KAMAT AND MULGAONKAR: CLOSE FRIENDS, COLLEAGUES AND BROTHERS-IN-LAW By Jayant P. Mulgaonkar jayantmulgaon...@gmail.com
Gopal Apa Kamat and Pandurang Mulgaonkar were brothers in law. (Kamat was married to Mulgaonkar's younger sister.) They were also lifelong friends, professional colleagues and fellow freedom fighters. They were of the same age, being born in 1917, within four months of each other; they met for the first time in 1930 at Panjim's Lyceum where they studied together for seven years. After completing their lyceum, they taught for three years at an institute in Panjim, simultaneously studying law. In 1940, both commenced legal practice at Bicholim. Within a short time, getting known as lawyers of competence and integrity, each built a large practice. But this did not bring in corresponding financial returns. Most clients were poor, perennially hard up villagers from around Bicholim and Sattari. But no client was turned away because he could not afford fees. The Second World War ended with the defeat of the Nazis and the Fascists on the continent of Europe. But in Portugal, on the fringe of the continent, Salazar remained firmly in the saddle with his own variant of Fascism, suppressing all political activity. Even as India stood on the verge of independence and the British imperialism was on the retreat on the subcontinent, Goa was lying in a state of political quiescence, but with simmering discontent against the oppressive colonial rule. It was ignited by Ram Manohar Lohia. On June 18, 1946, he showed the way for the aspiring fighters for freedom to follow. Hundreds of inspired Goans, crossing the religious and gender divides, came out in the open against the Portuguese. In a brutal response to the nascent non-violent nationalist resistance its prominent leaders were given harsh sentences and were banished either to Portugal or its African colonies. Those who escaped this fate found exile in Bombay and other places in the newly independent India. After the initial outburst, there was a lull. In 1953, Peter Alvares became the President of the National Congress (Goa) (NCG). He was originally from Parra in Bardez. He belonged to the Praja Socialist Party (PSP). Attired in khadi, donning a Gandhi cap, he spoke fluent Marathi and English. Alvares contacted Pundalik Gaitonde, a noted Lisbon-educated surgeon, Gopal Kamat, Pandurang Mulgaonkar and many others. A committee was formed with Pundalik Gaitonde as the President and Gopal Kamat as the Vice President. Pandurang Mulgaonkar was one of the key members. The committee had the task of organising a movement by mobilising freedom fighters across Goa. On February 17, 1954, Pundalik Gaitonde was attending a private dinner, a strictly non-political gathering. But one of the speakers could not let go the opportunity of showing his loyalty to his Portuguese masters and in the course of his speech burst out saying "Aque e Portugal" (This too is Portugal). Gaitonde's patriotic pride was hurt to the quick. He spontaneously rose to register his instantaneous protest by uttering two brief words which were to become famous among the freedom-loving Goans. "Eu protesto." (I protest.), thundered Dr.Gaitonde. This declaration of protest was reason enough for the Government to pounce on Pundalik Gaitonde and banish him to Portugal. In Gaitonde's absence, Kamat headed the committee. But in a pre-emptory strike, the Portuguese Government arrested all the key leaders. Kamat and Mulgaonkar were arrested on June 30, 1954. They remained incarcerated in Panjim for some time and then at Aguada jail for five long years. The declaration of a political amnesty meant that they did not have to serve their full sentences. Mulgaonkar and many others were released on May 17, 1959; Kamat, about four months later, on August 15, 1959. A long prison term meant sacrificing promising professional careers, separation from families and the utter disruption of the lives of the family members, young and old. It was a period of great pain and suffering and the constant worries about the loved ones . But it was also a period of education and learning , companionship and consolidation of the camaraderie with fellow prisoners, many of whom they had not even met before. The movement did not die down after the arrest of its principal leaders as the Portuguese had been hoping. On the contrary, the years 1954 and 1955 saw the non violent movement in Goa reach an unprecedented peak. The armed groups of freedom fighters were also becoming active. Hundreds of Satyagrahis , mostly young men, just out of school or those who had interrupted their college studies, filled the prisons of Aguada and Reis Magos. The Portuguese had no qualms firing on the unarmed Satyagrahis coming from across the borders of the Bombay State. Most of them were Goans, led by the likes of Alfred Afonso, Anthony (Tony) De Souza and Mark Fernandes. The struggle was also attracting participation of Satyagrahis from the rest of India. Some of the Satyagrahis died the death of martyrs falling victims to the bullets of the Portuguese soldiers. Others were brutally beaten up. The Aguada and Reis Magos jails were filled as never before with political prisoners. Most of the prisoners were within the age group of 20 to 25, some even younger. Only a few were nearer in age to Mulgaonkar and Kamat. They acquired the status of the elders in that predominantly youthful congregation. Close to four and a half years, four of them -- Gopal