VISHVANATH PAI PANANDIKER
DEMOCRACY came to Goa in 1961 � much before it came to Portugal. It was only under a new Constitution in 1976 that Portugal became a Parliamentary Republic. Democracy was essentially foreign to Portugal both in terms of its history and culture. According to K.G. Jayne, �In the opening years of the twelfth century, Portugal was an obscure county, tributary to the petty Iberian kingdom of Leon�.1 Jayne further states: �In 1460, Portugal was one among several petty Iberian principalities: by 1521 it had become an empire of world-wide fame, with dominions extending eastward from Brazil to the Pacific. Then followed a period of decline, caused partly by certain defects of national character, but more by the pressure of inevitable misfortune which ended in the loss not only of greatness but even independence�.2 Portugal�s fortunes were made essentially by spice trade with India. As H.V. Livermore pointed out: �A few years later Afonso de Albuquerque� asserted that India had made (King Manuel I) the richest of the rulers�.3
Portugal was never at the forefront of democratic movements in Europe. And for a long time, Portugal could not be democratic because it could not separate the state from religion. Reformation and the separation of the state from religion were late to come to Portugal. It became a Republic in 1910, but soon lapsed into a dictatorship in 1928, largely of Salazar. Portugal became a parliamentary Republic only in 1976 and later joined the European Union in 1986.
Considerable literature on democratic governance focuses on the electoral process and the institutions of democracy, especially an elected legislature, an accountable executive and independent judiciary. The essence of democracy, however, lies in the Freedom of the citizen. Hence the emphasis on Fundamental Rights in the Indian Constitution adopted on 26 January 1950. And the Indian Constitution begins with �We the People of India�, clearly indicating the ultimate sovereignty of the people � a founding statement which has not yet been imbibed by the institutions of governance of the country, neither of Goa.
In substance, however, democracy needs not just institutions of governance but a far greater and deeper respect for �diversity� of opinion, thought, culture and religion which in essence is �freedom�. This was foreign both to the European and, of course, to the Portuguese culture. As Robert Pinkney points out, the Portuguese and Spanish colonizers �had articulated a clear racialist ideology with a strong belief in European and Christian superiority�.
4 Europe took more than a thousand years to separate religion from the state with the advent of Reformation, a process which the other great Judaic religion viz. Islam has not yet been able to do. The religious �overhang� of both Christianity and Islam in countries dominated by both religions with its tight regime governed by the �Holy Book� make full freedom to the individual a constant contest, even struggle.
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n that sense, �secularism� as understood in India today is the paradigmatic product of European history and Judaic tradition in which Christianity (and Islam � the other great Judaic religion) never separated religion and its dictates from the state for a long period. In fact, Islam is still struggling to come to terms with the problem. It is, in essence, the story as to why relatively �Hinduism� in India did not conflict with democratic values and Pakistan and Bangladesh, both Islamic states, have yet to make the critical transition. And Nepal perhaps has made the mistake of declaring itself a �Hindu� Kingdom. There is no record to show that �Hinduism� or Buddhism were ever �state� religions in India even if the King was a Hindu or Buddhist.Portugal did not separate religion from the state for bulk of its history and certainly could not understand the relevance of diversity and freedom. It, at best, looked for assimilados � the assimilated as the ultimate approbation. The Inquisition was part of the same desire for ensuring the security of the empire by having assimilados � as complete as possible.
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he civilizational atrocities by the Portuguese in Goa, which have left permanent bitterness in the majority Hindu community, were with respect to religious intolerance. Christianity came to India, especially Kerala, much before it came to Portugal. The Syrian Christian church was reputedly set up in the 1st century of the Christian era. It was a natural and smooth process of individual choice. There was no �clash of civilizations�. Today, Kerala�s Christian population of over six million is much larger than Goa�s Catholic population of 3.6 lakh.Witness the Portuguese record, especially the Inquisition Tribunal established in 1560 in Goa. �It was a tribunal to take cognizance of offences against Catholic religion and its main object was to maintain the purity of religion. In Portugal, Inquisition had to deal with the possible Jewish, Mohammedan, Lutheran or magical rites influence on the Catholic religion. A similar attitude prevailed in the Inquisition in Goa, which tried to prevent the influence of some customs, connected with the Hindu religion, from infiltrating into Catholic religious practices of the neo-converts�. �Baiao gives a figure of around sixteen thousand cases, tried by Inquisition from 1561 to 1774�.
5Democracy and intolerance, whether of religious faith or of opinion, are contradictions in terms. The Portuguese cultural and political legacy, in this sense, was fundamentally antithetical to freedom and human rights � the foundations of democracy. It was not Christianity but the Portuguese which was the problem. In that sense, while the history of Portuguese rule is an accepted fact, the Portuguese contribution to the essentials of present-day Goa remains a big question mark. Today, both Portugal and Goa have democratic political systems in which religion is separated, at least in law, from the state and therefore share a lot in common. So do both the faiths of �Hindus� and the Catholics of Goa. The relationships of Portugal and India today are good, as they should be.
