This is an abridged chapter from a Goan who was disillusioned with the newly independent Indian nation. QUOTE Ever since India's covetous designs on Goa were made manifest I had know that the only way the Goans could retain Goa for themselves was for them to return to their motherland. I had been preaching to my fellow countrymen in Bombay that we should sacrifice what we had in India to retain what we have in Goa - a spiritual and cultural legacy besides our homes and our lands enriched by the sweat and dust of our ancestors. I had more than the average Goan has in India. I had position and income. I had a home and property worth more than a hundred thousand rupees. I also had children whose education and future was bound up with India as that of any other Goan family residing there. I did not advise them to do anything which I was not prepared to do myself. It was a story of frustration and flight. Frustration came to me from disillusionment. And disillusionment comes to those who build their hopes on things as they might be, instead of things as they are. My illusions were the hopes on which was reared. My tender years were spent in Bombay. From the age of ten I was nurtured with nationalistic ideas. My maternal aunt was a born politician and she was perhaps one of the first persons of Goan origin to become a member of the Indian National Congress. She was rich and adopted my brother and myself into her household, as also many other nephews. She made us wear khadi and the white cap as early as 1918. I well remember those hectic days. There were mass meetings, mile-long processions, lathi charges, police raids and secret purchase and sale of Congress bulletins. Peter Alvares, who later was to be the arch conspirator against Goa, was with me at school. We lived alongside each other and were in fact great friends. We also came from the same village in Goa and it is surprising how the same village could have bred, if I may so put it, the poison and the antidote so near each other. The last time I met Peter Alvares was when I was a well-fed servant of the Government of India and he a hungry socialist. We differed violently in political matters, but somehow managed to remain friends. Reared in this atmosphere, and my working life having brought me into contact with British snobbery, I became a rebel. Fortunately my rebellion was not against individuals or a race. I rebelled against injustice in the abstract, and it did not matter who was the perpetrator. I was natural therefore that the great rebels of the age would become my heroes. There was idealism in their rebellion; at least there was in Mahatma Gandhi and I expected his followers, particularly Pundit Nehru, to have the same idealism and the same honesty. Nehru was a hero to me and at the time I believed her was motivated by the highest ideals. Destiny however intended that I should take a closer look at him, and in time, made me a worm in the Mountbatten organism. Worms have a great advantage when they look up at the world stage and at the actors thereon - no one notices a worm and therefore no attempt is made to hide from the worm those things that are hidden from more conspicuous eyes. I looked up in the faces of men, heard their whispers compared notes with other worms and came to my own conclusions. If the walls of the Viceregal Lodge had ears, they would compile a history very different from that of the official historian. There were Lord Mountbatten, Mahatma Gandhi, Jinnah, Nehru, Vallabhai, Liaquat, Sarojini and hundreds of others, strutting, drifting, hurrying and scurrying down the corridors, each bearing the impress of his own mental worries. I was there in the Marble Hall, when Lord Mountbatten proclaimed the surrender of India to the Congress by swearing his loyalty to India as her first Governor-General. I was in Delhi and in Simla when hatred broke loose and killed a half million men, women and children with a savagery the world has never seen or heard of. Then came the events in Kashmir, Junagadh, Hyderabad and finally the murder of the Mahatma by Brahmin intrigue. I was privileged to weep and pay my last homage to the one and only man who could prevent the tyranny of the oligarchy that rules the Indian Union today. It was said that said that Godse's was the only finger that pulled the trigger. Who knows whose was the body or which the brain that planned the murder? The death of Shyam Prasad Mukherjee had also started doubts in many minds. The lack of scruple displayed in the matter, as in the case of Goa, has made me suspect that not all the Mahatma's murderers have been brought to book. ONE THING IS CERTAIN AND IT IS THAT THE MAHATMA WOULD NEVER COUNTENANCE THE MEANS EMPLOYED BY NEHRU AND HIS COTERIE TO SUBDUE THE GOANS TO HIS WILL. My disillusionment however did not come until India had settled down after the birth pangs of independence. It is said that a single straw may show the way the wind blows and my disillusionment came from the analysis of two decisions which Pundit Nehru took while I was in Delhi. I had read Nehru's speech at the Indian Science Congress, in 1946. He had told us that India was a country of naked starving people who had to be given food and clothing before one talked to took to them of God or philosophy. I expected that he would give food and clothing priority even above God, when it came to be his business. When I saw that Nehru took to himself the portfolio of foreign affairs and passed the portfolio of Food to a wily lawyer, I began suspecting the sincerity of Nehru. The next act which confirmed my suspicions was the fact that having taken the portfolio of foreign affairs, he started denuding the Delhi Secretariat of Administrative Personnel in order to staff the embassies abroad. I knew that all the European members of the Indian Civil Service had resigned en bloc when India became independent. The burden of departmental administration had therefore fallen upon Head-clerks and Office Superintendents. The most capable having gone, the removal of the next best to staff Indian Diplomatic Missions abroad confirmed my suspicions that this Nehru was another of those egotists who have scourged the world, urged on by the belief that they could mould the world in their own image and likeness. UNQUOTE To be continued in part II: Roldaum (Roldao Anton Souza) sees the start of decay corrupting the new Indian Government encouraged by those on the top. He concludes that there is no hope for India when the tyrants that rule encourage Government Officers themselves to break, by-pass and subvert the laws. He plans to seek refuge in his native Goa knowing that with his loyalty to Portugal, he will face inevitable arrest in India. There is much work to do there and he prepares for flight. He hopes with faith that many Goans will return and that Goa will rise higher, a continuing beacon to a darkening India. Roland. Toronto.