Kamat, Pandurang Mulgaonkar , Shankar Sardesai and Nanda Gaitonde, (the younger brother of Pundalik Gaitonde) -- shared one cell. The political prisoners received books on various subjects sent by their friends and admirers outside such as were cleared by the censors. Both Kamat and Mulgaonkar took full advantage of this and the forced leisure that they were getting . They read extensively on diverse subjects. Kamat got for himself standard books on economics by authors such as Pigou, Hicks and Keynes to make a systematic study of the subject. Mulgaonkar's prison notebooks contain copious notes from some of the books he read in prison, such as Harold Laski's classic 'The Grammar of Politics'. He also devoted much time sitting with Gurunath Kelekar to compile a vocabulary of Konkani words from the works of Shenai Goembab. At the same time he was introducing Felicio Cardozo to the writings of Shenai Goembab and familiarizing him with the Dev Nagari script and Marathi. To James Fernandes he taught the rudiments of the French language. The teacher in Mulgaonkar was always alive. At other times he himself turned a student, trying to learn Italian and spending time with the young and brilliant Suresh Kanekar to polish his English. The prisoners debated the issues concerning Goa ‘s future. Here the differences surfaced and the divisions emerged. On the language issue , there was a group of Konkani protagonists and the other holding the opposite view. To the latter, Konkani was but a dialect of Marathi language. Deeply Influenced by Shenai Goembab, Pandurang Mulgaonkar was an early convert to the cause of Konkani which he believed was the symbol of the Goan identity and would be the bond uniting Goa ’s two major communities. Gopal Kamat had also read Shenai Goembab , but was sceptical of the efficacy of his cause. Supplanting Marathi by Konkani, in Kamat's view, would be doing more harm than good. Gopal Kamat , Pandurang Mulgaonkar and other likeminded leaders like Shankar Sardesai , Jose Fransisco Martins, Alvaro Pereira and many young freedom fighters came out of prison determined to carry on the fight from the Goan soil. It was no easy task. A complete absence of civil and political liberties made it impossible to hold any public meetings or to have a meaningful mass contact campaign. The Press was not free. The civil rights of Kamat and Mulgaonkar remained suspended and their right to practice law taken away. They were under constant police surveillance and their residences were subjected to the occasional searches. Purushottam Kakodkar, one of the leaders of 1946 movement, having served his prison term in Portugal, was now back in Goa and joined them. On his return, some time in 1957, Kakodkar had met Nehru and won his trust. Kakodkar was a prolific letter-writer and had been corresponding with Kamat and Mulgaonkar before their release from the jail. For an immediate resumption of some kind of political activity, they decided to demand certain immediate reforms within the existing framework. This was to be a prelude to the revival of the freedom movement. Governor General Vassalo Silva was persuaded to let Kakodkar and Mulgaonkar go to Delhi to meet Nehru, ostensibly to impress upon the Prime Minister the need to take measures to lessen the hardships faced by the Goans travelling to the rest of India due to the blockade imposed by the Indian Government. In the event, during their meetings with Nehru, Kakodkar and Mulgaonkar had wide ranging talks with him. They apprised him of the hard realities of the Goan situation. Nehru was appreciative and seems to have given an encouraging nod to their efforts to resume the struggle from within Goa. Governor General Vassalo Silva however saw in these seemingly moderate demands a potential for a more serious challenge. In June 1961, Mulgaonkar, Kakodkar and Kamat were arrested and detained in the police lock up in Panjim where they remained till their release in October 1961, barely two months before liberation . Goa was liberated and united with India on December 19, 1961. The long cherished dream had come true; the struggle had ended. Many of the exiled Goan freedom fighters returned. When the liberation dawned, Gopal Apa Kamat and Pandurang Mulgaonkar were seen as the men who would matter in Goan public life and play a major role in the liberated Goa. This was not to happen. While they could wield some influence on the turn of events in the immediate post- liberation period, as the years went by, their presence in the political sphere was to become more and more marginal. At a joint meeting of NCG leaders from Goa and Mumbai held soon after liberation an ad hoc committee was formed and Pandurang Mulgaonkar was unanimously elected its President. NCG had been a magnificent vehicle for freedom struggle but did not last as a political party. The differences between Peter Alvares and others who belonged to the PSP and those like Kamat and Mulgaonkar who had a pronounced inclination towards Nehru’s Congress Party were irreconcilable. An ad hoc committee for Goa was appointed by the President of the Indian National Congress in June 1962 with Pundalik Gaitonde and Purushottam Kakodkar as the convenors. Gopal Kamat and Pandurang Mulgaonkar were among the members. In the organizational elections for the Pradesh Congress Committee (PCC) held later, Pandurang Mulgaonkar lost, although almost all his colleagues from the NCG including Kamat and Kakodkar won. Mulgaonkar