Rethinking Special Status - I

I laughed, long and hard, and then laughed out loud some more on reading the aghast responses to the denial of Goa’s request for Special Status. The laughter was not because the demand for Special Status is unjustified, but because the response was so obvious! Our hopes were pegged on the assurances of Chief Minister Parrikar, and the electoral promises of Prime Minister Modi. It should have been obvious at that time that the Goans interested in Special Status were being taken for a ride. There is no way that a government composed of the BJP, a party committed to the RSS vision of an undivided India, and the creation of the history of a Hindu(only) India, will ever concede to the recognition of special-ness for any part of India that does not rest on Hindu-ness.

The impossibility of a BJP government ever conceding to Special Status is not, however, what I would like to focus on in this column. Rather, I would like to suggest that the denial of Special Status by the Modi government should be looked upon as a blessing in disguise. This denial opens up for us the opportunity to rethink what it is that we are demanding under Special Status, and how we are making this demand. In other words, what exactly are the principles that underlie the demand for Special Status, and what are the implications of each principle; that is to say, who benefits from the choices made?

Thus far most demands for Special Status seem to revolve around the issue of special economic status, and constitutional clauses to ensure that only locals can own land in Goa. In other words, the demand has been restricted within the bounds of Article 371 of the Constitution. I have argued in earlier columns that such a phrasing of the demand for Special Status ensures that it is really the landed and business elites in Goa who stand to benefit from Special Status. The vast segment of former tenants really do not benefit from this form of Special Status given that local landlords can still get into partnerships with external capitalists to allow for highrise apartments and other developments to allow for more of the wild speculative ‘development’ that has characterised Goa in the recent past. Similarly, grants from the Centre would appeal to the business and industrial elites and wold not reach the common person except through possible increase in employment.

If they are intent on ensuring that they do not get cheated in the process of being mobilised to demand for Special Status then it is critical that Goans put aside an obsession with form and identify the problems they seek to address by gaining Special Status. Thus far the debate has been about saving land, identifying land sold to non-Goans as the reason for cultural peril. This argument also blames Goans for selling land in the first place.  This is a particularly unhappy argument since it ignores the fact that the non-landed Goans who are selling land are doing so because this is by and large the only way through which they can make money. The argument does not recognise that these Goans operate in a context where a system of power is in fact loaded against them.

Put simply, the system of power that I am referring to is one where Goa, its homes and its landscape are fetishized by a Indian elite. Armed with greater economic and political power thanks to the fact of a different political history under the British Raj, supported by a representational system that privileges Goan property but disregards the Goans, these elite consumers from India are able to skew the market such that it often makes more sense to sell a property, than to sustain the property. Add to this the almost non-existent support provided by the state government to maintain homes, or even diverse employment possibilities within the state, as well as a solid public infrastructure. All too often then, the Goan who sells one’s property is in fact operating against a system that is solidly weighed against them.

The Special Status we demand, therefore, must be about meaningful political equality within the country and the right to reforge the political relationship with the Indian state. Further, unless we recognise the powers that operate to cause the insecurity within Goa, any demand for Special Status result in the repetition of the history of the past fifty odd years of Goa’s presence within the Indian Union.

While making this argument I would like to especially underline the fact that almost every postcolonial popular movement to save Goan identity ranging from  the Opinion Poll, Language Issue, Statehood, to the Regional Plan, has rested on the shoulders of the bahujan Catholic men and women of Salcete. Each and every one of these movements has appealed to their insecurity and each time their aspirations have been frustrated, largely because the demand for protecting Goan identity has been couched within the language of Indian (i.e. Hindu) nationalism. These demands have failed to assert that cultural demands, where Catholics are cast as not-quite-Indian are only a part of the problem. The other problem rests in the fact that there has been no systematic development that can empower the Goan population to gather both economic as well as cultural capital.

The result has been that the Catholic bahujan of Salcete in particular have been converted into the oxen pulling the cart that fulfils the interests of Goa’s landed and business elites. These groups have always managed to use these movements to increase the scope for their autonomy. Any demand for Special Status therefore, must be one that recognises that there is a great socio-economic diversity among Goans. This demand must recognise that different kinds of Goans require different kinds of support under Special Status, and that local elites need to be restrained from exploiting the situation.

