--------------------------------------------------------------------------- **** http://www.GOANET.org **** --------------------------------------------------------------------------- 2008 International Goan Convention Toronto, Canada
http://www.2008goanconvention.com --------------------------------------------------------------------------- STRAY THOUGHTS: By Rajan Narayan [The Goan Observer, July 19-25, 2008] Feedback to [EMAIL PROTECTED] ---------------------------------------------------------------------- Margao photojournalists fake Moti Dongor sword picture? And a few more stray thoughts and a few more observations for yet another Sunday. For a Sunday following the week when the Goa Bachao Abhiyan had strong reservations over accepting the draft Regional Plan 2021 which has reportedly been finalized. For a Sunday following the week when the Sangh Parivar-backed citizens' welfare committee accused the GBA of becoming part of the government. For a Sunday following the week when the Times of India carried a report claiming yet another attempt to topple the government by Vishwajit Rane. For a Sunday following the week the editor of The Navhind Times, Arun Sinha, sought the help of the Editors' Guild to take on Penpricks. GBA UPSET AND a few more stray thoughts on the strong reservations of the Goa Bachao Abhiyan (GBA) on the draft Regional Plan, which is ready and likely to be made public very soon. When the draft Regional Plan 2021 was circulated among members of the Task Force, which includes Dr Oscar Rebelo, the convenor of the GBA, it was discovered that rules or guidelines on acquisition of land by the Central and State governments were included in the draft Regional Plan. This is being strongly objected to by the GBA which has rightly pointed out that the rules pertaining to acquisition of land by the government are not relevant to the Regional Plan 2021. It may be recalled that the consultant to the Town and Country Planning Department, Edgar Ribeiro, was asked to frame the rules by Chief Minister Digamber Kamat following the uproar over the amendment to the Town and Country Planning Act, which exempted State and Central government projects from the purview of the Regional Plan 2021. LAND SHARKS IT may be recalled that during the last session of the legislative assembly, obviously under pressure from the patrons of the land sharks, an amendment was made to the TCP Act, exempting not only Central and State government projects but even land acquired by the state for the benefit of private parties from the purview of the Regional Plan 2021. This was strongly objected to by the GBA, which pointed out that the amendment would defeat the very purpose of entrusting the preparation of the new draft Regional Plan to the independent Task Force. Though privately the Chief minister, who is the chairman of the Task Force, kept assuring the GBA that rules would be framed to prevent abuse of the amendment, the GBA did not receive an official response to any of the three letters it wrote protesting against the amendment. Moreover, though draft rules for the acquisition of land by the government were included in Appendix X of the interim report of the Task Force, the Chief Minister has not committed himself to even adopting, leave alone enforcing, the rules. In the meanwhile, pressure mounted on the convenor of the GBA, Dr Oscar Rebelo, to present an ultimatum to the Chief Minister on the amendment to the TCP Act. It will be recalled that, last week, the GBA made it clear that it would not settle for anything short of the abrogation of the amendment to the TCP Act which exempted Central and State government projects from the purview of the Regional Plan 2021. It is against this backdrop that Dr Oscar Rebelo had reportedly refused to endorse the draft Regional Plan 2021. Indeed, the Convenor has been under pressure to withdraw from the GBA and was savaged by the saffron group within the GBA for having endorsed the interim report. The reluctance of the Chief Minister Digamber Kamat to make any commitment on the demand for scrapping the amendment has strengthened the hands of the fanatics and lunatics in the GBA and made it embarassing for the moderates to continue to defend the Task Force. Indeed, there is every possibility that the GBA will be hijacked by the lunatics and fanatics, or marginalized by Sangh Parivar-promoted groups if it makes any compromise on the demand that the government should scrap the amendments to the TCP Act. SANGH PARIVAR AND a few stray observations on the continuing attempts by the Sangh Parivar to marginalize the GBA. It may be recalled that recently a group of individuals and organizations sympathetic to, if not close to, Manohar Parrikar attempted to start a rival GBA, deceptively called GPA. Unfortunately for Rajan Parrikar and company, who had promoted the GPA, it did not receive any significant response from even the more established NGOs, leave along the 'aam aadmi'. On the contrary, even in the internutting world where the Sangh Parivar and its sympathizers have a strong presence, the audio visual presentation of Rajan Parrikar was dubbed as destructively provocative. Which reportedly