Notes from after the Rally

The response at the rally held at the Azad Maidan last week, to protest the communal violence toward Christian minorities, was overwhelming. Yet, one can’t help feeling (to use a phrase from chemistry) that the equation was somewhat unbalanced. The incompleteness of that demonstrative moment we could attribute to matters both said and unsaid.

Of what was said at the rally, perhaps the most disturbing was the statement that we are members of the nation first and then members of our religious communities. Fact is, it is this insistence on the primacy of the nation is exactly the reason why we are in the mess we are contemplating today. The Indian nation was constructed on a curious mix of the Anglicized culture of the upper castes of India and technology. For those who had the necessary social capital, namely possession of the English language (and the associated culture), an upper caste history or identity, and an ability to engage in the technological ministrations of the nation-state, this national identity worked very well indeed. For those who did not posses these markers, and whose social capital rested either on a lower caste identity, or a religious or other identity, or indeed participation in a different economic and technological world, the nation-state’s primacy meant only slow and certain death. The rise of lower caste groups and religious communities protesting this upper caste control of the state was a natural outcome of this insistence on the nation-state before other identities. The demand of these groups was simple, do not ask us to be something that we are not. Accept us the way we are and let us be. The response of the nation-state in its turn was the saffron terror that is increasingly being unleashed to retain the hold of those upper castes in control of the state.

The argument being forwarded here is not to insist that we should necessarily place our religious identities prior to the State. On the contrary, the question being asked is; what happens to those people for whom this national culture – itself cast in the cultural language of certain (predominantly Hindu upper caste) groups – does not make sense at all? Thus as a Muslim, or indeed as a Goan who prefers my Konkani in the Roman script and the lilting phrases of Sashti Konkani, this primacy of a nation, that does not recognize my needs or mocks my existence does not make sense at all. Clearly the way out of the conundrum we are in lies in getting out of the nationalist rhetoric, and recognizing that we are individuals and communities that have a right to continuing our way of life, without having the nation-state or its extra-legal demon armies breathing down our backs.

Moving on, they say that you can always fight a known enemy. It is when the enemy is unknown that you have no clue as to what strategy to employ. And indeed, it was the issues left unsaid at the rally, that are the most troubling and disturbing. The rally was called by Catholics, to protest violence against Christians in various parts of the country and spoke of the need to end the madness. Through this framing of the issue, the Catholics came out looking like lambs bathed in wool, perpetual victims at the altar of communal frenzy. This may be the partial truth in other parts of the country, but it definitely does not hold good for Goa. In Goa, it is the Catholic who is part perpetrator and part silent accomplice to the systematic campaign of hatred against the Muslim. It is because of the knowledge of large-scale Catholic participation in this Muslim persecution, that it was possible for that Saffron activist to make a public call to Catholics and Hindus to unite and send them packing out of Goa. The laudable ethical position to take at the rally- one drawing from the laudable Christian tradition of confession - would have been to openly speak about this persecution that the Goan Catholic is actively engaged in. Unfortunately, no one spoke about the real issue, preferring to bury these real issues, under the outdated, sickly sweet talk of Indian secularism, where are all bhai-bhai. In the end problems are resolved only by speaking about them, not by ignoring their existence.

In this sense the rally was a total failure, because we failed to make use of a literally God-given opportunity to preach to the flock who had gathered entirely unconscious of their own bloody hand in the carnage that goes on around us.

The large presence of Catholics at the meeting however, was problematic at another level.

The manner in which we use our religious identity can be distinguished between two forms; religion as ideology, and religion as faith. In the first a religious identity is mobilized to create a universal identity that is primarily political in nature. This process erases internal differences to create an artificial and monolithic community. Like in an army, one responds to the call of the bugle, and does not, or cannot question why one is being summoned, or the cause one is being asked to lend one’s support for. On the other hand, one has religion as faith, where one contributes to a cause prompted by one’s belief in the ethics preached by religion. On what basis did the many participants attend the rally at Azad Maidan? Did they attend as members of a political identity responding to a call, or as members of a faith community protesting the perpetration of violence? To mobilize Christians primarily on the basis of ideology would leave us open to perpetuating the very violence we seek to protest. It is precisely religion as ideology that is relied on by both Islamic fundamentalists and the Hindu right wing to draw members to its causes. As Christians in India are drawn into this fire-storm, it would be useful to keep in mind, that there is a way out of the trap. This way (for the Indian and Goan Christian) would draw from Christian ethics, and protest violence regardless of the identity of the oppressed. When necessary it would be fully conscious and cognizant of our own contributions to persecution and violence. To be fair to the Catholic Church in Goa, it has since the time Archbishop Rev Filipe Neri Ferrao has taken over, initiated a variety of steps to bridge the gap between the Catholic and those of other faiths, including the Muslims. It is unfortunate though, that these necessary overtures by the Archbishop have not been welcomed by some within the body of the Church.

