Good Governance on another day, BJP-ruled Goa opts for holiday on Christmas

Panaji: As of now, BJP-ruled Goa might well be the only state in India to celebrate December 25 in unadulterated Christmas spirit. Bowing down to sustained pressure from the Opposition as well as belated dissent from Goa’s influential Roman Catholic Church, which oversees 26 percent of the state’s 1.5 million population, to ensure that December 25 is not a ‘working day’, Chief Minister Laxmikant Parsekar on Wednesday conceded that government offices will remain closed on the Christmas Day. “We have informed our High Command that we will be unable to observe Good Governance Day on December 25. But we will do it (conduct programmes as per the central government initiative) before and after that day…. This government has a tradition of delivering good governance,” Parsekar said, ending days of speculation about whether Christmas would be a working day at all for the state bureaucracy and ministries. [caption id=“attachment_1793975” align=“alignleft” width=“380”]  Goa Chief Minister Laxmikant Parsekar.[/caption] Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s National Democratic Alliance (NDA) government had recently unveiled a nationwide initiative to mark former PM Atal Behari Vajpayee’s birthday on December 25 as ‘Good Governance Day’. As part of the new Modi initiative ministers as well as bureaucrats have been asked to report to work even if for a few hours and follow a work protocol prepared by the central government. This move, which comes on the heels of the Union Human Resource ministry’s oblique attempt to get students to attend school on December 25, resulted in a lot of opposition, especially from minority organisations, which accused the BJP-led coalition of trying to hurt the sentiment of Christians who celebrate Christmas on December 25. In Goa, which is almost symbolic to Christmas festivities, the Opposition was repeatedly tearing into the state  calling the ministers “Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh’s altar boys” for trying to douse the spirit of Christmas through officialese. “The more they try to kill Christmas spirit with their crooked ways, the Christmas spirit will glow. The deputy chief minister and his altar boys should come out clearly on the attack of BJP on Christmas,” Nationalist Congress Party state vice president Trajano D’Mello told Firstpost. A Church spokesperson said that such moves were creating a sense of insecurity amongst the minorities about the direction in which the state and the central government were moving in. “Such statements are disturbing,” the spokesperson said Wednesday. A day earlier, the Goa Archbishop, considered a spiritual leader of the Catholic population in the Goa Archdiocese also publicly endorsed a statement of the National United Christian Forum, which has lambasted attempts by the state to de-value Christmas. “Christmas is the only holiday that we Christians have in the whole year when we join the rest of the world in celebrating the birth of the ‘Prince of Peace,’ our Lord Jesus Christ,” the forum said. After maintaining a stony silence on the issue, the first signs that the Goa government could possibly relent and defy Modi’s diktat became evident after Tourism Minister Dilip Parulekar told Firstpost ON Tuesday that it would be difficult to observe Good Governance Day in Goa on Christmas day. “We should get a holiday. We are Goans, whether Catholic or Hindu. We celebrate our main festivals with each other and they have said that they should come (to work),” Parulekar said. Not that the BJP, in the past has not borne the brunt for attempting to tinker around with religious holidays by either slotting them as restricted in nature or cancelling them altogether. A similar attempt by Goa’s first BJP-led coalition government under the chief ministership of Manohar Parrikar to add Good Friday to such a list had triggered tremendous opposition.