Goa Diary: Bullfight, booze on beach & BJP leader’s oops moment

Mayabhushan Nagvenkar, Panaji Over-eager BJP ‘breaks’ a Catholic Commandment With its minority outreach programme still in infancy, one really shouldn’t be too harsh on the Bharatiya Janata Party folks for almost breaking a key Commandment. In Goa, after being recently elevated to the post of national secretary, Arti Mehra, the party’s overseer for Goa affairs, almost committed ‘blasphemy’, by violating a native variant of the commandment ‘Thou shalt not take the Lord’s name in vain’. During her Goa visit in April, the feisty Mehra had said that the BJP’s effort of reaching out to the minority Catholic community and its leaders like the Arch Bishop (actually during a press conference Mehra said that she had met Goa’s Pope—Lord Bless Pope Francis—before she was corrected) had paid off in the March 2012 Goa polls. Mehra even went on to say that she had met the Archbishop Filipe Neri Ferrao ahead of the elections, which the BJP won after fielding an unprecedented eight Catholic candidates.[caption id=“attachment_741571” align=“alignleft” width=“380”] Gaffes in Goa. Reuters[/caption] A couple of days after her statement, the Church issued a response denying the suggested meeting. “It has also been stated that the BJP national secretary had a private audience with the Archbishop, as part of the pre-polls BJP campaign. It is clarified hereby that no such meeting did ever take place,” spokesperson for the Arch Bishop Fr. Francisco Caldeira clarified. From Fr. Caldeira’s written rebuttal it does appear that Mehra had taken the name of the Archbishop, the spiritual leader of Roman Catholics in Goa, in vain. The BJP has been silent on the issue since. But really Arti ji, there’s nothing that a discreet visit to the confession booth will not cure and heal. Take cover Soccer; Bullfighting kicks up a dust storm Football had better beware. Because the clamour to revive bullfighting or dhirio in Goa just got official. Portly poet Vishnu Wagh, a debutant in the state assembly on Monday made an impassioned plea to restart the bloodsport of bullfighting in Goa. And it certainly got Chief Minister Manohar Parrikar’s ear. “Dhirios should be revived at the earliest. Thousands of Goans are going to Maharashtra for bullfights. It used to be our tradition,” Wagh told the House. A typical dhiri (singular for dhirio) involves two specially reared fighting bulls, with humps the size of a few giant-sized pomfrets patched together, head-butting each other until the loser scampers away from the makeshift ring. The two bovines, who use their horns to good effect, goring their opponent at every opportunity, are egged on by thousands of baying spectators and gamblers who bet huge sums of money on their favoured animal. Until it was banned by the high court in the late nineties, bullfighting almost rivaled football in Goa, as far as popularity was concerned. But the ban too doesn’t mean that bullfighting has stopped after all. The banned sport is perhaps one of the most sought after contraband in the sub districts of Salcete and Tiswadi, where a missed call or a text message that simply says “COME” at 6:30 am means jumping out of bed and rushing to a pre-determined, but secluded coconut grove or paddock, where a couple of bulls are head-banging. And a crowd of a few hundred milling, cursing, goading, shouting around them. Over the years Goan legislators claim to be a harangued lot, with bullfight aficionados repeatedly demanding that the fights be revived. Parrikar himself says that with Vishnu’s plea on the floor of the House, he as well as other legislators would now be besieged with phone calls urging the Goa government to revive bullfights. What to do Mr. Parrikar? Shall we just blame it on Goa’s Iberian connection? Yay… Goa makes it to Wikileaks. Finally! The latest installment of diplomatic cables released by Wikileaks may not have created a buzz in the corridors of power in New Delhi, but the tiny state of Goa was humbled by several references to it, in the leaked missives. One leaked cable authored by Paul Folmsbee, Mumbai consul general of the US embassy in 2009, pretty much demolished Chief Minister Manohar Parrikar’s written response tabled during the ongoing budget session, in which he categorically denied the existence of foreign mafia in Goa. Quoting celebrated cop Rakesh Maria, then Mumbai Crime Branch head and currently head of Maharashtra’s anti-terrorism squad, Folmsbee said in his cable to Washington: “Maria alleged that most trafficking of foreigners to Mumbai is connected to Russian and Israeli mafia operations in Goa, explaining why the Mumbai Police had not cracked the trafficking ring(s)”. Parrikar’s political detractors however say that one should not take the chief minister’s denials too seriously. “Why, after campaigning against illegal mining for over seven years, Parrikar said there’s no illegal mining within a month of coming to power!” a senior Congressman said, referring to a similar reply tabled in the assembly by the chief minister last year. The reply had been one of the early signs of the ruling BJP’s soft pedalling on Goa’s mammoth illegal mining scam. Other leaked cables blamed both the Congress and the BJP of promoting casino culture in Goa; an interesting third party insight, considering the fact that