Despite this raising of the dilemmas arising from the rally held on the 16^th of this month, the fact that the rally was held was in itself useful. It should be seen as a necessary first step towards combating the rightist take over of the Indian state. What we should keep in mind however is that the solution is not going to come through heightened nationalism, but heightened respect for the differences of other groups. And secondly that if the Goan Catholic is truly desirous of peace in Goa, it must first make the overture of peace toward the Muslim community it has by and large been sinning against.

(Published in the Gomantak Times 24 September 2008 as "Azad Maidan Rally: Combating the rightist takeover)

[The Council for Social Justice and Peace, a forum of the Archdiocese of Goa, and the Inter-Religious Dialogue for Life, organised together a rally to protest the atrocities against Christian minorities in Orissa. Subsequent to the announcement to hold the rally, violence against the Christian groups in Mangalore and other parts of Karnataka broke out, allowing the rally to doubly express the concern of concerned groups, not just Christian. Helping out at the rally to collect signatures, I collected a small amount of Muslim signatures as well. The overwhelming presence of people attending was Catholic however. This rally was one of the larger rallies that Goa had seen, with the central square in Panjim literally engulfed by a sea of humanity.]

Strange Tales from the Indian Republic: The Police and the Innocent

A strange Kafkaesque scenario grips the Indian republic. In the course of the pogrom in Gujarat, victims testified that the police either didn’t land up on time, stood silently by while the mob did their job, or fired upon the victims rather than the aggressors. In Fontainhas when a right-wing mob attacked road signs, the police stood by and looked on. Subsequently this has happened again, a few weeks ago, when a Hindu nationalist group sought to violently take over the open space of a housing colony in Porvorim. The police reportedly stood by and watched as the Hindutva brigade attacked the members of the Housing colony. In Mangalore, as saffron groups go on rampage, attacking one Christian institution after another, reports are coming in that the terrified Christians are obtaining practically no support from the police. On the contrary, angry Christian youth who gather to protect churches and prayer halls are being rounded up and sent to the lock up. In Quepem recently, the local Hindutva brigade threatened to create trouble if the local Muslims were allowed to offer namaz in a space rented for that purpose. As a result the police suggested that it was the prayers of the Muslims that should not be allowed since it would create a law and order situation. More recently the Taleigao Bachao Abhiyan was not given permission to announce its public meeting via a loudspeaker attached to a vehicle, because it could possibly pose a problem for the maintenance of law and order.

In every one of these cases we see the innocent being punished by the police as a result of the acts of an aggressor. The police in many of these cases pleads its inability to deal with any breakdown of law and order and thus muffles the voices of the protesting innocent. How does one make sense of these repeated occurrences; of police silence in the face of aggression against minorities of various sorts in our country?

The most common response from civil society is to label such actions as a failure of the police to follow the law. In this event, the police are seen as aberrant in the moment and needing disciplinary action to bring them back to the straight and true path of the law. This perspective I believe misses the point. The police are the arm of the State established precisely to ensure the operation of the law of the State. If it fails in this primary action, there would be serious talk about its dissolution and reconstitution. As we would know, there is no such talk about the police system in the country. On the contrary there seems to be a trend toward increasing the arbitrary and detentive powers of the police in the country. As such it appears that to think about these actions of the police as being random mistakes by compromised officials does not in fact hold good and we need to look for another way to understand this situation.

As an integral arm of the State in maintaining law and order, the police should necessarily be seen as the perfect weather-vane to fathom the State’s current understanding of the law. Through this logic, the police should be seen as necessarily embodying the practice of the law, as sanctioned by the State.

It is possible that the initial response to this argument would be derision. However, think again; and you will realize that in fact, it is merely our expectation that the law of the land will be just. This expectation from the law is derived in part from the assurance of the state that it will provide justice. This assurance and consequent expectation from the law is a necessary requisite for the existence of a liberal state. As history will show us however, there have been umpteen times when people have been forced to violently overthrow the law in operation in a state, precisely because it is not just.

