--- On Wed, 6/4/08, CORNEL DACOSTA <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
> From: CORNEL DACOSTA <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
> Hi Selma
> Pray, who exactly do you mean in your statement
> below--"each and every one of us is responsible for
> flaunting the law..." Does it include poor me, minding
> my own business from some 5000 miles away from Goa?
> And if so, how please?
> Cornel
-----------------------------------------
Dear Cornel,
No ofcourse I didn't mean you but I did mean myself and a great many Goans
residing in Goa.
To give two small examples, when helmets were being made compulsory, Goan
stalwarts of personal liberty and freedom of head, were agitating to protect
the Goan from the helmet.
To cite another ridiculous example, when pay parking was introduced in Margao
to ease the traffic woes that plague that town, people vandalized the parking
meters and finally had pay parking rescinded.
The point I am trying to make is that Goans have gotten used to taking the law
into their hands. Because Goa is such a small state, a few Goans can actually
influence the law to their petty rather than collective advantage.
You may ask what all this has to do with mega-development projects? Well, one
has to ask who converted arable land to commercial land? Which panchayat gave
permission? Who turned a blind eye as septic tanks were sunk into fields or let
into ponds? If we trace all this, we will find Goans at every step of this
corruption ladder.
There is no point in hanging the "Scarlette letter", on the British or builders
from Delhi or Lamanis or Ramanis. There are too many issues getting mixed up in
what is essentially a conservation of the environment issue. To that, we have
lumped issues of Special status for Goa, trying to circumvent the market price
of land, ban on sale of land to non-Goans, confiscation of flats from
foreigners, the lawless assaults on migrant labour, the preservation of
so-called Goan identity, the banning of all infrastructural projects, the
devolution of legislative powers to Panchayats.
All of these are superfluous to the main concern, and when all the heat and
dust settles down, I assure you Goans will return to selling their land to the
highest bidder, bribe whoever they can to regularize illegalities and continue
exactly as before. Because at the end of the day, one can't legislate greed.
There, I've said a lot :-)
selma
