords, and mundkars living on this land, with various obligations towards its upkeep.
The problem of land-grab in Goa needs to be understood through the manner in
which the existing feudal land relations of Goa – the relation between the mundkars and agricultural tenants
(henceforth tenants), and the bhatkar (landlord) – have been
supplemented by the feudal-like powers of global capital that works in alliance
with the feudal lords. Additionally, we also suggest that the existing sorry
state of affairs that Goa finds itself in, due to excesses of ‘development’ in
the real estate market and other industries that gobble huge chunks of land,
can only be correctly understood, and effectively addressed, if one approaches
the issue from the perspective of the tenants and their experiences .
In Goa, land was traditionally
appropriated and tightly controlled by the bhatkars.
In addition to being a class, these bhatkars
were also upper-caste. The caste equation is important as the bhatkars could be of any religious
background, but were invariably from the upper-castes. Relief to the mundkars and tenants came in the form of
the Goa Agricultural Tenancy Act, 1964 and the Goa Mundkar Act, 1975, but this
relief was eventually thwarted by a new and developing economic system that no
longer made it economically viable to cultivate land and made it seem more
alluring to sell land to the highest bidder and share the spoils, albeit
disproportionately between the bhatkar
and the tenants.
But Tiracol was different. The
bhatkarial rights were held by the Khalap family, said to be a branch of the
Deshprabhu family who still are the bhatkars
of most of Pernem taluka. The bhatkar
here was an absentee one who had long broken contact with the village, to the
extent of not collecting either mundkarial services or tenant revenues. This,
coupled with the relative homogeneity of the tenant population – a small
village of about 50 Catholic households living off cashew orchards, fishing and
the production of urrack and feni, along with some rice farming and
coconut plantations – made the village a relatively egalitarian and developing space
where caste hierarchy was not strongly evident and where many were making the
socio-economic shift from tenants to entrepreneurs and workers in the modern
economy.
Hence it is not surprising that the
proposed golf course project by M/s Leading Hotels, which first hit the news in
2007-08, was vehemently opposed by the St. Anthony Tenant and Mundkar
Association (SATMA) of Tiracol. It is also interesting, though again not
surprising, that the local spokesperson of Leading Hotels, Gerson Rebelo,
viewed the company that he represents as a bhatkar:
“The land belongs to us, we are…the bhatkars in the traditional
sense, and whatever claims that are there on the land will be settled in the
appropriate fora. We have every permission in place”. Goa’s tenancy law echoes this
outlook where it is clear that if a land parcel, which includes mundkars and agricultural tenants, is
sold, then the purchaser buys the land with the obligations to comply with the
provisions of the mundkar and
agricultural tenancy laws. Normally, the practice is that when a bhatkar sells that land, the purchaser
simultaneously settles the claims of existing tenants, creating in this process
an unencumbered right to the property. But what the law, as well as the Leading
Hotels’ spokesperson, hides is the fact that the clout of the new bhatkar in the form of a big powerful
corporate entity makes it possible for both money and muscle to be flexed to
take over physical possession of the land.
It is pertinent to note here that
M/s Leading Hotels is a subsidiary of Asian Hotels (North) Ltd. and according
to the Director’s Report of the latter, the company holds 100% equity as well
as preference capital in Fineline Hospitality Pvt. Ltd., Mauritius (FHCPL). For
its part, FHCPL is a significant player in the global tourism economy and holds
substantial equity stakes in many other companies worldwide, including in the
company which has a substantial stake in Leading Hotels. One can clearly see
the power and reach of global capital that comes to bear on, or invade if you
like, Tiracol.
As has been pointed out, the bhatkar of the village of Tiracol was
absent in the years subsequent to the integration of Goa into India, giving the
tenants the space with which to craft a relatively egalitarian order and use
the benefits of quasi-land ownership to become small-time agricultural
entrepreneurs. But the bhatkar made a
comeback, to make a killing off the land. He sold the rights to the land to M/s
Leading Hotels in 2007. Since SATMA questioned the legality of the sale,
because the existence of the tenants was
not acknowledged and recognized, M/s Leading Hotels began to approach
individual village households to buy them off; about ten families agreed to
sell at varying rates, from Rs 120 per square metre, then Rs 200, and finally
Rs 500, showing how life-sustaining resources can be robbed from villagers for
a pittance because of their ignorance. It also shows the complete failure of
the Goan government to protect villagers, even while it boasts of its support to
the farm economy – and thus its tacit support to the land-grab. ‘Tacit’,
however, may be too obtuse a word, given the fact that newspaper
reports of over a year ago claimed that the state government had actually planned this golf project
under the Central Government’s ‘Large Revenue Generating Scheme’, in
which a state subsidy of up to Rs 50 crore can be given!
Despite everything, however, the
project was unable to take off for procedural and infrastructural reasons. But
things seem to have changed with Modi’s rise to power at the centre. The
project obtained environmental clearance despite the earlier assurances by
Environment Minister Alina Saldanha to the contrary. Although the villagers
went to court against the clearance and, with the Goa Foundation, obtained a
stay on further felling of tress, M/s Leading Hotels apparently felt emboldened
enough to try to terrorize their way into taking over the land and destroying
the orchards there.
While the issue of Tiracol was thus
on the boil, Goan newspapers also reported the opposition of villagers to a
proposed Marina project in Sancoale, close to the port town of Vasco. The project proposal had
been forwarded by the Investment Promotion and Facilitation Board to the
panchayat of the village of Sancoale. The company intending to develop this marina is M/s Yacht Heaven
(Pvt) Ltd, registered in the name of Umaji Vishwasrao Chowgule and Arjun Ashok
Chowgule.
The Chowgules, as is widely known in Goa, made their fortunes
first-and-foremost through mining operations. The close links that many Goan
real estate companies have with the mining industry is important to note, as
this is how economic, political, and social capital already in possession of
such class and caste elites, get transformed within the real estate industry,
thus pushing tenants out of their lands.
In this context, it was interesting
to note the editorial in O Heraldo (19 May, 2015), which talked about the popular opposition to such mega
projects, taking two of the most recent examples, the blatant goondaism at
Tiracol and the Marina project at Sancoale, as cases in point. The editorial
revealed how the Investment Promotion and Facilitation Board (IPFB), which has
the current Chief Minister Laxmikant Parsekar as its chairman, would try to
circumvent the locals as well as government bodies like the Pollution Control
Board and the State Bio-Diversity Board. One of the members of the IPFB in a
private conversation revealed to the editor of O Heraldo that since the “IP[F]B has given its approval, the
project proponents can go to the pollution board and tell them to better give
permission since the IP[F]B has the CM [Laxmikant Parsekar] as its chairman”.
The editorial further notes that this “shows the mindset of a body made to
clear projects at a rapid pace to meet the very ambitious investment target of
the government”. What we can see here is how a narrowly framed conception of
‘development’ is being used by the Goan government in collusion with corporates
(bhatkars of a different kind) to
push the people of Goa off their land.
So, what we see is that, although
the mundkar and agricultural
population in Goa is not able to forge alliances with similar beleaguered
communities across India and the world, more bhatkars – in the form of national and global capitalists – are getting added to the old ones in
Goa. These national and multi-national corporations have allied themselves with
the local Goan bhatkars and thus
combine modern as well as traditional power to drive out the mundkars and the agricultural tenants
from their ancestral homes and the lands that they have long tended.
First published in DNA (web) on 31 May, 2015, here.
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