The justice of the law is not to be presumed, it must be evidenced from its actual operation. In large part, the State defines the law and all too often, if it serves its interest, the law as actually defined by the State need not be just and fair to the segments of the population. Fact is the State holds an ambiguous relationship to the law, where it claims to be bound by law as much as the people are, but very often slips outside of the control of the law. A wonderful example really of this escaping from the law, as the amendments to sections 16 and 16 A of the Town and Country Planning Act, where the State is effectively excused from following a Regional Plan. It can make amendments to this plan and not be bound by democratic norms of transparency and accountability. This is a classic case of the law being used to excuse the State from being bound by law

Clearly then, in a situation where the reality of the law is often not what it is claimed to be, we need instruments that will decipher to us what exactly the contents of the law really are. In such a situation, the operation of the police becomes a perfect indicator to understand these contents of the law.

If this way of understanding the actions of the police holds good, then their actions which could be systematically documented would indicate to us that the content of law in the republic is by and large no longer justice to all. The law has been perverted to such an extent that the right of people to riot and hold the democratic practice to ransom is being considered the norm, and those who suffer are held to be violative of public order for protesting against this violence.

To be fair, the Indian state has been founded on violence. Ever since the days of its founding, the Indian state has employed force, particularly against those on the margins of our society – dalits, tribals and the poor, as it force-led the nation toward ‘development’. As local business interests have flourished and India emerged supremely self-confident into the global market, this violence has however increased. The violence we see today, being directed toward religious and caste groups is but a logical progression of this perversion of the Indian state.

This comment on the police and law should not be read as a call to boycott or stop reliance on the police of the State and country. On the contrary, our calls on the police must continue if only to persist in demonstrating the manner in which they flout norms of justice, fairness and equality. Our continued calls will also hopefully serve the purpose of exposing the contradiction to such an extent that reform in the entire system will become a necessary option. And at the end of the day, we must not forget to salute those within the police and the State who continue to uphold a notion of justice that is sensitive to those on the margins and in vulnerable positions.

(Published in the Gomantak Times, 19th Sept 2008)

Patna 2008 to Goa 2011: Drawing the links between Patna today and Goa tomorrow

Spending the latter half of last week in Patna drove home the truth of a saying prevalent in the city. “Hell is prohibited for those who spend ten whole years in Patna”. The flood of the Kosi may not have impacted Patna, but it does not need a flood to complicate daily life in this once proud city. It has to rain hard for just a half hour before the roads get flooded. Things are made worse by roads that have collapsed into the sewers below. In other places the man-holes seem to have floated away, in both cases providing invitation for the unsuspecting to fall into them. In many places there are no roads, only craters filled with dark slush, forcing the already chaotic traffic to find place on the roadway that remains. On the sides of the roads huge mounds of garbage and slush rise, flowing into the craters when the rains descend. Even more reason to avoid the potholes. That is not all though. Ever since the monsoons began, 12 people have been electrocuted to death thanks to live wires finding contact with pools of water. Over the weekend, my own colleague felt a surge of current as he sought to open a metal gate and let our car through. Truly this weekend, I passed through the gates of hell, and felt relief when finally reaching Goa.

And yet, the misery that inhabits the city has not prevented the seductive bounties of consumerism from establishing themselves prominently in the city. Old buildings are pulled down, and high-rise buildings reach into the sky and malls draw you into them with the false promise of decent public space. These buildings exist merely as islands in the sea of wretchedness that is the fate of most of the numbed citizens. Step outside your high-rise where you can create your own little private paradise, and you are back into the urban collapse of Patna 2008. Indeed, as the urban anthropologist Rahul Srivastava points out, such islands of precarious luxury are possible in India, only because of the poverty that is the norm in the rest of the city.

How did this city get this way? Patna’s urban woes can be said to have begun with the attachment of the estates of Bihar’s feudal elite. Left without the rental income from their agricultural properties, the one way they could make money was to sell off their urban properties, in many cases the land around their homes, and raise high-rise buildings. The result was the chewing up of Patna’s urban fabric. Goa’s rural-urban fabric is being torn up today for similar reasons. Goans are waking up to the fact that the State has not really invested in making Goa productive for its citizens. The result of this lack of investment is that the land they own, is the only resource that Goans possess, which must be sold if they are to make a transition into the global economy. If there was no creative solution to the crisis that the abolition of the zamindaris threw up, there is no serious response to this lack of investment by the Goan state. Captured as it is by politicians playing the role of middlemen, the sale of land and conversion into housing developments continues unabated. The result as many of us in Goa have rightly foreseen, is an urban disaster scenario not unlike the one that Patna is witness to today.