would therefore not be a member of the PCC from which the Party President was to be elected. In the contest for the President's post, Mulgaonkar backed Kakodkar. Kamat supported Kakodkar's opponent, Madhav Bir. Purshottam Kakodkar was elected President defeating Madhav Bir. Mulgaonkar seems to have struck a good rapport with Kakodkar. Kamat never got along with him and always remained his trenchant critic. This may have been one possible cause for the growing political rift between the two. The Congress list of candidates for Goa's first general elections held in December,1963 read like a freedom fighters who's who, though a couple of mine owners also figured in it. In a communally polarised atmosphere the spoils were shared between the two local parties, cobbled together only some months earlier, the Dayanand Banododkar-led MGP and the UGP led by Jack Sequeira. MGP, winning 16 seats against the 12 won by UGP, had an absolute majority and came to power. For the Congress Party the results were a disaster. It was completely wiped out. By hindsight, one sees that the Congress approach to the elections was marked by a rank political naiveté and its leadership was completely clueless about the political realities in the immediate aftermath of Liberation. Many leading figures of the Liberation movement suffered electoral loss and went into complete political oblivion. Some gravitated towards Dayanand Bandodkar. MGP, now in power with Bandodkar as the first Chief Minister of Goa, with the backing of the Maharashtrian leaders of all political hues, claimed that its victory in the elections was the vote for Goa's merger with Maharashtra. The clamour for the immediate merger of Goa with Maharashtra started getting shriller after the death of Nehru in May, 1964. Within the Congress Party in Goa there was a vertical schism, a significant number of PCC members joined the chorus for merger with Maharashtra. Mulgaonkar and Kamat stood on the opposite sides of the political divide. Their differences came out in the open in 1965 when two parallel conferences were held in Panaji at about the same time, one supporting merger where Kamat was a prominent participant and a speaker and the other to oppose the merger of which Mulgaonkar was one of the chief organisers and a principal speaker. In 1966, Purushottam Kakodkar, who had been target of a venomous campaign of calumny by the pro-merger forces within Goa and Maharashtra, suddenly disappeared. This led some of his over-zealous supporters to insinuate the hand of his political opponents in his vanishing. It turned out that Kakodkar's disappearance had been a voluntary act. He appeared in Delhi as suddenly as he had disappeared. Many of those who had expressed concern at his disappearance, now slammed him, but Mulgaonkar showed greater understanding . The opinion poll held in 1967 decisively settled Goa's political future. But whoever fathered the idea of the opinion poll was taking a political gamble. It was a close contest, a difference of just about 34,000 votes between those polled for the union territory and the votes for merger with Maharashtra. It could easily have gone the other way. Jack Sequeira on his own could never have ensured the defeat of the pro-merger forces. Sequeira was the leader of the segment of about 38 per cent stoutly anti-merger voters who had voted for his party in the 1963 elections. The share of the pro-merger MGP in that election was about 45 per cent. The battle in the opinion poll was in reality the battle for the remaining 17 per cent votes, the bulk of which had gone to the Congress Party in the previous election. Nearly half the Congress candidates at the previous election and many of the PCC members were supporters of merger. Sequeira must be given credit for keeping his flock together, but his influence on the segment of the unattached voters on whose vote the ultimate outcome of the opinion poll depended was next to negligible. Here the anti-merger faction of the Congress Party and the Konkani protagonists had a decisive role. Purushottam Kakodkar, still in Delhi, kept away from campaigning. The mantle fell heavily on Pandurang Mulgaonkar who threw himself tirelessly organizing the campaign. Rashtramat, a Marathi daily edited by Chandrakant Keni and the young and persuasive Konkani orators like Uday Bhembre contributed in a big way. But Mulgaonkar's contribution to the winning of the opinion poll hardly finds mention in its today's accounts. Despite the triumph in the opinion poll, the Congress in Goa was in total disarray. In Kakodkar's absence, the Congress High Command decreed that the Party would not officially contest the 1967 election, though the partymen were given liberty to contest the elections on their own. Many Congressmen did, by combining forces with the breakaway faction of the UGP known as UGP (Furtado), under the banner of the Goa Organised Alliance(GOA). Mulgaonkar as one of the leaders of the GOA contested as an independent candidate under its banner from Panjim constituency. Kamat, on Bandodkar's persuasion, contested on MGP ticket from Sattari constituency. Kamat won, but Mulgaonkar lost yet again. The GOA experiment was a total fiasco. All its candidates lost in the election which was but a repeat of the 1963elections, MGP and UGP retaining substantially their respective constituencies and the relative numerical strength in the Legislative Assembly. Dayanand Bandodkar formed his second MGP ministry. Kamat