I agree with the views expressed by all the people who have said that life was simple, easy and corruption free during the Portuguese era. But we were denied our self respect and civil liberty and were treated like inferior human beings by these colonial masters. This outweighs all the disadvantages brought by liberation.
It is distressing to observe many of our Goaneters feeling that liberation of Goa by India was infect invasion. Sadly We still have supporters of Portuguese rule in Goa. How these unpatriotic people with slave mindset tend to forget the tyrannical 451 years of foreign Portuguese rule who had adopted crusade of forced conversions of Hindus to Christianity, demolished Hindu temples and, and their most bitter act of repression , the horrors inflicted by the Goa Inquisition inducted between 1560-1814. By supporting the Portuguese rule they are insulting the sacrifices made by our freedom fighters many of whom lost their lives fighting the Portuguese forces to attain freedom for Goa. The Portuguese refused to give up their colonies in-spite of repeated requests of India since they assumed that India had renounced the use of force and would not attack them. But both the Prime Minister Nehru as well as the defense minister, Krishna Menon made it clear that India would not fail to resort to force as an option, if all diplomatic efforts to make the Portuguese give up Goa fail. The struggle was two fold, from within Goa and from the Indian Government outside Goa. After a decade and a half of diplomacy and failure of the US diplomatic intervention on the Goa issue India liberated Goa on December 19, 1961 with bloodless use of force and integrated it in the Indian Union. Vinay Natekar
