The following article by Ashok R. Kavi describes in detail the language
agitation in Goa in 1987 and other important related issues. On 20 December
1986 Floriano Vaz was shot dead during the language agitation in Goa. He became
the first martyr of Konknni. On 21st December 2006 six more were killed. Many
people may not be aware of the details of their death. This article will
enlighten them with facts. The Saraswat group which dominated and manipulated
then continues to resist to amend the Official Language Act now and to give
equal status to Konknni written in Roman script. They are making use of a few
priests and Catholic lay persons who mainly use Roman script but oppose it the
official recognition! Goa is a land of paradox. After 22 years on the same day
of Floriano Vaz's death anniversary, Dalgado Konknni Akademi organises two days
First Konknni Conference (Roman Script) at Ravindra Bhavan, Margao. Let us
hope that this conference will
achieve its main objective, namely to obtain the official status to Konknni in
Roman script in the Goa Official Language Act 1987.
Dr. Pratap Naik, S.J.
SETTLING OLD SCORES
By Ashok Row Kavi was first published in THE WEEK issue of January 18-24. 1987
THE TWO chants, one childish and the other self-evident, rise louder and louder
and fall rhythmically with the swaying fronds of coconut palms in Goa's verdant
plains. As they fall on the territory's sun-scorched beaches, submerging the
roar of the waves, an uncomfortable tension grips the mind of the largely
peaceful inhabitants.
Goa's soporific calm has been shattered beyond repair. A language, which held
the Goans in good stead during the Portuguese rule, has ironically divided the
little Union territory now. Yet, little has changed. The paper stars of
Bethlehem twinkle quietly and chains of small colourful bulbs still glow though
Christmas is past and the tulsis are decorated with kumkum in the dewy
mornings. Trouble had been brewing for long, but the cauldron boiled over only
six months ago, when the lone MLA of Goa Congress, Luizinho Faleiro introduced
in the assembly a mischievous bill urging the government of Pratapsingh Rane to
make Konkani the sole official language of Goa. The bill, badly worded and
plainly provocative, was a gauntlet thrown at the Marathi protagonists in the
Congress (I) and the
Maharashtravadi Gomantak Party (MGP) who were slowly retreating from the
position that Marathi should be the sole official language of Goa. [Luizinho]
Faleiro, and his party headed by Dr Wilfred D'Souza were in fact giving hard
choices to the Congress(I) which had been trying to equivocate. But Rane
instead of deflecting the attack, invited trouble with a reflex action. "Which
Konkani do you want - the Pernem variety, the Salcete variety or the Cuncolim
variety?" he asked in the legislature, referring contemptuously to the
variations in the language found in different parts of Goa. The bill was
dismissed, but the whole incident hurt the Konkani sentiments. Party loyalties
were given the go-by and the Congress(I) split right down the middle. There
were now only two kinds of people in Goa, as desired by scheming Goa Congress
leaders: those who wanted Konkani, mainly the Catholics and the Gowda Saraswat
Brahmins, and the Marathas who considered Konkani just
a dialect of Marathi. The Goa Congress, supported mainly by the Catholics, and
the Konkani Porjecho Awaz (KPA), claiming to represent all Konkani interests
including the Gowda Saraswats as well as Christians, then decided to harass the
Maratha- dominated Congress(I). When the territory began preparing for the
December 19 silver jubilee celebrations of its liberation, the two
organisations suddenly demanded statehood for Goa and renewed its demand for
Konkani as the sole official language with added vigour.
On December 18 [1987], the KPA held a massive rally at Panaji's Azad Maidan and
demanded that Rane resign immediately. Luizinho Faleiro asked the people to
start a civil disobedience movement by not paying taxes, bus fares, and ferry
charges "to bring this anti-people government down". Faleiro also said the
"deadline given to the government was over and the KPA leaders would not be
responsible if anything happened tomorrow," the Liberation Day. Surely enough,
the next day, the whole of south Goa, comprising Salcete, Sanguem and Canacona
burst into violence. "It was too well organised to be called spontaneous," said
Collector Sinha. Roads had been blocked the previous night with boulders and
uprooted trees (more than a thousand trees had been cut with electric saws),
telephone and electric poles, billboards and even cars dragged out during the
night. A culvert at Vernem was damaged by dynamite. Barrels of bitumen were
rolled into the roads and set afire.
Seven-inch nails welded on steel plates were placed on roads to puncture
tyres. Water pipelines were blasted between Mungal and Margao.