One could also make the argument, that the failure to effectively articulate issues of social and economic equality both within and outside of Goa has in fact resulted in the kind of communalisation of Goan society that we are witness to today. The interests that were served were invariably of the upper caste and business elites, but the movements were always misrepresented as Catholic. This has pitted the vast bahujan majority against the Catholic bahujan minority.

If the movement for Special Status is to provide genuine benefit to the people of Goa then it must necessarily assert that the basis for this demand lies in recognising the insecurity and marginalisation that the non-Hindu, and bahujan minorities in Goa have faced since 1961, as well as commit itself towards a vision for economic justice. Such a twining of agendas would allow for us to also address the increasing communalisation of the Goan polity. The Special Status movement would need to make alliances with the Hindu bahujan samaj, who at this moment, have been largely seduced by Hindu nationalism. Indeed, there is good reason for them to be seduced, given that it was Indian liberation that ensured that they could escape the clutches of their landlords. Additionally, this Indian liberation has also involved providing space for the Hindu bahujan through the marginalisation of the Catholic bahujan rather than opening up new avenues for all Goans. The Special Status movement needs to necessarily reach out to the Hindu segments of the bahujan samaj to ensure that Special Status will meet the aspirations of both the Catholic and Hindu segments, and that development in Goa will be egalitarian. Such a reaching out would only be possible once we start asking deeper questions about Special Status, not limit it to the issue of ownership of land, or grants and tax breaks from the Centre, and recognise that the negotations for Special Status need to be directed both towards the outside, i.e towards Indian state; as well as inside, within Goan society.

(A version of this post was first published in the O Heraldo on 8 Aug 2014)

The Goan in Goa: A Response to Aravind Adiga

In his essay “The Lusitanian in Hind” for the magazine Outlook India (2 September, 2013), novelist Aravind Adiga strives to situate the 19^th century Goan writer and politician Francisco Luis Gomes (1829-1869) as an Indian patriot while decrying how “most Indians [have] not heard about Gomes,” which to Adiga “speaks more about the narrowness of our present conception of Indianness [...].” Yet, through his essay, Adiga further perpetuates the very narrowness he warns against. In trying to resuscitate national and nationalistic interest in Gomes, Adiga explores the possibility of the Goan polymath’s canonicity solely within a prescriptive Indianness hemmed in by Brahmanical, masculinist, Anglo-centric, and ethnocentric preconceptions of what it means to be Indian. In Adiga’s estimation, Gomes can only be made legible to the larger Indian imagination if, as a Goan of the Portuguese colonial era, he can be seen as adequately Indian based on elitist particularities of caste and other constricted views of proper national and historical belonging.

While Adiga notes how Goa generally registers in popular Indian thought “as a landscape of fun,” he also pre-empts any discussion of the history of the region apart from modern India, and the impact of such historical regionality upon Gomes’ own oeuvre. Instead, when citing Gomes as having written of himself that he “was born in India, cradle of poetry, philosophy and history, today its tomb,” Adiga rushes to correlate such sentiment with Gomes having penned those words in 1861 which, in turn, would make one suppose “[naturally] enough that [the] author was a Bengali Hindu, writing either in Calcutta or London.” However, as Adiga interjects, “[Gomes] was a young Goan Catholic in Lisbon [...].” Clearly, Adiga endeavours to draw attention to the biases that exist in how perceptions of patriotism connote an Indianness circumscribed by location, coloniality, and religion. Nonetheless, rather than striking a contrast for deeper critical reflection on difference, Adiga’s purpose is to collapse all distinction into nationalist similitude as if it were “natural.”And what is believed to be natural here is that Goa can be a known quantity precisely because there allegedly is no difference between it and British-colonised Hindu Bengal, which at once reveals what the historic, religious, ethnocentric, and colonial default of the nation is as Adiga predicates it in this ostensibly neutral reasoning.