The high-rises and malls that emerge in Patna, are also based on another principle, one being assiduously followed in Goa. The right to profit of a real-estate developer is to be secured at all cost; regardless of the costs to the environment, or the general public. As such, if one has money, and sees a business opportunity, one could take an old house, or an orchard, and convert it into a high-rise building complex. It matters not whether the city (or the village) has the capacity to deal with the sewage and solid waste that this complex will generate. It matters little if this will result in a quantum leap in the amount of vehicles on the roads. It matters little what the impact will be on the electricity and water requirements of the people. Based on the land-use rules created by a blinkered bureaucracy the buildings come up, and (quite literally) pave the way for urban disaster. Clearly then, what emerges is the need for something that is being followed neither in Patna, nor in Goa; coherent socio-economic planning that is he basis for sustainable land-use planning.

The GCCI and various professional groups recently paid a visit to the Chief Minister protesting the setbacks to business in the state that the sustained public movement in Goa is allegedly creating. It’s a pity they didn’t make a case for rigorous socio-economic planning that would result in a hassle-free environment and a stage for sustainable development. But then, as in the atomized society that Patna plays host to, it appears that these groups are really after immediate personal profits rather than the sustained generation of profit for an entire society.

It is an atomized society that creates the peculiar environment that Patna is witness to. It creates enclaves of difference, in a sea of normality. Thus you have little islands of upper and middle class existence co-existing side-by-side with absolute and shocking poverty and degraded conditions of living. The lives lived inside the malls and the high-rises are not normal, they are an aberration. The normal condition is the condition that one finds spread out across the city, between islands of high-rise. In the course of my stay in Patna, I stayed in a compound located within a working-classs Muslim neighbourhood. The compound hosted around five high-rise buildings, all of which were populated by middle-class Muslims. In this situation too we have the playing out of difference and normality. What is being created, through the creation of an environment of fear in the city, are Muslim ghettos, where Muslims are forced to huddle together for security. The perverseness of the situation is such though, that even within their ghetto, society creates conditions where the oppressed cannot find solidarity amongst each other. And so it is, that within the larger ghetto, a smaller ghetto is created of middle-class Muslims, pitched against their working class brethren.

Xenophobic Goans love to project Goa as radically different from Bihar, blaming the (Bihari) migrant for our problems. The sad truth however is that we are not very different from Bihar. On the contrary, we are actively creating Patna-like situations in Goa. Give us a few years and we may not have to live in Patna for ten whole years to find ourselves a place in heaven. Hell will exist right in our own Goan backyard.

(Published in the Gomantak Times 10th September 2008)

Offerings of Silence

The events of the past one week have been extremely disturbing. For at least a week now, Christians in Orissa have been the target for groups of extremists who have been doing to these Christians in Orissa what was done, not so long ago, to the Muslims of Gujarat. From news reports we hear that while the Government is able to contain violence in urban areas, in the villages it is a free-for-all as Christian villagers flee to the jungle at sunset to save their lives from their hunters. The only crime of these Oriyas is that they are Christian and according to the supporters of the slain Swami Laxmanananda Saraswati, the killers of the Swami were Christian.

Meanwhile in Mangalore a venerable healing institution, Fr Muller’s Hospital was attacked by a mob with alleged links to Hindu extremist organizations. The reason for this attack? A girl who attempted suicide was brought in, and owing to the refusal of her family to shift her to the ICU succumbed to her attempt to end her life. This provided the mob with reason to vandalize the premises of the hospital claiming negligence of the doctors.

In Goa, trouble has been brewing in Porvorim since Janmashtami where, once again, a bunch of Hindu nationalists have violently usurped the open space of a housing colony and established a shrine there. According to reports, rather than prevent the clash between these nationalists and the residents of the colony who were out to protect their open space, the police stood by as mute spectators.

