Expats, properties, home
By Frederick Noronha
December and January are the months when expats visit Goa, and this
gives us time to rethink Goa’s equation with its diaspora.
At one level, the expats are crucial to our society - even if only in
selfish economic terms. Their remittances have been largely uncounted
and not even adequately estimated.
At another level, Goa has a love- hate relationship with them. Sometimes
we get cheesed off with their attitudes and expectations from a
postcolonial Goa. Yet, seen differently, we are them! Many Goans based
in Goa have had an expat experience themselves. We know what it means to
come back, and find yourself a stranger in your own home.
We at least have relations who are expats. Or, if young, we dream of one
day chasing the rainbow and our ambitions to end up in some lucrative
part of the planet. The migration gene has been deeply encoded - like
some virus - within the Goan DNA. This is especially true among the
Catholic community, which probably has a larger section of its community
outside Goa rather than with the State itself.
* * * So, how do we treat our diaspora? In other words, how do we treat
ourselves? ( This might be a bit of an exaggeration, because in the pre-
1961 era, the ruling dispensation didn’t care much for this ‘
dispensable’ section of the population. After 1961, Liberation and all
that, the political elite in Panjim also doesn’t care much for the diaspora.
In any case, its vote- banks are constituencies whose interests are more
caught up with disempowering the diaspora.) Sometime back, the BJP
government in Goa got an NRI Commission going. For quite a few years, it
was a non- starter.
Under Eduardo Faleiro, things have improved, though in this networked
world, a lot more could be done to reach out more effectively to the
scattered and often forgotten Goan communities worldwide.
In the last few weeks, one’s own personal interactions with friends from
the Goan diaspora made a thing or two very clear.
The biggest challenge facing the expats is their property. They have
been treated very shabbily on this.
The 1960s saw rather lopsided ‘ land reforms’ squeezing middle- sized (
or even small) landholders, who happened to be out of Goa.
The 1970s saw a further state of flux over such issues. In the 1980s,
expats got conned once again, by convincing them to go in for coastal ‘
rent- backs’, which raked in moolah for the politically well- connected
here while giving the expats a raw deal in most cases. More recently,
the diaspora population is being convinced to go in for the ugly
concrete that is changing the very nature of their home State.
While the MGP regime has been unfriendly to hostile to the diaspora over
their land and properties, the Congress has hardly done anything. On the
contrary, as its prominent figures dabble in real estate and land big-
time, this has meant that the expats have got squeezed further during
Congress rule. Because of the demographic breakup of Goa’s international
diaspora population - largely Catholic, and Old Conquest based - the BJP
couldn’t care less for such issues, though an occasional comment has
come up from leaders like Manohar Parrikar.
Today expats are caught in a Catch 22 situation. If they hold on to
their properties, its security is always under doubt. If they sell, they
get disinherited ( often for peanuts) from the land of their roots! Some
have opted to donate their properties for charity, and a good cause.
But will the local partners keep to their side of the promise and make
good use of what they get? There are stories of people who sold their
ancestral properties, and whose children had to pay many times the same
figure to get their properties back! All in all, this is an unhappy
position. The faster we understand and seek to address such major
irritants in Goa’s crucial relationship with its diaspora, the better
chance of building a hopefully win- win situation for both.
http://www.epaperoheraldo.in/Details.aspx?id=3300&boxid=53538281&uid=&dat=1%2f11%2f2012
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