There is no denying that there were overlaps, and even collusions, between British and Portuguese colonialisms, but there were also marked differences. Although relegating it to a parenthetical aside, even Adiga must admit that “[u]nlike Britain, Portugal gave its colonies the right of representation.” This was an opportunity that was not available to the sub-continental subjects of the British Crown, not even to Dadabhai Naoroji who even while he may have been the first Asian in the British Parliament, was able to raise issues about British India only while representing a constituency in London. In contradistinction, it was from his position as a representative of Goa in the Portuguese parliament that Gomes sought to speak about the effects of colonialism on his Goan homeland and about India. Nowhere is this more apparent than in his book Os Brahmanes, or The Brahmins, written in Portuguese and published in Lisbon in 1866, making it one of Goa’s, if not India’s, first novels. What might Adiga do with other divergences in histories between the former British and Portuguese Empires in India? Not only was the latter a longer colonisation, witnessing radically different forms of inclusion and exclusion of the colonised, it also resulted in the decolonisation of Goa in 1961, much after British-occupied India. His essay can only sidestep the fraught history of India’s “democracy” in which Goans were not allowed self-determination despite much evidence of efforts in that vein. This is itself a political trajectory within which one could arguably place Gomes’ own polemical writing.

In his haste to employ a one-nationalism-fits-all approach, Adiga’s lauding of Gomes as a forgotten patriot occurs, furthermore, along the lines of an unquestioning maintenance of religious and other supremacies as the default of proper Indianness. One way the article effects this is by privileging narratives of upper caste loss. For instance, Adiga posits the notion that it was “[t]he brutal start of Portuguese rule in Goa in 1510” which caused Saraswat Brahmins “to flee their homeland in order to protect their faith [...].” This according to him was a “boon for modern India,” as the Saraswats “fertilis[ed] commerce and culture everywhere they went.”

Yes, under the leadership of Afonso de Albuquerque, there was much bloodshed of the residents of the city of Goa by the Portuguese in the early sixteenth century; strikingly, many of these victims were the soldiers of Adil Shah who, like the Bijapuri ruler of the city, happened to be Muslim. Albuquerque is in fact said to have declared that Muslims were enemies and the “gentiles” friends, which is not surprising given that he was aided in his conquest by the army of Saraswat chieftain Mhal Pai, after being invited by Timayya, agent of Vijayanagara, to capture the city in the first place. These allies buttressed the more preponderant contestation between the Portuguese and the ‘Moors’ for trading rights and privileges in the Indian Ocean. Some Brahmins did flee, as did members of other caste and religious groups who do not factor into Adiga’s retelling; consequently, their contribution to India is forgotten rather than celebrated as a “boon.” It must be pointed out that some Brahmins and others even opted to convert to Christianity. As recent research has shown, not all conversions were forced, but were calculated decisions taken by members of various groups. Moreover, in the last few years, scholars like Pankaj Mishra and Goa’s Victor Ferrão have questioned the idea that Hindus, as they are known today as a faith group, pre-existed the orientalist efforts of colonisers to classify, and lump together, discrete religious sects into one category. In addition, Adiga does not reckon with how members of the upper caste echelon who lived on in Goa sought to preserve their authority within the machinations of colonialism. As in other parts of India, Goa too bore witness to the collaboration between colonisers and higher caste groups in order to strengthen domination based on existing hierarchies.

These details fail to appear in Adiga’s narration because he predominantly restricts his understanding of Goan history to the mythologies of the Saraswat caste. In so doing, he also misrepresents the fact that the Saraswat caste was already well established through the length of the Konkan coast prior to the arrival of the Portuguese. It was this coastal predominance that allowed the Saraswats to operate as interlocutors for the Portuguese, as well as to ensure that those Brahmins who chose not to convert were able to migrate to places where they were not entirely without some social and cultural capital. The casting of Goa as a Saraswat homeland was a feature of nineteenth century Goan politics, a politics supported in equal measure by Catholic as well as Hindu Brahmin elites as they both sought to jockey for greater power. For the latter group, in particular, their power struggle was to secure a regional fiefdom in Goa against the supremacy of the Marathi-speaking Brahmin groups in Bombay city.