In another incident that occurred only the day before yesterday, the Muslims of Quepem were prevented from praying namaz in a building that they had taken on hire. It is the month of Ramazan and a time for more frequent offering of prayers. Objection was brought to this hiring of the hall, and the Muslims compelled by the local authorities to give up the use of the hall and congregate in a household instead. Further more, they were told to pray in congregation not five times a day, but two times a day. The authorities were no doubt acting in the ‘public interest’ attempting to ensure that there was no ‘provocation’ and invitation for communal conflagration. But what sort of justice is this? A group goes about obtaining permissions and meekly hires a hall (rather than take over public space) to offer prayers in the course of the most spiritually intense month in their calendar. A known troublemaker in the area objects to this. And so, it is the law-abiding citizen, who in the public interest is prevented from exercising his right to freedom of religion, so that the fascist element at large is able to enjoy free rein?

There are two elements that unite these four episodes. The first is that there is no logical or justifiable reason for provocation of violent attack on the minorities in this country. That you are minority is enough and even the whisper of a rumour is justification for violent action. The other element is the inability or the unwillingness of the State to take any action that will set matters right. Porvorim is not the only place where police have reportedly remained as mute spectators to communal violence. This happened in Gujarat, and this happened in Fontainhas, Panjim. These two elements combine to confirm to us the steady rise of the Hindu right in this country as it bullies not just non-Hindu minorities, but even those Hindus who chose to differ in opinion and practice from these extremists. We are seeing a consistent pattern where the law is being used to silence the oppressed rather than control the aggressor.

In the face of this bleak scenario therefore I can offer you this week only silence. The silent sorrow that mourns lives lost, the silence of betrayal when faced with a State that seems unwilling to protect, the silence of shock when one realizes that one’s very existence is unwelcome.

"Sometimes the silence can be like thunder" - Bob Dylan

(Published in the Gomantak Times 3rd September 2008)

Ecological Mandalas: Aesthetic Notes from Portugal

From the 18^th of this month, the Instituto Camões in Panjim has had on display images of the works of Alberto Carneiro, a prominent Portuguese artist. This particular exhibition represents the latest of a series of exhibitions that the Institute has been organizing for some time now, representing a reopening of dialogue between two cultural spaces that were suspended, somewhat uncomfortably, subsequent to the actions in 1961. What is refreshing about these exhibitions, and in particular the exhibition of the works of Alberto Carneiro is that they introduce us to a Portugal substantially different from the Imperial representations of the colonial era.

The works of Alberto Carneiro do not draw from the Imperial Portuguese tradition, and with the sole exception of a work titled Vessels Ploughing Never Before Navigated Seas, make no reference to the Age of Discoveries or similar imperial imaginations. On the contrary, the imagination that Alberto Carneiro employs is one from the agrarian heartland of Portugal. Carneiro was neither born and nor raised in the Portuguese metropole or former centers of the empire and presents therefore an alternative perspective into the Portuguese mind and the sources of its inspiration. A Field After The Harvest For The Aesthetic Pleasure Of Our Body is
an installation composed of dried sheaves of corn tied into bundles, arranged upright on the floor. It celebrates the cycles of agriculture suggesting an alternate source for aesthetics and sensorial pleasure. Beyond agriculture though, it is nature (that is if one wants to see the two as distinct) that forms the inspiration for Carneiro’s work and the materials with which he crafts his art. The Cane Plantation: Memory-Metamorphosis of an absent body is presented to us as one of the works that marked a fundamental departure from his earlier works. Subsequent to this work wrought in 1969, Carneiro would work primarily around ‘ecological’ themes and their relation to our bodies and the relationship of our bodies to these ‘natural’ stimuli. Indeed, thanks to his authoring of Notes for a Manifesto of Ecological Art Carneiro is hailed as a pioneer in encouraging the utilizing of an ecological idiom in contemporary art. In doing so, Carneiro’s work opens up a mystical path toward contemplating contemporary existence and its relationship to nature.

The opening of the doors of mysticism in ‘69 seems to have Carneiro towards explorations of the traditions of the East through the 80’s and the 90’s. The ‘Eastern’ influence is manifest through his utilizing the motif of the mandala to structure his installations. A Tree Is A Work Of Art When Recreated In Itself As A Concept For A Metaphor is a particularly impressive work of this category, which one wishes one had a chance to encounter first hand and not merely through the photograph of the work on display in the exhibition. Arranged in a vaulted cellar, Carneiro has arranged a mandala-like placement of mud, tree roots, branches and twigs to make the meditative point rather elaborately articulated in the title of the work. Despite his acknowledgement of Eastern influence however, one can sense the urge towards expression in the form of a mandala in his work entitled A Forest for Your Dreams wrought in 1970.