promoted an unprintable response from Rajan Parrikar. PARRIKAR LINK THOUGH the GPA failed to take off, the Sangh Parivar has started another front against the GBA in Margao, through a newly-formed organisation called Citizens' Welfare Committee. The Citizens' Welfare Committee has issued an ultimatum to the Chief Minister Digamber Kamat demanding the scrapping of the Margao ODP, alleging that it was as diabolical as the scrapped Regional Plan 2011. The Citizens' Welfare Committee is headed by a close associate of Manohar Parrikar, Sanjeev Raiturkar. There are no two questions that the Margao ODP, just as the Taleigao ODP and the Panjim ODP, was rigged by politicians to favour land sharks. There are no two questions that the GBA, for whatever reason, has been unable or unwilling to take up and pursue the issue of the diabolical ODPs fabricated by the planning and development authorities to favour land sharks and extort money. But, apparently, the Citizens' Welfare Committee also has a hidden agenda that goes beyond demanding the scrapping of the Margao ODP. It is obvious that the Citizens' Welfare Committee is being promoted as a Sangh Parivar alternative to the GBA. The secret agenda is exposed by the remarks of the convenor of the citizens' committee, Raiturkar, that the GBA "has gone to sleep and today is part of the government." If the Citizens' Welfare Committee wanted the support of the GBA in their undoubtedly laudable objective of having the dubious Margao ODP scrapped, they could have approached the co-convenor of the GBA for the South, engineer Shridhar Kamat. The fact that they did not do so and their unwarranted insinuation that the GBA was part of the government, exposes their real agenda. At the same time, we do believe that the GBA should seriously address itself to the scrapping of the OPDs. In fact, the PDAs have been uniformly corrupt and should be abolished altogether. There is absolutely no logic in excluding the urban areas from the purview of the Regional Plan 2021. It would be absurd to have a set of guidelines for sustainable development and growth in rural areas but exclude urban areas from the purview of sustainable development and people-friendly land use. TIMES OF INDIA CLAIM AND a few stray thoughts on the claim of the Times of India that Digambar Kamat had survived yet another toppling bid by the group of eleven. Though the TOI does not mention Vishwajit Rane, it is clear that he is the first-time MLA from North Goa who is alleged to have masterminded the latest toppling bid. The story only shows how desperate the TOI is to establish itself even if it means cooking up stories. There is no denying the fact that Vishwajit Rane is unhappy with Digambar Kamat. The source of the unhappiness is Digamber's continued opposition to SEZs. It is an open secret that all the three SEZs which have been allotted land by the IDC and were approved both by the Centre and the State governments have the patronage of the Ranes. Indeed, it was during the tenure of Rane as chief minister that the allotment of land was made to Meditab, Raheja and Peninsula SEZs. But Vishwajit is fully aware that the Centre is not inclined to replace Digamber with papa Rane. Indeed, it was the refusal of the Congress High Command to accept the yuvraj's demand that papa be made the chief minister in preference to Ravi Naik that resulted in the compromise choice of making Digamber the chief minister. And surely a national paper should know that the Congress High Command is extremely unlikely to entertain any demands for change in leadership when the future of the Congress-led UPA government at the Centre itself is at stake. Indeed the reason why all the toppling bids against Digamber Kamat have failed so far is because of the TINA factor. The ground reality is that there is no alternative to Digamber Kamat. Not that Digamber is the most competent Congress MLA. But the rebels cannot agree among themselves on who should succeed Digamber Kamat. Much as the yuvraj may dream and hope, there is no possibility whatsoever of Pratapsing Rane being acceptable to the Congress High Command as an alternative to Digamber Kamat. In fact the last time around, it as made clear to the Yuvraj that if Digamber was replaced, the chief minister's kodel would go to the first choice of the high command -- Ravi Naik. And even though Ravi Naik's vocal chords may have been affected in the course of his recent cardiac operation in Bangalore, he is still not as voiceless as the high command or the yuvraj presumes. AGITATION, IRRITATION AND a few stray observations on the agitation and irritation and fury and rage of The Navhind Times editor, Arun Sinha, with the anonymous journalists who run the blog called Penpricks. Indeed, the principal item on the agenda for the meeting of the Editors' Guild convened by Arun Sinha last Friday was the Penpricks blog. Not just Arun Sinha, but editors of all newspapers in Goa are sore about being taken for a ride by Penpricks. The blog, which is run by a group of disgruntled journalists, most of whom being former employees of Herald, issued a fabricated press note claiming that a notorious Nazi war criminal had taken sanctuary