The Inquisitors Arrive: The steady ingress of the Hindu right tears into Goa’s patient fabric

"Well before Narendra Modi’s advent, before his acolyte Manohar Parrikar could become chief minister in 1994, Hindu fundamentalists have viewed Goa’s Catholics as an impediment to their larger aim of ‘Bharat’ becoming a ‘Hindu nation’. Thanks to the asinine comments of Goa’s PWD minister Sudhin Dhavalikar urging bikinis be banned and pubs closed down, it helps to revisit extremist fears—to see, if nothing else, whether women visitors to the beach will choose to show him a thing or two.

Goa’s elected representatives seem largely illiterate in at least three languages, but hapless, overwhelmed and cornered though he may have been on TV, Dhavalikar is anything but harmless. It is fitting that he represents the BJP regime in Goa on behalf of the Maharashtrawadi Gomantak Party (MGP), its loyal, right-wing ally. After all, in the early ’60s, just freed of colonial rule and still a Union Territory, the MGP’s founder and Goa’s first chief minister, Dayanand Bandodkar, had pushed through an opinion poll to see whether Goa should be merged with Maharashtra.

Thankfully, he lost—perhaps the sole occasion when Goans came together, setting aside their differences. But Bandodkar spr­ead seed. For the first time, Goans in the north saw jeeploads of proto-Shiv Sainiks, armed with tridents and orange flags, spoiling for a fight; or knew that allegiance to the MGP was now being sought at village temples in accompaniment to the tinkling of bells and slokas. Bandodkar kept the MGP a truly populist party; he himself was a charismatic, benevolent, Peron-like character who played all sides. Under his daughter Shashikala Kakodkar, who inherited party and post, blatant nepotism entered political life, but the MGP also changed.

Today, circle complete, it has degenerated into a private firm run by Sudhin Dhavalikar and his cohorts who consciously cultivate a Hindu votebank and worse, an ‘us versus them’ mentality—a phenomenon foreign in the larger annals of Goan consciousness and identity. It may not be a coincidence that the build-up to Narendra Modi’s ‘massive mandate’ has blessed a fistful of Hindu extremist groupings in Goa and encouraged them to move so far right that one more sideways step and they’d fall off the cliff!..." (Read full article.)