both parties accuse each other of abetting proliferation of casinos in the state at every occasion. “The Congress party was the first to allow gambling in Goa, when in 1992, it amended the Goa Public Gambling Act to allow slot machines in five-star hotels. Later, table games were permitted offshore, during the tenure of Congress chief minister Pratapsingh Rane,” says one of the leaked cables. “The BJP opposed these developments at the time. Nevertheless, after coming to power in Goa, BJP chief minister, Manohar Parrikar granted a licence for Casino Goa to commence operations,” it further says. The last US connection to Goa in the cables was Parrikar’s neither-here-nor-there reply to an assembly query which demanded to know if the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) was keeping tabs on Goa’s casinos? Parrikar did not say “no”. What he did say, however, was: “The matter falls in the domain of central government and hence cannot be replied”. One really cannot believe that Goa’s sluggish intelligence apparatus would be able to fathom if CIA were indeed eavesdropping on the dice rolling on Goa’s casino tables. If they did, then the US intelligence agency wouldn’t be good at it’s job? But then again, are they, really? NaMo chant hits Goa Turns out, NaMo mania has not spared Goa. When a few corporate ‘suits’ got together to brainstorm a way ahead for Goa, which is suffering from an industrial logjam, the mention of Gujarat Chief Minister Narendra Modi did not surprise many. The praise which Goa’s ‘corporate types’ heaped on Modi at the session organised by the Goa Chamber of Commerce and Industry (GCCI) could just give our own Chief Minister Manohar Parrikar a touch of blush; despite their publicly confessed fondness for each other. “This was the first time that the allotment of plots by the IDC (Industrial Development Corporation) was carried out in a fair and transparent manner. It was based on the Gujarat model,” said Anil Kher, immediate past chairman of the Confederation of Indian Industries (CII), one of the first champions of Modi at the meeting organised to throw up suggestions for a proposed industrial policy. Allotment of plots by the IDC has been wrought with controversy over decades in Goa, with the government-run corporation being accused of opaque functioning and ‘industrial’ scale corruption. Within minutes GCCI president Manguirish Pai Raikar took off from where Kher left. “This transparency in plot allotment is what we learnt from Gujarat government. This was perhaps the first time that the allottee was allowed to choose a plot, instead of being allotted one. The latter method kept doors open for partisanship,” Raikar said. Arun Naik managing director of the Goa-based Merit Pharmaceuticals marvelled at the manner in which Modi had actually managed to attract investment worth billions to the western Indian state, despite a lot of opinionated flak from certain sections of society. He recounted an instance of a Goan businessman, who had set up an industrial unit in Gujarat, who was actually received at the airport by the Gujarat chief minister in person. “He makes people feel wanted. That is why he has attracted so much investment there,” Naik said during a panel discussion. It was, however, not all ‘sickly saccharine’ for the Gujarat chief minister, with former Congressman and now an independent legislator Vijai Sardessai, who insisted that the story of Gujarat’s success lies rooted in the Godhra riots. “We do not want a replication of Modi’s model here because his success story began with Godhra. We do not want that kind of development here,” Sardessai said, almost trying to upset the NaMo momentum at the meet. But on that day, it was clearly a case of “hell hath no fury than a corporate scorned”. And Sardessai had to beat a hasty retreat when Kher sought his response to former Congress prime minister Rajiv Gandhi’s infamous comment following the 1984 Sikh riots, when the latter reportedly said: “When a big tree falls, the earth shakes”. With so much politicking at a corporate meet, one wonders if any good suggestions for Goa’s investment policy were crafted at all? Moral Pooh-lice For a state which sells the cheapest beer pint in the country, bear-hugs the casino industry in orgasmic glee and where joints and cocaine fixes are on offer at every third beach shack, Goa’s top cop is a mighty moral man. While the government offered practical reasons like broken glass bits which cut into feet-soles and crimes against women for banning drinking on the beaches last week, Kumar, played the morally outraged mortal, when asked for his take on the new directive. “Would you like to drink in the open? What kind of human beings like to drink on beaches,” Kishen Kumar asked this correspondent instead, before slamming down the phone. What the reclusive DGP appears to have missed out on, is that most government sponsored events like the International Film Festival of India, Carnival, Sea Food festival, actually promote sale and consumption of alcohol in public. That’s apart from government sanctioned events like Sunburn and other music festivals, which are held on beaches and have valid liquor licences. Actually, I quite like to drink “in the open”, especially when I wear a pair of shorts, barefoot on the sand, facing the sea. Wonder how DGP sahab likes it!