in Goa, who had then been arrested just across the Goa border in Karnataka. The blog claimed that the Nazi had exposed his cover when he had sought to sell an expensive organ to some private party. The scam was planned meticulously with a neo-Nazi type symbol morphed into the letterhead, claimed to be issued by some German organization. None of the local papers, or for that matter many of the national papers, bothered to check out the story with either the German embassy or the Karnataka and Goa Police, and carried it, some of them very prominently. The editors were left red-faced when the blog Penpricks revealed that the whole story was a scam which it had fabricated to expose the incompetence of editors and senior editorial staff. The Nazi scam came on top of a succession of exposes; many of which were close to the truth over the working of the media in Goa. In the past, the Penpricks blog had conducted a sting operation exposing how the former editor of the Herald, Robin Abreu, had expressed his willingness to sell not just editorial space but the Holy of Holies, the editorial itself to an advertiser. It also had partly established that the former editor of Herald, Robin Abreu, was in the habit of plagarizing from editorials from other newspapers. RAJAN DEAD Penpricks has been quite unfairly fair or fairly unfair in targetting all editors and publications though, relatively speaking. The Navhind Times and Herald have been its principal targets. The Goan Observer has, of course, been one of the favourite whipping boys of Penpricks. To the extent of not only accusing me of being a yellow journalist but even declaring me dead. IN fact, some who saw only the heading declaring me dead and did not read further, really thought I was dead or at least seriously ill. I received several calls from close friends and several friends kept calling each other to find out if I was seriously ill and had been admitted to hospital. Arun Sinha raved and ranted and was insistent that the Editors' Guild should file a criminal complaint against the Penpricks blog to the Director General of Police. I was present there entirely by accident, or maybe because Arun Sinha thought that as a victim of Penpricks I would endorse his campaign of vendetta against them. I have nothing against the comments that the Penpricks blog makes, including the comments they keep making about me. I think they are revealing, sometimes a little irritating and very often hilarious. I must admit that they have tended to be very personal and malicious at times. But unlike Arun Sinha, I have no objection whatsoever to media blogs that are critical of people in the media. But I do believe that those who wish to criticize others should have the courage to identify themselves. I believe that the cloak of anonymity with which they surround themselves is despicable. Those who run the Penpricks are behaving like whores -- a community who it has been famously said exercise power without responsibility. I fault the Penpricks for their cowardice and not for their comments, which in any case I treat with contempt. SWORD SCAM AND a few stray observations on the sword conspiracy, not of the migrant Muslim residents of Moti Dongor but by the photo journalists of Margao. The photographs of swords that appeared in several newspapers were not of the swords seized by the police from the truck owned by Bashir Sheikh, the main accused in the Moti Dongor sword seizure case. I understand that the photograph that was carried was actually a staged photograph of swords that were borrowed for the photograph from a business establishment which stocks 'nakli' swords for 'natak' companies doing historical plays. Apparently, the photo journalists of Margao were very upset with the DySP Umesh Gaonkar over the beating up of one o their colleagues by the police. They were further enraged when Umesh Gaonkar refused to show them the swords which were seized. So they decided to teach him a lesson and allegedly entered into a conspiracy to fake the photograph. They went to a costume and props supplier, got some 'nakli' swords from him, photographed them and sent it to the publications they were associated with, claiming that it is a photograph of the swords seized. And the editorial staff of the newspapers, none the wiser, published the photographs, not having any reason to suspect that they were photographs of fake swords. If the editors object to the postings on the Penpricks blog, they should be equally furious and indignant and agitated over the duplicity of the photo journalists of Margao. In fact, this is not the first time the photo journalists of Margao have engaged in such dubious practices. I recall being a victim of the dishonest photographers myself when I was the editor of the Herald, when I was sent morphed pictures showing Dayanand Narvekar behind bars in the police lock-up. Though the truth is that Narvekar successfully manipulated things to ensure that he did not spend even an hour, leave alone a night, unlike Mauvin Godinho, in the police lock-up. Feedback to [EMAIL PROTECTED] -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... 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