Goa tourism: Beyond the sun, sand and sea, it is sleaze and sex

Panaji: It is two hours past midnight, but along the narrow, dusty road from Calangute to Baga beach, it’s business as usual; especially if you are cruising for sex or other allied kinks.  By day, the busy three-km long path, trod upon by hundreds of thousands of tourists every season, is a lively, colourful affair with hawkers, cafes, tattoo stores, bikini shops, few-dollars-a-day resorts and buzzing bars. By night however, this stretch of road could well be called Goa’s cruising capital, whether it’s for women, men or transgenders. A few hundred metres away De Baga Deck, a famous round-the-clock café and bar in Baga, an extremely popular beach, 20 km from Panaji, a well-sculpted figure in a tiny black skirt and high heels hails down a Maharashtra-registered Mahindra Bolero jeep ferrying what appears to be four men. Both the necklace and glossy lipstick on the figure shade glows softly in the sodium-vapour lamp light, but as you get closer, you can hear four men haggling with the figure in black, whose voice incidentally is as male as it can get. “Get lost. Rs 1000 for four men? Have a beer on me you beggars,” says Naina, who a few seconds later tells Firstpost, that her price for the night is Rs 2000 and for an hour Rs 500. Naina is one of the several dozen transgenders who have made the popular north Goa beach stretch their home base, flitting between soliciting publicly, to lap-dancing in shady beach shacks and illegally operating dance bars, several of which were burnt and demolished last week by a mob allegedly led by the local BJP MLA Michael Lobo. On Tuesday, a few days after the demolition and arson, operators of these outfits accused Lobo and the police of extorting money from them. “Lobo demanded Rs 25 lakh from me to run the place. When I refused he attacked my restaurant,” Sunil Bhomkar, who runs Agni bar told reporters. Lobo, while admitting that he was approached by one of the bar operators with a Rs 25 lakh bribe, told reporters that he rejected the bribe offer. “I have filed a police complaint against Bhomkar. They have even tried to shoot me. They are openly threatening an MLA,” Lobo countered. The MLA, along with 25 others has been booked by the police for arson. An expose by a national daily on New Year’s eve about open soliciting by transgenders and women, foreigners and Indians at several bars and shacks in the Calangute-Baga belt has triggered a chain reaction, in which local politicians, police and journalists too have been caught on the wrong end of the story. The series of accusations and open soliciting around Baga and Calangute beaches have only reinforced the reputation of the state as a sex tourism destination. And considering that names of politicians, top police officials, including Indian Police Service officers and journalists were taken by dance bar operators for accepting favours, ranging from cash to escorts to borrowing of luxury SUVs from them, Goa Chief Minister Laxmikant Parsekar has not ruled out a judicial probe into sleaze-gate. “I have read it in the section of press. If need be we will have to adopt to all such measures,” Parsekar told Firstpost when asked if he was considering a judicial probe into the sleaze scandal. Efforts made by the Shack Owners Welfare Society (SOWS) to curb such soliciting have failed, claims the association’s secretary John Lobo. “No amount of complaints work. These shacks which hosts provocative dances and offer transgenders are attracting the wrong kind of tourists to Goa,” Lobo told Firstpost, adding, that complaints to both tourism as well as police officials in the past vis a vis prostitution in shacks and open soliciting had not yielded any results. Goa annually attracts three million tourists, half a million of which are foreigners. The state is known as a destination for beaches, cheap alcohol and easy availability of drugs.