As Adiga repeatedly points out, despite the privileges accorded to some natives in the Portuguese colony, even elite Goans found themselves “doomed to a second-class existence.” Of Gomes’ own trial by fire at the onset of his time in the Portuguese parliament, Adiga states that the Goan politician “heard another member demand that the government rescind the right given to colonial savages to sit in a civilised parliament.” This caused Gomes to wax eloquently about the civility of Indic cultures in educating his parliamentary counterparts, a group Adiga refers to as “the carnivorous Europeans.” What is the purpose of such an authorial statement other than to ascribe some notion of purity to one group over another along the lines of casteist exclusion? While it serves to characterise Europeans as uncouth because of their presumed dietary habits, it can only do so by participating in the logics of defilement used against the many marginalised peoples in India and, perhaps, meat-eating Goan Catholics, a group that Gomes himself belonged to. Though that irony seems to escape Adiga, it nevertheless continues to establish a sense of Indianness in the article that strongly veers toward Brahmanical Hindu nationalism.

The bent of such nationalism is made even more explicit when Adiga likens Gomes to Vivekananda. The essay purports that the two had similar visions of emancipation: “Vivekananda saw education and the renaissance of Hinduism as the answer. Gomes, who believed Hinduism was spent, pointed to education and Christianity.” As one might expect of a novel titled Os Brahmanes, the book – like Gomes’ own politics and thinking – is not without orientalist or elitist notions. Albeit, in describing some of Gomes’ narrative as being “Orientalist escapism,” Adiga spotlights the novelist’s indignation at the inherent contradictions of European colonialism. The essay quotes Gomes’ novel as declaring that if “the law of Christ governs European civilisation [...] [i]t is a lie – Europe tramples upon Asia and America, and all trample upon poor Africa – the Black races of Africa are the pariahs of the Brahmans of Europe and America.” Idealism, no doubt, but it is in this regard for the oppressed beyond the confines of nation and religion that one can locate the conspicuous distinctions between Gomes and Vivekananda.

In “Dharma for the State?” - an article that also appeared in Outlook India (21 January, 2013) - writer Jyotirmaya Sharma begins by underscoring the “one phrase [...] that effortlessly invokes the name and memory of Ramakrishna,” who was Vivekananda’s mentor: “Ramakrishna’s catholicity.” The article, which is an excerpt from Sharma’s book Cosmic Love and Human Apathy: Swami Vivekananda’s Restatement of Religion (HarperCollins 2013), charges that “Vivekananda, more than anyone else, helped construct [...] this carefully edited, censored and wilfully misleading version of his master’s ‘catholicity’.” Like Gomes, Vivekananda travelled beyond his homeland in the 19^th century. Sharma records how “[i]n 1896, Vivekananda gave two lectures in America and England on Ramakrishna.” Studying these lectures, Sharma finds “that they are placed entirely in the context of the glorious spiritual traditions of India as contrasted with the materialism of the West.” While on the one hand a decided subversion of the universality espoused by Ramakrishna, the essentialism Sharma infers from Vivekananda’s lectures may also be seen in Adiga’s aforementioned pronouncement of an East-West dichotomy founded upon casteist notions of restrictive purity.

Of the lectures, Sharma goes on to mention that “[t]here are frequent references to Hinduism’s capacity to withstand external shocks, including the coming of materialism in the guise of the West and the flashing of the Islamic sword. Despite all this, the national ideals remained intact because they were Hindu ideals.” What should be perceived here, then, is not only the conflation of nationalism with Hinduism, but also the theorising of the religious state as needing to be masculinist in order to withstand purported threat. Accordingly, it is not only Vivekananda that Adiga troublingly aligns Gomes with, but also “Tilak and Gokhale” as if the only way to understand the Goan’s place in the Indian context is by placing him firmly within the male iconicity of nationalism.

