THE ANATOMY OF RESISTANCE: SOCIETY AND PROTEST

India’s bid to be a superpower, or at least economically dominate the region of Asia has guided many policy decisions in the last decade or so. The Mopa airport is part of this scheme. Ever since the airport was proposed, circa 2000, India’s economic policy has consistently promoted airports and projected them as a way to allow small cities or towns, and rural areas to partake of the economic benefits of a surging economy, while also opening up these spaces for the investment of global capital and infrastructure development. The brunt of this ‘development’, as is all too familiar for Goans, has to be borne by the people on whom it is forced – especially the marginalized ones. The idea that smaller undeveloped areas can be included in the circuits of a surging economy – in turn benefiting the people of these regions – by massive injection of infrastructure investment simply does not hold water.

This neoliberal model of development has also met its opposition. In recent times we are familiar with the opposition to mega projects at Tiracol, Sancoale, Mopa, and Vasco as defining the political discourse in Goa. The massive, and hitherto unprecedented, public hearing in Vasco demonstrated that spirited public debate poses a challenge to governmental inefficiency and generally misguided policy making. The resistance that is shaping up in Vasco in comparison with other recent cases can help us identify the forces that are crucial in the success and failure of people’s resistance against development. Simply put, why did a public hearing this effective take place in Vasco and not in Mopa?

To begin with, one has to look at what is being opposed. Coal pollution is visible, its effects felt immediately through respiratory disorders, whereas clearing large chunks of forests changes the climate and ecology slowly, at times almost imperceptibly. This perhaps impacts the urgency with which people mobilize. The literacy rate and the access to higher education also have an impact on the protest and resistance for a particular place. Even if the literacy rate stands at 83.63% at Mopa, there is an absence of professionals such as lawyers, whose skills and clout come in handy in times of crises. Vasco on the other hand has a good number of such professionals – lawyers, teachers, doctors – who can contribute to the fight. Moreover, while Vasco contains a diverse population of people – diverse in terms of education and social background, Mopa’s villages largely have farming and pastoral communities, or communities belonging to the bahujan samaj. The 2011 Census reports that there are about 70 persons belonging to the Scheduled Castes communities. These communities are rather scattered from each other, while the area that is marked for the Greenfield airport is a lush green plateau that is largely forested.

If the fight for Goa’s identity and environment must go on and won in the favor of its people, it needs the active support of diverse sections of the society. In the same way, one can think of how certain pockets of Goa which contain small communities need the support from outside resources to make their voices heard. These ‘outside resources’ could be access to higher education or professional education to its members, access to centers of judicial and executive power, and access to media platforms so that grievances once articulated reach the widest possible people. Linked to the issue of internal collaboration is the ability to understand that local mobilizations are connected to other struggles elsewhere in the world. Thus, activists in Vasco were able to include the struggle of people in Carmichael, Australia as part of their own discourse of protest. The same, however, is not observed in Mopa despite the fact that there are global movements against aerotropolises, and many places in Poland, South Korea, Taiwan, and Nepal are fighting against the development of mega airports.

However, the most crucial factor that affects the success or failure of protest is the social background of the communities that are fighting to protect their rights and/or the environment. Many of these developmental projects are situated on lands that subaltern communities use for their sustenance. Further, marginalized communities are deliberately divided amongst themselves by selective offers of jobs, or some other largesse which is denied to other marginalized communities within the same area.

We can also think of the importance of literacy and education as being crucial in understanding the policies formulated by the government. Many of the families living in Mopa had received notices informing them of the government’s plan of acquiring the land. However, these notices were in English which resulted in most of the people having very little clue of what was happening. In this context, it was heartening to note that activists during the Vasco hearing demanding that all material pertaining to the project, including the minutes of the public hearing, be made available in other local languages – a procedure which the government machinery had failed to follow.

Thus, it would appear that the way a society is structured and the way this very society treats its subaltern members directly impacts its ability to resist power and annihilation. Moreover, if governmental policies and private capital is constantly able to move ahead despite the express wish of the people then it is an indication of how democratic processes have failed many communities within a particular society. And in the final analysis, how there isn’t equality amongst all Goans.

(First published in O Heraldo, dt: 22 November, 2017)

ACTIVISM, IDEALISM, AND REALITIES ON THE GROUND

Irom Sharmila’s recent loss in the Manipur Assembly elections has sparked off a debate. Many commentators, largely on social media, were shocked to learn that Irom Sharmila only managed to get 90 votes. These commentators contrasted Irom Sharmila’s bad show at the elections with her 16 years of struggle against the draconian Armed Forces (Special Powers) Act, or AFSPA. Many felt that Irom Sharmila’s long and arduous activism should have resulted in her sailing through; or at least ensured a close fight against her opponent.