became the Speaker of the legislative assembly and also presided over the first Law Commission appointed by the Goa Government. As Speaker, Kamat could maintain distance from Bandodkar. Bandodkar was a doer with no patience for political discourses and discussions for which Kamat had fondness and certainly, tolerance of the independent-minded was not one of Bandodkar's political virtues. Kamat may not have been entirely comfortable with him. During Kamat's term as the Speaker there was a rebellion against Bandodkar ’s leadership in the legislature wing of the MGP. Anthony De Souza, Kamat's old comrade in the freedom movement, who had also left the Congress to become a senior minister in Bandodkar's cabinet, was one of the principal rebels. But Bandodkar survived with the support of the defectors from the opposition UGP. The 1967 election was the last election contested by Pandurang Mulgaonkar. He did not contest the 1972 assembly elections. Kamat contested once again from Sattari, but this time as the Congress candidate, losing to Pratapsingh Rane, Bandodkar's new handpicked candidate In the previous few years, Kamat and Mulgaonkar had drifted politically far apart. Yet, the old bonds of affection were not severed. As if to underline this, on Mulgaonkar's 50th birthday on October 10, 1967, Kamat wrote an effusive article in a Marathi daily extolling his friend's many qualities. Although Mulgaonkar continued his association with the Congress Party and to wield influence in the party affairs, his participation was getting to be more and more peripheral. He had returned to the legal profession and was one of the Portuguese-trained lawyers who successfully managed the switchover to the new legal system. Despite a long break he had retained the respect of his professional peers who unanimously chose him as the first President of the newly formed Goa, Daman and Diu Advocates Association in 1967. Kamat returned to the Congress party which was still under Kakodkar's control. He again became the dissenting voice in the Party and regularly articulated his views through newspaper columns. Later, Kamat could hardly fit in the Congress Party's new avatar after the merger of the A.N. Naik-Wilfred De Souza faction of UGP into it. In 1981 Kamat suffered a heart attack. He survived, but had to withdrew from public life and the legal profession. His voice was not heard even in the Press. He passed away on May 2, 1990. It was the final parting; bringing to an end the journey together of the two boyhood friends which had begun sixty years earlier in 1930. Some years after Kamat's death, afflicted by the Parkinson's, Mulgaonkar too withdrew from public and professional life spending his last years amidst his family and surrounded by his grand children. The end came on July 21, 2001. Political success eluded Pandurang Mulgaonkar. He never held any political office. It is somewhat ironical that someone so widely liked and respected never won a contested election. In smaller gatherings he often emerged as the most acceptable and even the unanimous choice. He lived to see the causes he stood for triumph. The last years must have brought a profound sense of disillusionment. The party to which he had given his unswerving loyalty was ruling Goa, but had changed beyond recognition. It was a motley crowd of rank opportunists, turncoats, the corrupt, the self-seeking time servers who dominated the political space within the Party. The Party had become the source of rampant corruption and an instrument of ruining the social and moral fabric of Goa. Mulgaonkar and Kamat had their share of political differences. Temperamentally too they differed. Kamat was studious, cerebral and a bit of a contrarian. His candour sometimes hurt people. He liked exchanging views and holding forth in discussions on various subjects with the select few. Mulgaonkar was gregarious, possessed of a magnetic personality, a gentle disposition and a winning smile which was the reflection of an innate goodness; people were naturally drawn to him. He had a knack for putting others at ease and a rare ability to maintain a dignified composure in the most adverse situations, absorbing disappointments in public and personal life with stoic poise and equanimity. Both shared certain basic values. Neither was religious in the conventional sense. They had a definite aversion for the ritualistic religion. Their lives were guided by deeply held beliefs and convictions. In public, professional and personal life neither strayed from the path of rectitude. Both were remarkably free from petty small mindedness and brought a certain decency to the public life. They were firmly committed to the idea of the Indian nationhood and their nationalism was the inclusive, the non-sectarian and the liberal nationalism of the Gandhi and Nehru mould. They had empathy for the lowly and the deprived and were always ready to give a helping hand to the struggling. To their extended families and to their friends' families they were the father figures who could be re upon to give a wise counsel and a guiding hand in their hours of difficulties. -- The writer is the son of late Adv Pandurang Mulgaonkar and is a practicing advocate in Goa. He can be contacted via email jayantmulgaon...@gmail.com On October 10 each year, the birthday of Adv Mulgaonkar is marked with a guest lecture. This year, the speaker is expected to be Justice Santosh Hegde, the ex-Lokayukta (Ombudsman) of Karnataka.