Gomes’s position is much more complex that the easy binary of bad coloniser versus the suffering colonised that Adiga seems to have adopted, and it is precisely Gomes’s Christianity that sharply distinguishes him from the Hindu nationalism of Vivekananda, Tilak, and Gokhale. As Adiga mentions, Gomes may have worn a dhoti to a reception, and spoken of the hallowed wisdom of the East, as also of the hypocrisy of Western civilisation. Even so, this should not be read as representative of Gomes’ overwhelming desire to cast off his European self and wholly embrace Indian subjectivity. Rather it should be seen as a limited strategy that he, as a member of the Goan Catholic elite seeking greater autonomy within the Portuguese empire, was using against recalcitrant Europeans. If there was one position that the Goan Catholic elite of the 19^th century espoused, it was that they were capable of managing the Estado da Índia Portuguesa without metropolitan oversight because they were not only heirs of the millenarian Indian civilisation that spun the Vedas, but were also reprieved by their Christian religion and European traditions. They were not merely Indians superior to the Europeans; they were Goans superior to both the Europeans, as well as the subcontinentals because in either case they had a marker that trumped the other: ancient Indian culture against the Europeans and Christianity and European culture against the subcontinentals. Nor was the contest that Gomes was in necessarily a simple case of natives versus those with foreign blood as Adiga seems to suggest when recounting the case of Bernado Pires da Silva, who in 1835 was “[t]he first Indian to rule colonial Goa.” In attempting to craft Goan history within the narrow frames of nationalist British Indian history, Adiga fails to highlight that the Goan polity of the time was the scene of a vicious battle for dominance among the local dominant castes, that included the metropolitan Portuguese, the Luso-descendente caste, the Catholic Brahmins, the Hindu Brahmins, and the Catholic Chardos (Kshatriyas), with theatres spread over Goa and the metropole.

If Adiga really believes in the project of securing visibility for those marginal regions and personages that do not figure in usual conceptions of the Indian cultural and political landscape, this cannot be achieved without accounting for both the peculiarities of a location apart from the nation-state and the vexed relationship between the two. It is not colonisation alone that chronicles a history of the marginalisation of Goans, but also the contemporary postcolonial condition. Adiga asks if Portuguese, “the language of the Inquisition” can “be called an Indian language” as it was one of Gomes’ “mother tongues.” One could put this strange question to Sanskrit, or indeed any language used by rulers anywhere: can the language of the Manu Smriti, the language that advocated the horrifying oppression of Dalits, be called an Indian language? By equating Portuguese language and culture with the Inquisition alone, Adiga negates the formation and endurance of Portuguese culture in the former colonies. He brushes aside a whole gamut of cultural innovations by peoples, many of them subaltern, who still cherish their traditions, even if he does allude to them in passing.

The memory of the Inquisition, as Adiga posits it, either shames if one is a Catholic, or it hurts if one professes Hinduism. This essentialist rationale proceeds to permit Catholics to feel ashamed and Hindus to feel victimised, thereby leading to the victimisation of their Other. The majoritarian Hindu politics in Goa with all its trappings of casteist purity has made sure, quite successfully, with the insensitive misuse of the history of the Inquisition, as well as conversion, the perpetual marginalised status of the subaltern Goan Catholic, and those seldom mentioned groups, like Muslims. Correspondingly, language is another site of contention. Gomes’ other language, as Adiga indicates, was Konkani. Adiga rightly offers that Konkani is “now Goa’s official language,” and also that “Catholics, aware that their presence in Goa is diminishing [...], seek to protect their heritage.” But what Adiga obscures is that the postcolonial state’s official recognition of Konkani is only in the Devanagri, and not the Roman script largely used by Catholics.

For the Goan in Goa and for the marginalised elsewhere in the country, it is not useful to simply be squeezed into a preset notion of Indianness, but for that very category to be critiqued at every turn for its lack of inclusiveness by design.
          (This essay was collectively written with R. Benedito Ferrão, DaleLuis Menezes, and Amita Kanekar

 It was first published in Outlook India.com on 6 Sept 2013.)

Europeans of An Other Colour: Why the Goans are Portuguese

On 13 May, 2013, the Goan Ethernet was aflame with outrage at statements made by Sir Andrew Green, chairperson of Migration Watch, and carried in the Daily Star and the Daily Mail. The Daily Star reported, “An Indian national from Goa can obtain Portuguese citizenship if their parents were Portuguese citizens prior to 1961,” and quoted Green as saying, “They can then move straight to the UK with their family. On arrival they can avail themselves, immediately, of all the benefits available to UK citizens.” The Daily Mail seems to have been spurred on by Green’s statement, going on to claim that “[a] number of Indian nationals from the former Portuguese territory of Goa are thought to have taken advantage of the loophole. Indians living in Goa can claim they have Portuguese heritage and so claim Portuguese citizenship. They can then move directly to Britain - without ever having to visit Portugal - and bring a family without meeting any qualification test.”