Like in Manipur, Goa also witnessed a few activists jumping into the electoral arena. Some contested as independent candidates, while others contested on the tickets offered by political parties. In most of these cases these activists performed very poorly. The focus of this article is the activist of a particular kind who contests elections after trying to reform the system from the outside. This activist is deeply connected with localized, environment-related, socially conscious movements and generally hails from the marginalized sections. As such an activist does his/her activism at a huge personal sacrifice. Their activism, by default, makes them anti-establishment.

I would like to briefly discuss the activism of Ravindra Velip, who unsuccessfully contested in Sanguem. The rampant destruction caused by the mining companies in cahoots with the Goa government forced Velip to oppose this destruction of his native village of Caurem. Leading several agitations, Velip and his fellow-activists were arrested in March 2016. Here he suffered a murderous assault. Velip and his fellow villagers in Caurem – a village largely populated by STs – were not necessarily opposed to mining per se but refused to put up with the illegalities of the mining companies and the government. They rather argued that the locals had a claim to the resources of the village, wherein most of the benefits will go to the people of the area rather than giant corporations. Contesting in the constituency of Sanguem, which contains many mines, Velip brought his experiences as an anti-mining activist to his campaign. Indeed, he used his experiences to articulate a politics of change. But the end result was dismal – Velip only received 658 votes.

If one follows Velip’s interventions in the public sphere, it will be clear that his politics is neither lacking in activism nor in idealism. So why did such activism and idealism not translate into a thumping victory? To this, we can suggest that there is a gap between idealism and how people vote. On the other side of the issue, there is also a gap between ideals and how power is brokered once representatives are elected. Recent events leading to the formation of the Manohar Parrikar-led government have shown that electoral verdicts can be turned upside down in a matter of few hours. What happens and what is said behind closed doors is not known to the general public. Removed from the public eye, these negotiations operate in an economy that subverts any politics of idealism.

Away from the corridors of power, it is believed that ‘the people’ form the keystone of the electoral process. If the poor performance of activists in this election is any indication, then it appears that other factors come into play that make people vote for the status quo. One can observe that votes are cast on the basis of the ‘cult of the personality’. This person generally emerges as a leader by making it big in business and/or facilitating the bureaucratic and legal difficulties of the people of his area. He/she is an activist of another type (in common parlance, a ‘social worker’), the quintessential person who gets your work done. This person due to being rich, or of dominant caste, or due to an extensive personal network that he creates habitually reaches out to people in times of need, even if he is conveniently not addressing the structural set up that has caused the problems for the people in the first place. Often this ‘cult of the personality’ neatly fits into the aspiration of various caste groups; sometimes people simply vote because the candidate belongs to their own caste.

What also takes precedence as well over idealism is the access to basic amenities in towns and villages.Voting is done on the basis of how effectively a candidate can deliver development, which in common parlance means water, electricity, roads, or at least claims to effectively deliver this development once elected. (Such a development is not the same as the other type of development which the government promotes through mega-projects). These issues, closest to the lived reality of the people, resonate more effectively than idealism that claims to overhaul the entire system.And, painful as it is, we have to accept that money and other such favors are also exchanged that do affect the outcomes of elections.

To be fair, many activists have actively worked against the exchange of money during elections, and to bring about transparency in the corridors of power, but the fact that it makes very little impact on elections, or on persons in the higher echelons of power suggests that issues of basic amenities, and local or caste-based loyalties take precedence over the current form of idealism.The activist and his/her idealism cannot tackle such well-entrenched power structures as easily as one might think.These ideals seem to not work if pitted against the ‘cult of the personality’ and the exchange of money for votes. Even the anti-incumbency wave doesn’t seem to have much of an impact.

Considering such realities that affect whom people choose to vote in elections,activists need to think more deeply how idealism needs to be compatible with the complex decisions that people make whilst voting. It will be quite tragic if politics in Goa does not get enriched by the huge sacrifices made by activists from marginalized communities, and if principles of liberty, equality, and justice are not deepened in Goan politics. Or else, we will only witness more power struggles detrimental to public interests.

(Illustrations by Angela Ferrao. First published in O Heraldo, dt: 29 March, 2017)

COLONY LOST?

