Devil May Care
Published on: June 6, 2010 www.navhindtimes.in
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Opinion
THE resignation of the Tourism Minister, Mr Francisco Pacheco might
prove to be the beginning of the end of a very ‘eventful’–both in the
positive as well as negative sense–political career.
Mr Pacheco appeared from nowhere and defeated Mr Churchill Alemao in
Benaulim, gaining the image of a giant-killer, for few would have ever
imagined Mr Alemao, with his folksy vibe with the masses much like
once-upon-a-time Lalu Prasad, could ever lose in his borough. During the
years to follow, Mr Pacheco would star in several successful and
unsuccessful attempts at enthronement or dethronement of somebody as
chief minister, collecting with other participants better ministries as
gifts dispensed by the Santa Claus of the new chief minister. But then
he also earned fame for brash, unruly, reckless behaviour and
statements, his victims being from ordinary persons who came in his way
to cabinet colleagues to right up to chief minister. He seemed to have
little control over his temperament and tongue.
He was tolerated because, thanks to Goa’s highly fragmented polity where
every village thinks its own way and elects whoever it thinks it should,
he was important to any exercise in ministry-making or –breaking even by
the power of one vote. Mickky is the price the state has to pay for its
super-democratic democracy where every village decides without thinking
of who are going to run the state smoothly for five years as a majority
in the Assembly. Day in and day out we hear NGOs and angry citizens
hanging the ‘chalis chors’ by their verbal noose in public forums and
private conversations, but nobody would ever bring those villagers to
dock who exercise their franchise without any sensibility to stable
governance. The irresponsibility of voters has got a lot to do with the
political instability that has been the state’s longest-surviving plague.
http://www.navhindtimes.in/content/mickky-evades-police-third-consecutive-day
Mr Pacheco represented a new trend in politics, a trend that has also
been witnessed in other states, in which to be a politician was not to
be a wise, decent and restrained and conventionally dressed one but to
be a devil-may-care, rough, loose and unconventionally dressed one. This
trend supposedly represented the younger generation of politicians. Just
as the youth were supposed to behave as a different class with respect
to their elders, so were the politicians of this generation were to be
wild and iconoclastic with respect to the politicians of the older
generation.
Nobody expects the younger generation to be the same as the older
generation. But when you are in a profession there are certain norms and
values that you have to adhere to. You can be different, but you cannot
be self-willed. You can be different, but you cannot be perverse.
Because by being self-willed or perverse you encroach upon the basic
human and civil rights of other persons who might not challenge you if
they are helpless and might if they decide to.
The problem with Mickky was that he would not care about other persons’
rights–that was perhaps his nature, which was strengthened several times
by his consciousness of the power he enjoyed as a minister. The truth
about the tragic death of the 27-year-old Nadia of Loutolim will take
some more time to come out through the investigations of the crime
branch team entrusted with the probe, but whatever Mickky’s initial
responses were, to the media and to the investigating officials, would
strongly suggest that he was hiding facts he was aware of (if not guilty
of). His very first reaction to the media was that Nadia was a ‘family
friend.’
This was at best a vague description. It could suggest that the family
of Nadia and the family of Mickky were friendly, exchanging formal and
informal visits, sharing each other’s concerns and helping each other
out in cases where help was needed or sought.
It could mean that Mickky knew Nadia’s family and used to visit them and
help them when they needed or sought help. But this could never mean
that he had an ‘affair’ with Nadia, which her estranged husband had
alleged in his petitions in two pending cases in the court. In a
European country or America, a politician suspected of having an affair
with a deceased woman would have made a public statement, admitting or
denying it. In Mickky’s case, there was no word. That was in line with
the brash, wilful, stubborn attitude of the new generation politicians:
To hell with the system.
http://www.navhindtimes.in/opinion/devil-may-care