Given the manner in which the matter regarding Goan access to Portuguese citizenship has been reported in the British press, as academics studying Goa and the Goan community, we believe that there is a need to redress such misrepresentations and firmly call out, not only the wilful amnesia about Britain’s imperial past, but also the Anglo-centric interpretation of colonialism, the post-colonial, and de-colonised world order that motivates such representations. In so doing, our aim is to address not merely a need for Goans and others of former Portuguese India to assert the legitimacy of their actions, but to also enable a view of the global order from a position that is more respectful of the formerly colonised.

Addressing the aforementioned inherently Anglo-centric bias of the colonial and post-colonial context requires commencing with a review of the Western European encounter with South Asia. This engagement traces back to the late 15^th century with the Portuguese “discovery” of the sea-route to the fabled Indies. It resulted in the establishment of what came to be known as Estado da Índia Portuguesa, or the Portuguese State in India, which was centred in Goa in 1510. The boundaries of Portuguese India, which extended to other enclaves beyond Goa were firmly fixed only in the 18^th century in the face of contestation with, not just local, but other European powers as well. As a result of this early entry into South Asia, by the time the British departed from the subcontinent upon handing over power to two nation-states - India and Pakistan - the Portuguese State in India would outlast their English counterparts and have existed for approximately 450 years. This Portuguese state was markedly different from the one that the British had created in the course of their time in the subcontinent. Most significant, for the misrepresentations that we seek to correct, was the fact that through the length of its presence in the subcontinent, the Portuguese state attempted to recognise natives as citizens, or bearers of rights equal to those of persons from the metropole. As a consequence, Goa was represented by non-white parliamentary representatives from 1834 when the declaration of the constitutional monarchy in Portugal created the space for a national parliament. These rights were extended universally in 1910 with the commencement of the First Portuguese Republic, only to be eclipsed somewhat during the course of the dictatorial Estado Novo, or New State, headed by Dr. António Oliveira Salazar. Nonetheless, the rhetoric of equality was firmly established and constantly referred to by Portuguese Indians, whether living in Goa, or as migrants to British India or, indeed, British East Africa where many Goans lived and worked, as bearers of Portuguese citizenship. Within this colonial framework, even if only in legal theory, racial and cultural difference was in fact surmountable.

This situation was certainly different from that existent in British India, or in any other part of the British Empire for that matter, where the only status enjoyed by the natives was as that of subjects of the British crown. As a result, one could argue that it was the failure of the British state to extend the much coveted status of imperial citizen to the comprador British Indian elites that caused members of that echelon to then set up their claim for independence from the Crown. The nationalist claims that these elites initiated rested on the creation of a national culture that accepted the racial and other differences that the British colonial system enforced. This situation ensured that extant differences were perpetuated rather than challenged.

The Portuguese State in India came to a definitive close with the actions of the Indian state in 1961, when the Indian armed forces invaded the Portuguese territory of Goa. While an anti-colonial movement was afoot in the region, the eventual decolonisation of Goa cannot be said to have resulted primarily from the anti-imperialist movements of its own soil due to the military intervention of the Indian state and its subsequent denial of the right of self-determination to the Goan populace. Additionally, in an imperialist act that was echoed in the newly independent nation’s actions in Kashmir and the north-east of the country, the formerly British India unilaterally integrated the territory of Goa into itself. If India was able to get away with this, it was because the developing post-colonial order was awash in racist and ethnocentric perspectives engendered to a large degree by British colonial practices. These were predicated on the assumption that territorial contiguity and the presence of the Hindu religion across the geographic expanse, though not exclusively or without diversity, gave India ample right to take over marginal territories such as Goa and Kashmir.