An article in The Guardian recently claimed “artists” and “hipsters” to be the new agents that drive the process of gentrification. Though the article was about the current situation in Britain, similarities could be drawn with Goa’s own fraught tourism-led development. According to the article, artists and hipsters “are the neoliberal state’s troops”. Artists first move into certain areas that seem to have decayed or have not developed, and “sow the seeds of cultural capital. ... Both artists and (some) of the hipsters – the ones who haven’t ‘settled’ yet – will move on, exploring, breaking away (again), developing new potential sites for capital investment. And so the cycle of gentrification starts all over”.

The Goan parallels with the quote above may not be obvious on first reading. Goa’s unchecked development of the tourism and real-estate industry started with Goa being exposed to the neoliberal economic setup of India. What has this to do with the influx of artists and hipsters in Goa? The idea of Goa as a ‘touristic heaven’ or a ‘pleasure periphery’ was constructed on a Goan landscape that was populated by agrarian villages, making the acquisition of  real-estate, in due course of time, elite status symbols coveted by the artists, writers, and the upwardly mobile professionals from Indian metros – or the catch-all desi misnomer, “culturewallahs”. The neoliberal economic setup and the easy mobility afforded by the Indian nation-state led to the large scale gentrification of sea-side villages that we are witnessing today – a process either exemplified by the rise of ‘mega projects’ or the emergence of ‘Portuguese houses’ as markers of chic and luxurious lifestyle.

Another parallel is how people who drive this gentrification in Goa can leave anytime for better pastures. Very often the “culturewallahs” who move to Goa claim that their commitment to Goa and its people is much deeper than a sudden decision to shift to Goa. It is not simply an investment in Goan real estate. However, a recent assertion by Deepti Kapoor, who had moved to Goa but has now decided to go elsewhere due to the deteriorating situation here, testifies to the skin-deep character of this commitment. It also reveals the disaster that gentrification is, for Goans, who unfortunately have to live in the mess that such a development leaves behind. What does Goa get out of this? Art? And what is the relevance of such art?

To say that the affluent global and Indian elites can move to Goa due to the financial resources available to them is only half the story. This is why we need to dwell on the notion of ‘colony’ in relation to gentrification. Like the colonies established during the height of European imperialism, the ‘colonies’ established by the real-estate industry have an element of exclusivity to them. One’s social location determines who gets access into these ‘colonies’. To think of gentrification as a process by which ‘colonies’ get established allows us to see that rather than being harbingers of modernization and progress – or of art or culture – they are, in fact, a recapitulation of South Asia’s age-old and timeless hierarchies. 

It is the emergence of such ‘colonies’ that defines the ‘brand value’ of Goa in recent times. These gentrified places, while a good economic investment, also simultaneously become a refuge for the rich…a utopia tucked away from the hustle and bustle of the world. Thus, while these places are physically enclosed by way of allowing access only to a privileged few, they are also cut-off from the social and political realities of the world. Only when these utopian places are threatened for any kind of reason – then one sees a remarkable outrage that gets blown out of proportion.

 

Pic: Vishvesh Kandolkar

Consider the recent case of the unfortunate murder of a perfume-maker who had made Goa her home. Her death was mourned by a huge outrage. The critique that the same attention was not paid to another murder which happened on the same day is insufficient. The reason why one person’s murder was discussed down to its last detail and the other was almost ignored was also due to the fact that the other murder occurred in a nondescript ‘vaddo’. To be fair, most of the gentrified neighborhoods that have emerged in Goan villages have been constructed in various ‘vadde’, but the gentrification makes all the difference. Compared to the genteel location of the murder of the Goa-based perfumer, the nondescript ‘vaddo’ in a Goan village is insignificant.

Juxtaposing the social and physical locations of the two murders allows us to see that the comments by numerous glitterati and literati to declare categorically that the crime against the perfumer signaled the demise of the once great Goa, is nothing but a fear of losing privilege. It is not an outrage marked by concern for Goa. For the same people couldn’t care any less when large chunks of Goan land were (and are) grabbed from ordinary, hard-working Goans. Considering that most of the land grabbed from Goans goes largely to build resorts, second-homes, and ‘colonies’ made available for the disposable pleasure of the same elites, one can understand why there isn’t any outrage.

Gentrification thus is a process by which localities get taken over by the rich, simultaneously pushing out the locals. It is also a process by which the locals are slowly rendered powerless. Goa’s problem with gentrification does not need any outrage or lamentations of demise, but to recognize first that the problem exists, and what and who engendered it. 

(First published in O Heraldo, dt: 26 October, 2016)

COLONIZING GOA: THE INVASION OF LOCAL, NATIONAL, AND INTERNATIONAL BHATKARS

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.

This is the process by which Goa gets colonized, one mega-project at a time.

First published in DNA (web) on 31 May, 2015, here.