When asked how spontaneous all this was, Jitendra Deshprabhu, an aggressive
Youth Congressman opposed violently to Rane, said: "We Goankars are pretty well
organised. This isn't all that difficult as you think it is." In other words,
the Congress dissidents knew what was up but preferred to embarrass their own
chief minister. Even Goa PCC(I) president Sulochana Katkar, a nominated MLA,
has taken the anti-Rane stand. In the legislature of 30 elected MLAs and three
nominated women MLAs, the Congress(I) has 22 MLAs including Speaker Dayanand
Narvekar. MGP has seven MLAs and the Goa Congress, one. The remaining are
independents. At certain places the behaviour of the mob was quite
inexplicable. Eduardo Faleiro, Union minister from south Goa, had declared that
he was for Konkani. Yet his house was stoned. Obviously, the fight was also
between Congress factions. And then two incidents, which had nothing to do with
the language agitation, inflamed passions. In
Margao, a teenage tough, Floriano Vaz, was shot at point blank range by
Inspector Narayan Yetale. The boy seemed to have been marked out by the
policemen from some previous enmity with the son of a local bigwig. Vaz was now
accused of trying to impose the bandh call given by the local Konkani
protagonists.
The other incident at Dongrim near Mandur village is what really set Goa to the
torch. Peter Fernandes of Agacaim had a grouse against the group of brothers
called the Parwatkars for having outbid him for the fishing rights at a sluice
gate. He sent two local toughs to break the Parwatkars' shop at Mandur, but
they were beaten up. When Fernandes's friends tried to take one of them to
hospital, they found the roads blocked by the agitating KPA men. Frustrated,
they rang the Agacaim church bell and a mob of 300 proceeded towards Mandur to
attack the Parwatkars. Suddenly it was a communal issue between Konkani
Christians and Maratha Hindus. The Parwatkars gathered 300 men of their own and
ambushed the Agacaim group in the paddy fields of Mandur. Both groups were
armed with sickles and .22 guns with the result that two persons died on the
spot and four died in hospital. It was a savage butchery with men cutting each
other's faces and genitals of the fallen.
Two days later the KPA came out with a statement that the dead were "martyrs to
Konkani". Not only that, 30 priests said mass on a platform in an emotional
funeral ceremony where some of them said that the dead youth would resurrect
like Jesus Christ to fight for Konkani.
Following this, the daily 'Gomantak' wrote a nasty editorial saying "molesters
of women have become martyrs." Whether the Agacaim boys had molested any woman
is doubtful though they are boisterous by nature. Then Chief Minister Rane
committed his next mistake. He pointed out that only Catholics were involved in
the KPA agitation. The police were given orders to arrest only Catholics. The
Hindus arrested were either let off or abused publicly as those "rascals who
have become Christians." By then, the situation had exploded in the face of the
KPA. "The agitation is now out of our control and in the hands of the people,"
said Datta Naik, the main controlling force behind the KPA. In other words,
after having inflamed passions, the KPA had no strategy worth the name. But the
interests behind the KPA, the Gowda Saraswats, the Goa Congress and the Goa Lok
Pox, now took over.
The houses of MLAs from South Goa and those of Ministers Francisco Sardinha and
Voikunth Desai were attacked. Manu Fernandes, an MLA, was forced by a mob of
over 3,000 to hand in his resignation from the assembly. Another mob proceeded
to J.B.Gonsalves, MLA from Panaji, and asked him to resign. Meanwhile, the KPA
claimed that it had got the resignation of Sripad Cuncolikar, MLA from St
Andre. Subsequently, the army was called out to patrol Margao. Fourteen
platoons of CRPF and SRPF were called out to clear the roads.
The 2500-strong local police just watched from the sidelines. On Christmas eve
the Gowda Saraswat traders in south Goa played a nasty trick. To provoke the
Christians further, they closed all shops, despite the fact that both were
fighting for the same cause. They calculated that the Christians when deprived
of the provisions and other things needed for Christmas festivities would turn
more anti-Hindu and subsequently anti-Maratha. The Gowda Saraswats could always
explain that they too were fighting for Konkani.
But the Christians still refused to be provoked. If there was no sugar for
cakes, they used jaggery. If there was no wine, they used cheap feni. It was
then that someone started a rumour that the church had asked Christians to
boycott the Liberation Day just as they did in December 1961 when India threw
out the Portuguese. There was no truth in it and Christians had celebrated the
Liberation Day with all Goans six days earlier. But this was now forgotten.