It is a real pity that the Goan audience has to encounter Carneiro primarily through photographic representations of his work, since the scale of a number of his works are significant, more easily absorbed through immediate and intimate encounter. Indeed, it appears that this is the manner he would wish his works to be encountered. Since the late 90’s it appears that Carneiro has taken his art from out of the confines of the gallery space and released it into the expanse from which he drew inspiration. We have as a result the Mandala of the Forest in Ireland, and the Mandala of the Landscape in Quito, Ecuador, and the House of Earth and Fire in Ordino, Spain. These mandalas are truly monumental; the first two composed of tree trunks rooted in the ground in conversation with the environment around them. These installations would perhaps also serve the larger role of prompting popular contemplation of our relationship to the environment. The Mandala of the Landscape for example, is one that forces our contemplation of the devastation of natural forests in countries of the Third world.

While Carneiro’s works are prompted by an ecological ethic, the works prompt certain questions. I was lead to these questions when viewing the image of his work entitled The Orange Grove.

In this work the spectator is confronted with a triple representation of an orange grove; in sketch, drawn and projected - and also with the orange tree itself and its fruits, all of it arranged on a bed of earth that includes an audio recording (an auditory representation of the orange tree) that speaks of the relation between the earth and the orange tree during the different seasons of the year. What was troubling was the extraction of the orange tree from its ‘original’ context and placement within the space of the gallery. Does this whole arrangement of ecological art not lead at some point to making a fetish of the natural environment? Rather than exposing ourselves to the aesthetics of the agrarian life, arguably more rooted in the earth, do these art forms in fact suck ecology into the cycle of capitalist consumption? For example, what is the manner in which the materials for the installation are procured? Do they come via an anonymous transaction, or are they sourced from a landscape and community one is in communion with? Do such installations then merely act as token acknowledgements to the need for an ecological sensitivity, in that process maintaining these aesthetic and the cultural patterns they emerge from perpetually on the periphery?

The Carneiro exhibition is a wonderful example of the manner in which the Goa-Portugal dialogue could be resumed. It manages to avoid the exclusivist parameters of earlier dialogue, and open new ground for a democratic conversation between related cultural spheres. One hopes though, that photographic images of originals will soon lead to more substantial exhibitions from the Instituto Camões. The Carneiro exhibit is on display until the 2^nd of September and open to viewing weekdays from 10 am to 5:300 pm. Catch it while you can!

(Published in the Gomantak Times 27th August 2008 as Ecological Mandalas)

(All images courtesy Instituto Camões)

Calling for a Mystical Renewal of the Goan Condition

This column appears on the eve of the Konnsacho Fest, the great harvest festival of my adoptive village Taleigao. Tomorrow the gaocars of the village will march to the field from which the corn is traditionally cut and subsequently distribute it among themselves. The feast however is being celebrated alongside rumors that dark forces seek to purchase the traditional field of corn, even as the physical context within which this field now sits is sought to be transformed. There are plans to plunge a ten-metre wide road into the heart of green that surrounds the field of the konnos. But it is not just the operation of speculative real-estate development that threatens the continuation of the Konnsacho Fest of Taleigao. For some years now the corn that is distributed among the gaocars of the village is not corn from the field of the konnos or from the fields of Taleigao, but grain purchased from outside of the boundaries of Taleigao. Materially this may not affect the celebration of the feast, but the feast is not just a material event. It is also an event of spiritual significance when the villagers give thanks to the deity for the bountiful harvest and maintaining the environmental order and the social order that rests on it. More crucially, it is a feast that reaffirms the bonds of the villagers with the land that sustains them. To obtain corn from outside the village is to retain merely the material aspect of the festival, asserting a certain social order, without asserting at the same time the spiritual aspect, the bonds between the village and the earth that the festival sanctifies.

In these days of Goan upheaval, much noise is being made about the need to also preserve Goan culture. Without going into that elusive debate of what exactly constitutes Goan culture, we can safely recognize that as with any culture, it is a spiritual base sustained by a physical environment that one is in communion with that sustains a culture. As in the case of Taleigao, it is this spiritual rot that threatens the Goan, her environment and culture. This spiritual rot stems from a near total divorce of the Goan from the local environment, the environment being debased to a mere saleable commodity, not regarded as a landscape replete with spiritual significance. The challenge before us therefore is not merely legal change, but simultaneously, a spiritual one.

It is in this context that the recent statements of the Goan church must be viewed as providing appropriate direction to the Goan Catholic, and inspiration to other Goans resident in the territory.

