Tainted Congress is Turfed Out.
Driving in from the airport on the day of
the election results, we passed caravans of pick-up trucks, cars, scooters and
motorcycles. Draped in BJP colors, the caravans were celebrating the clear
victory of the BJP in the recently-concluded Assembly elections. As they
whizzed past towns and villages, people gathered on the edges of the highway,
cheering them on. Like Woodstock, it appeared to me “everywhere there was song
and celebration.”
I was struck by the sense of liberation
that was palpable on the streets and squares. It was as if a dictator had been
felled. “Sir, we are free from the corrupt Congress raj,” the owner of a shack
on Morjim Beach told me as we walked in the next morning to laze a few hours away,
swimming in the blue-green Arabian Sea and savoring the shack’s basic wares:
shrimp curry and rice with fried fish and chips, washed down with fresh
pineapple juice and Goa’s own King’s beer.
To get to this picturesque beach, you
have to drive east from our house into Mapusa and then head north through
Siolim across the bridge on the spectacular Chapora River. The drive from
Mapusa, an ugly, Indian-style market town, to Siolim is over a forested hill
with gorgeous valley views. The road is superb like most of Goan roads, except
that over the years it has become a garbage dump. Mounds of garbage line either
side of the road, detracting from the sheer natural beauty.
Even along National Highway 17, the major
artery that crosses Goa north to south en route to Kerala, you see similar
sights: piles of garbage on both sides. This odious development has come about
in the past five years. The years from 2007 have seen Goa assaulted by real
estate developers; exploited by illegal mining and stalled by crumbling
infrastructure: no waste management, acute power and water shortages, traffic
jams, eroding beaches and the growth of Bombay-style slums. Then there are
drugs, the Russian mafia and vastly increased crime.
This has happened on the Congress watch.
Clearly, these problems were building up over the years but neglected because
of political instability. Between 1963 and 1990, there were just four chief
ministers; since then, there have been 15. In 2007, the Congress formed the
government and lasted the full term until March 3, 2012. It appeared as though
a stable government might address the mounting problems. Well, it didn’t;
what’s more, it was seen as a beneficiary of these ills. On March 3, Goans
voted with a vengeance and turfed the Congress out.
One of the major causes of the Congress
defeat is the defection of the Christian vote. Though they form just a little
more than two percent of the Indian population; strikingly, Christians in Goa
number nearly 30 percent of the state’s inhabitants. They have traditionally
shunned the BJP because of its insular Hindutva agenda; this time they overcame
their distaste for the saffron party and voted against the Congress.
There is euphoria in this bucolic little
corner of India. The BJP has won handily so there should be no trouble for the
next five years. Manohar Parrikar, the likable former chief minister, is set to
run Goa again. Peoples’ expectations are high; but clearly it more an
anti-Congress than a pro-BJP mandate.
Parrikar is a soft-spoken man, educated
at the exclusive Indian Institute of Technology in Bombay. I happen to know him
because he asked me to help publicize the first International Film Festival of
India (IFFI) in Goa in 2004. In the course of the project, I met him several
times and found him to be focused on outcomes. In the event, we worked together
to make the festival a success and to make Goa a permanent home for it.
At the time, I was a member of the
Congress Media Advisory Board but that didn’t make a difference to Parrikar. He
wanted professional public relations support and so was happy to work with me
and my firm. The brief was to make it into a South Asian Cannes. The IFFI
public relations project went south after he was ousted. Subsequent Congress
governments had an opportunity to build on the national and international
notice the festival attracted. Instead, as a former senior official of the
Entertainment Society of Goa (ESG), the unit that ran the festival, told me:
“It has become a den of corruption.”
I learned it the hard way when my firm
responded to a tender for public relations support for IFFI 2011 put out by the
ESG. We made our submission and I undertook a trip to Goa for the opening of
the bids. The entire procedure was opaque. Three bids were opened: two firms
including mine, made similar financial proposals. Within minutes, the
bureaucrat, who read out the numbers (and he looked every bit vile and
corrupt), dismissed us and awarded the project to a firm that bid
one-fourteenth of the amount that we proposed.
This is the way Goa functioned under the
Congress. Even though I am a supporter of the GOP, I found the party’s Goa
dispensation less than transparent. I am not surprised they were booted out.
(This
article appeared in The Times of India on March 14, 2012.)
Link:http://blogs.timesofindia.indiatimes.com/capital-letter/entry/goa-journal-a-sense-of-liberation