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he problem of �democratization� is not limited to historical Portugal. Even though the modern democratic movement began in England and subsequently spread to the United States of America, the two �oldest� democracies still have a long way to go to become models. There is often a feeling in both countries even at the beginning of the 21st century that there is one law for the whites and another for non-whites. Despite long eulogies for its �democratic� performance, the fact is that in the 44 US presidential elections not once has a White Jew even been nominated by either of the two main political parties for the Presidency. Nor has England ever come close to electing a non-Protestant Christian as the prime minister. This apart from the fact that the head of state viz. the queen of England is also the head of the Church of England! European and North American democracies have in many ways been �Christian� democracies and several political parties in Europe are identified as such, e.g., Christian Democratic parties.In contrast, despite Indian constitutional democracy being only 54 years old, in 2004, India, a majority �Hindu� country, has a Muslim president in A.P.J. Abdul Kalam, a Sikh prime minister in Manmohan Singh and an Italian born Roman Catholic, Sonia Gandhi, as the leader of the United Progressive Alliance (UPA) ruling coalition. It was an interesting experience for me when I mentioned this fact to a senior Pakistani politician recently. He said India has always had this �tradition�. How many foreigners share this view? Or for that matter how many Indians have thought of it? In any case the record of India, a relatively new entrant to democracy with all its history of �communal� or religious conflicts, stands distinctly apart from the two �old� democracies. And India had a woman prime minister much before England did and the US has yet to elect a woman president despite its long democratic history.
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s against the British and American historical record, the Indian cultural and political tradition was essentially based on �diversity� and �tolerance�. Even in so-called �Hindu� religion, there was no �one path�. Since the Indian religious practices could not be classified in formal religious definitions, any one not belonging to �organized religions� in India was classified as �Hindu� � a term which finds no reference in any classical Indian texts such as the Vedas or the Bhagvat Gita. As Robert Pinkney states, �Hindu India with its traditions of dispersed power and compromises between elites was able to sustain a pluralist system after independence whereas the more authoritarian culture of Pakistan was less conducive to democracy�. 6The thread that holds the great Indian civilization is its tremendous respect for �diversity� of every kind, including of religion. Goa was part of the great Indian civilizational cosmos. 450 years of Portuguese rule in some talukas or less than 200 years in others was essentially antithetical to Goan and the wider Indian civilization of religious and other tolerance and hence best forgotten. What holds Goa and the Goan society together, despite differing religions is the identity of �one people�. The �two nation� theory never afflicted Goa � and thank God for that! Goa�s success truly lies in this single factor of identity as �one people� which is a good example for the rest of the country to emulate rather than the Common Civil Code which also is worth emulating but not critical.
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ndia�s democracy itself is under-going considerable transformation. Fundamentally, India is witnessing simultaneous process of change in political, economic and social spheres. Transfer of political power to the masses, especially since the 1967 elections is a process which no political party has been able to understand or come to grips with. As a result, the bigger parties often lose their vote share. In Goa, the �transfer of power� took place by early 1980s but the local units of national and regional parties have yet to come to grips with the change.In economic matters, Nehruvian �socialistic pattern� like the Cheshire cat has gone � but its grin remains. Nehru, as prime minister, himself chastened by the reports coming in about the way state capitalism was working in 1958 wrote to the chief ministers thus: �Democracy and socialism are means to an end, not the end itself". If the individual is ignored and sacrificed for what is considered the good of the society, is that the right objective to have?�
7The rise of Bahujan Samaj Party et al reflect the changes in the social and political power structure of India. That Uttar Pradesh, the largest of the Indian states could have a �Dalit� woman as chief minister speaks volumes of the change. India as well as Goa are in the process of profound social change, something most foreigners and some of our own people do not understand or comprehend. It is both essential and inevitable to build India into �one people� as the Constituent Assembly hoped for.
Interestingly, the much used pejorative reference to the divisive �caste system� of India is essentially of Spanish-Portuguese coinage. According to the Oxford Dictionary, the entomology of the word �Caste� is �a physically distinct kind of individual with a particular function�. Origin: Spanish and Portuguese �casta� � lineage, breed. The actual origin is in Latin �Castus� or �Chaste�. Not a very derogatory origin! Actually, in India, the words used in the ancient texts to describe the Indian social structure are Varna � literally �colour� but more �profession� and �Jati� or �the properties peculiar to a class that distinguish it from others�.
8 Though the word �caste� is even used in the Indian Constitution especially with reference to the Scheduled Castes, it does not mean that the word is Indian nor is its present day connotation.
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oa missed the general elections of 1952, 1957 and 1962. The first election to the state assembly took place in 1963 when Goa was a Union Territory and since then has had a total of 10 assembly elections including those after being made a full-fledged 25th state of the Union in 1987.Political participation was always high in the elections and continues to be so even now. Dramatic socio-economic change can be attributed to the democratization of the Goan polity. Goa was perhaps the only state which dramatically changed the plan allocations. Unlike the Union government�s formula for plan allocations, the first chief minister of Goa, Dayanand Bandodkar, raised the allocations to social sectors from 18% of the outlay to 47% after 1963. This changed Goa forever. To date no other state has followed Goa�s example.
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