The first statement, is the more recent, where the Church of Goa, through the Council for Social Justice and Peace has asserted that it supports the right of the people to participate in planning sustainable development in their respective villages and towns, while at the same time committed to motivating the people to fulfill their duties. This statement lays the material basis for the re-establishment of our relationship with the land, the physical environment. Early in the environmentalist movement conservationists in India were faced with a dilemma. How was it that groups that had a culture of caring for the environment now plunder it mercilessly? Decades of research and policy experience has revealed that when the right of decisions over land are divorced from the people, no matter what their earlier culture, they begin to see the land as a commodity to be exploited. Any sense of communal spirit is simultaneous destroyed, in the dog eat dog world that follows. Restoring the balance with nature and within the social order thus depends on asserting the rights of local people to communal stewardship of the local resource base. As the Church has rightly pointed out therefore, the step toward reanimating the Goan spirit lies in asserting the right of the village/town over its resources. This was the spirit of the gaocarial system, and while we cannot in today’s democratic age re-create the inequalities of the gaocarial system, we can imbibe its spirit.

The second statement of the Church that merits consideration is the Pastoral Letter of the Archbishop for the year 2008-2009. The Pastoral letter lays the spiritual ground for the rejuvenation of the Goan condition, filled as it is with ecological imagery. The Letter compares faith to the fonddaro/ onddo; ponds that dot the paddy fields of Goa, to the paddy field and to the golden grain that the field produces. Indeed the very grain that we celebrate this month. Disappointment was expressed in some quarters with the choice of imagery in the Pastoral letter. The fondarro is not something nice. It is seen as the location of chickol (dirt and muck). I choose to disagree with this point of view. The letter has taken the ubiquitous feature of our landscape and converted into a sign worthy of contemplation. No longer is it merely the giver of water (important in itself). Further, the letter urges us to change our attitudes to the fondarro. Falling into the muck of the fondarro, is no longer the falling into muck, but a process of being enveloped in the life-giving waters and soil of our land. To move to this position is to be unable to see the field and its ponds as merely a saleable physical entity, but to see it as the giver and creator of life itself!

In itself the statement of disappointment is indication of how far we have fallen from a respect for the land and the person enveloped in its life-giving water and soil. The Letter does not merely point to the physical features of our land as signs worthy of mystical contemplation. It points also to the figure of the farmer as worthy of contemplation. It is true that despite Christ having lived his life among fishermen, we don’t have much respect for them, but it is possible that the genuinely mystical contemplation of the figure of the farmer will allow us to generate the respect that this figure genuinely deserves. This respect is perhaps at the bottom of the key to Goa’s solutions, since it is the disdain and disrespect that we reserve for the farmer that is in part responsible for the abandonment of the Goan paddy-fields. A result of this contempt for physical labour has ensured that even if we may not have any other work to do, we will not step into the fields for fear of the lowly status that we will then earn. An abandonment of the ideals of the farmer, indicates also our abandonment of a spirit of humility and poverty that allows the farmer to depend on forces larger than oneself. As we can see all around us in Goa, we are today animated by the spirit of fast-money-here-and-now. Nothing could be further from the spirit of the monsoon dependent farmer who earns from the sweat of her brow.

The two statements of the Goan Church should be seen as articulations of a single position. The change required in Goa is not merely legal; it must be accompanied by a spiritual renewal. The key lies not only the realization of the oft-touted 73^rd ad 74^th amendments to the Constitution, but in simultaneously rebuilding a spiritual relationship with the land and its produce. When that is done, our task will have been complete.

(Published in the Gomantak Times 20th August 2008)

Resignations, Popular Politics and the Force of Law

Dr. Oscar Rebello, formerly Convenor of the Goa Bachao Abhiyan is reported to have made the following statement while announcing to the Press his decision to resign his position in the GBA; “So on the one hand you have GBA members insisting that the spirit of these two amendments be included; on the other hand you have a situation where no one is willing to say how this can be accomplished”.

I can scarcely believe that the GBA lacks the imagination to operationalize the 73^rd and the 74^th amendments to the Constitution. Perhaps there is a lack of will to translate the radical visions of democratic planning, but then that is another matter altogether. Let us take Dr. Rebello’s statements as fact though, and attempt an injection of imagination into the body of the GBA.

We must remember that it was GBA’s amplification of the cry for Participatory planning that got the GBA a place in the Task Force for the Regional Plan 2011. Realizing the ideal of participatory planning within the Constitutional framework rests on the elaboration of the idea of the Village Development Plan contained in Article 243 G of the 73^rd amendment to the Constitution.