Obviously the canard was spread to make the MGP react and its president
Ramakant Khalap fell into the trap. He issued a statement that the agitation
was "by those who have not reconciled to the Portuguese being thrown out and
Goa liberated." Meanwhile, a crisis developed in the government. Ministers
Francisco Sardinha, Harish Zantye, Sheik Hassan and Luis Proto Barbosa, GPCC(I)
president Sulochana Katkar, and Youth Congress president Mauvin Godinho rushed
to Delhi, without bothering to tell the chief
minister. The information in Panaji was that they had gone to give in their
resignations, but Sulochana Katkar later told THE WEEK: "We went to tell Delhi
that the law and order situation had got out of hand and that even we MLAs had
no protection from rampaging mobs." Hundreds of tourists were stranded in
Panaji as the road between the airport and the capital was blocked at Agacaim.
Petrol was in short supply and vehicle traffic stopped completely all over the
territory. Fish, the staple diet of Goans, vanished and Panaji did not get milk
for two days.
The second development was more sinister. One morning, the Christians found
crosses broken and the Hindus saw the tulsis in their yards desecrated. THE
WEEK discovered that most of the broken crosses were in Catholic dominated
areas and similarly the desecrated tulsis were in Hindu areas. Obviously,
behind the incident were people to whom neither the cross nor the tulsi meant
anything. But their plans failed when the ordinary people defused the situation
in a magnificent manner. The Hindus offered to rebuild the crosses and the
Christians washed away the cows blood and the pigs' entrails that had been
dropped into the tulsi pots. A Punjab was averted by the Goans' pragmatism. But
the game to embarrass Rane was continuing. What the Goa Congress had hoped for
was to make it impossible for any Christian MLA to work with Rane. The
attacks on the houses of Congress(I) MLAs and ministers from South Goa were
meant to intimidate them from siding with Rane. The strategy was to polarise
the Congress(I) legislature party so that it had to rush to the MGP for support
to survive. Surely enough, suddenly on December 28, Doordarshan reported that
MGP president Ramakant Khalap had extended support to Rane. This looked a bit
incongruous because just a day earlier, Khalap had derided the chief minister
and called for his resignation for "not protecting the life of Goa's citizens
and enforcing law and order." When asked by THE WEEK about this, Khalap said:
"I have extended my support to the chief minister only on the language issue.
We cannot afford to allow the Konkani protagonists to bully him into declaring
it as the sole official language." The crisis in the Congress had by then taken
another twist. On the day after Christmas, the four ministers said that they
had handed in their
resignations not to anyone in government but to AICC(I) general secretary G.K.
Moopanar. The next day, Katkar and Godinho also gave in their resignations. By
then, the real issue, that of language had become a non-issue. Harish Zantye
stressed that he was for the dual language formula while Katkar was for
Konkani. So why on earth had they made common cause? Obviously, to unseat the
chief minister who had taken such an openly partisan stand on language?
Lt-Governor Gopal Singh was also taking an equally partisan stand. He insisted
that "only Konkani people have suffered and not the other side." This was
untrue. All the people of Goa were suffering, despite the government's efforts
to pick on only one community.
Union Minister Ghulam Nabi Azad and Mani Shankar Aiyer, the Prime Minister's
press secretary, who visited Goa did not visit the riot-affected areas but
understood what was going on; the Congress was sought to be broken up so as to
communalise the politics of Goa. Armed with this information, G. K. Moopanar
told the ministers to get back to work and gave a few assurances. Yet Rane now
had only three MLAs on his side: Sangita Parab, Phylis Faria and Chandrakant
Verekar. To defuse the crisis Rajiv Gandhi asked Union Minister Eduardo Faleiro
to take over chief ministership, but Faleiro developed cold feet. Now Delhi is
counting on three men who it thinks are capable of rising to the occasion -
Harish Zantye, Speaker Dayanand Narvekar and Shantaram Naik, MP from North Goa.
Naik has a clean image but he would have to seek a safe assembly seat. Manu
Fernandes has offered to resign his seat from Cuncolim but one does not know
whether Naik would like the job.
Narwekar is slippery and is a little susceptible to the pressures of Wilfred
D'Souza of the Goa Congress. Zantye is considered a political lightweight.
Rane is unlikely to last long as Delhi is bound to find a replacement for him
either from among the three or in someone else. But no one can deny Rane the
satisfaction of having ruled the Konkani people despite being a Maratha. But in
the final analysis, the only ones to win would be the Gowda Saraswats. They
have used the Catholics against the usurper from Maharashtra, and they would
continue to hold the strings of Goa's economy.
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