The significant fact that the Goan people were legally Portuguese citizens was given short shrift and eclipsed by an act of the Indian parliament that bestowed on them Indian citizenship. Hindered by an effectively xenophobic understanding of Indian-ness, and its relationship with the countries that surround it, in contrast to many other legal regimes, the Indian state does not permit its citizens to hold multiple nationalities. Therein, unlike British Indian subjects, in being made a part of the Indian state, Goans and other Portuguese Indians lost their Portuguese citizenship, and the ability to be both South Asian and European, only to have Indian citizenship thrust upon them, and be fixed as solely Indian.

It was only subsequent to the normalization of relations between India and Portugal that a number of former citizens of the Portuguese State of India were able to reclaim their Portuguese citizenship. It is precisely because of the unfounded allegations of the Daily Mail that it should be stressed that these Portuguese Indians are not petitioning for new citizenship, nor exploiting a loophole. What they are doing is reclaiming a legitimate right that was lost owing to the actions of the Indian state. There is no need for them to prove their Portuguese character as the Daily Mail suggests, for their parents, if not they themselves, were Portuguese, and 450 years of Goa being a part of Portugal has made those Goans as Portuguese as any other person in continental Europe who holds Portuguese citizenship. The Daily Mail’s claim is profoundly offensive since it is based on the racist assumption that only Caucasians can be Portuguese and European. This assumption is of course buttressed by the fact that the colonial practices of states like Britain considered only whites to be properly British or European.

The British nation’s historical record when it comes to matters of who is deemed British enough is a controversial one. Note that in the 1960s and 70s, the aftermath of decolonisation in East Africa and Africanisation policies, emergent from impoverishment due to colonisation, saw the vilification and expulsion of Asians who were then denied entry to the United Kingdom despite being holders of UK passports as colonial subjects. In 1972, when 50,000 Asians were expelled from Uganda by Idi Amin, the very notion of the Commonwealth was proven to be one in name only because, by 1968, the right of colonial-era UK passport holders to enter Britain had been withdrawn in response to an increase in economically induced out-migration from Kenya in 1967. It is important to stress here that not only were Asians – Goans included – in East African countries because the British administration of those colonies had recruited them, but also that their labour had benefitted the Empire. Goans were given British subjecthood to serve the colonial administration in many cases. In so much as Goans were nominally British, their UK passports served more as travel documents than a guarantee of citizenship rights, as became painfully evident in the post-colonial period. While Goans and other colonised groups had been British “enough” to serve the regime, it became apparent that was no longer the case once their usefulness had been outlived. This was a profound abdication of national  and legal responsibility, not least for the racialised political climate induced by years of British colonial rule in Africa. In fact, the colonial legacy continues to reveal itself as is the case with the revelation this year of the destruction of records relating to violent and deadly atrocities committed against Kenya’s Mau Maus who rebelled against British rule.     

For all the problems that Portuguese colonialism produced, and the racism that accompanied it, what must be underscored is that it is also differentiated by the legal rhetoric that recognised, and continues to recognise, the multiple groups outside of Portugal as equally Portuguese. Thus, the Portuguese Indians who recover their Portuguese citizenship and then migrate, not merely to Britain but across the world, trace a path similar to other Portuguese nationals who are currently in flight from a Portugal laid low by the European crisis. Portuguese legal history and flows of migration are often ignored by the largely Anglo-centric understanding of the world. The recognition of the Lusitanian milieu allows for a reconstruction of European-ness outside of the racist frameworks that currently delimit it.  It permits a corrective to the manner in which the post-colonial world was constructed along racist lines, restricting the ability of persons to freely move internationally. While white privilege has ensured an ease of travel for some, the accompanying racism leads to the outcries as evidenced in the reports by the Daily Star and Daily Mail, as well as the ritual humiliations of non-white travellers at embassies, consulates, and immigration check-points globally. In challenging this racism that underlies the statement attributed to Sir Andrew Green, there is also an option opened up for Europe wherein the racism that undergirds the European project can be challenged, and in re-understanding the flows of capital and populations that have contributed to European hegemony today, the current crisis can be utilised as a way to reimagine the European Union’s association with the world outside itself and as the product of its own history.

(Co-authored with R.Benedito Ferrão and first published at Kafila on 31 Aug 2013.)

(I would also like to recognize the efforts of The Goan Voice in drawing our attention to the reportage of Green's statements.)