Art. 243 G indicates to us that the plans prepared by the panchayat should be concerned with economic development and social justice. That the two words appear together is significant, since it also points out to us the manner in which economic development must be achieved. From this point on, principles of planning take over and provide a base from which to articulate participatory planning for Goa. Participatory and sensitive planning models would argue that such a village development plan would first require the mapping of existing land uses. This is to say that we first figure out what is going on on the ground. Who is cultivating what and where, where are buildings located, which are the open spaces and what are the multiple uses they are being put to. Once this is done, you engage in a projection of how these existing demands will increase in the future, owing to population growth. Once this is figured out, you are now in a position to determine which new developments you can introduce into the area. Since you now have your facts and figures in front of you, you can predict with a good amount of certainty, the impacts that new developments will have on an area. Since you can predict some of the impacts, you can now ensure that the numbers impacted by new developments will be provided appropriate rehabilitation. For example, if we know that there are a good number of villagers using firewood, we know that we need to make adequate provisions for this firewood-using community before we axe the village forests for a government project.

Once we recognize this logic, a logic already recognized by the Goan people, we need to push it into a mechanism that will see this logic democratically articulated. The Constitution already recognizes that the Village Development Plan (VDP) needs to eventually merge with the District Development Plan. So we know what to do once we have the VDP. However, how does one articulate the VDP? This is where the ward committees come in to play. The Ward committees need to be supported by technical staff, who help them map out the various socio-economic aspects of the life of the ward, and their demand on various resources. Once this is done, the draft plan is submitted to a general body of the ward, and refined through the process of a ward level public hearing. Once articulated in this manner, the ward level maps are reworked into a village level map, once again refined through a village level public hearing process. As with the earlier process, any decision taken by the Panchayat, or the ward committee, has to be justified with elaborate reasons. The reasoning will allow the decision to stand the test of a court of law, or of the people. In other words, prevent any hanky panky. To prevent the marginalization of vulnerable groups, it is normally recommended that the mapping of these groups be commenced prior in time to the mapping of other dominant groups. This ensures that the marginal groups have the space to articulate and claim their rights to resources. While crunched and simplified to fit the demands of a column, it should nevertheless be clear that we do have a mechanism to ensure participatory local planning. This method ensures that not only are existing uses of local people recognized in a plan, but it is also possible for the State and private developmental interests to identify spaces for development with minimal resistance. When first attempted, this process will take time. However, it will lay the foundations for proper planning, which will be well worth the time.

And yet, if it is as simple as this, if this vision is now commonplace with even marginally well-schooled planners, how come this imagination has not percolated into the GBA? Perhaps the answer lies in what the Task Force sees as its goal, and not really in the lack of an imagination for popular participatory planning. While the demand of the Goan people was clearly for holistic socio-economic planning before land-use planning, the Task Force is apparently under the impression that it is required to engage only in land-use planning. As such, even if it does see this process as relevant, it does not see a role for itself in translating it into law. Since it seems to think it cannot translate it into law, or that the process of proper planning will involve a substantial amount of time, it has decided to stick to the easy bit. Take out the coloured pencils, and sketch away furiously. This may be well-intentioned, but it will not meet the demands of the Goan people. We have to recognize that the Task Force resulted from a demand of the Goan people and it should find its mandate in that popular demand. Its mandate is not to tell us what our land should be zoned as, but to set in place a legal mechanism to articulate this participatory planning process year after year. This is its primary task, one that it seems either unwilling, or unable to perform. Perhaps it is the conflicts that emerge from this situation that has had something to do with the resignation of the former convenor of the GBA?

Law exists in a tense relationship with popular politics. While law seeks to preserve and maintain the status quo, popular politics seeks to reframe the status quo. To do this, it challenges the law, seeking to empty out the obnoxious contents and fill it with processes and principles that will realize a new vision. A popular movement therefore almost inevitably stands in opposition to the law, its agenda based on recognition of the illegitimacy of the status quo framed by law. When co-opted by the State and its legal process, popular movements often flounder seduced by the ‘naturalness’ of legal process. It is time for the GBA to wake up and smell the coffee burning. A wholesale revision of planning legislations in Goa is what was effectively demanded by the Goan people, and if it is not to let us down, the GBA should stick to this agenda and demand the Task Force fall in line.

(Published in the Gomantak Times 6th Aug 2008)