SPEAKING AT a function recently the outgoing Chief Justice of the Supreme Court, K G Balakrishnan, the highest law officer in the country commented that murderers can execute their sinister plans faster than the judiciary can punish them. Which also holds true for other kinds of criminals like rapists, paedophiles, large scale narcotics pedlars and those who indulge in genocide of the kind we witnessed in Gujarat. Indeed it would be easier for a whole caravan of camels to pass through the eyehole of a needle than to get prompt justice in our system of law and judiciary. There are instances in our own Goa where litigation, particularly in property cases, has gone on for three generations.
The bitter ground reality is that as on January 1, 2010 there were 53,000 cases pending in the Supreme Court, as many as 40 lakh cases pending before the various high courts in the country and an incredible 2.7 crore cases pending in the lower courts. The arrears of cases awaiting disposal continue to go up. There has been an increase of 139% in the number of cases pending in the Supreme Court since January 2000.

BIOLOGICALLY, IT is the dog which wags its tail. But in politics, particularly in the parliamentary system of democracy, more often than not it is the tail or tails which wag the dog. In a parliamentary democracy, the prime minister or the chief minister is normally the leader of the legislative party and has the support of the majority of the elected legislators of his own party. When no single party has an absolute majority, the leader of the group which has the support of the majority is elected the leader of the legislative party and is invited to form the government. In the case of Goa, in the Legislative Assembly elections, the Indian National Congress secured 16 seats and the Bharatiya Janata Party secured 14. Of the remaining 10 seats, two went to the SGF - that of Churchill Alemao who defeated Luizinho Faleiro and Reginaldo Lourenco who defeated senior Congress leader, Francisco Sardinha in Curtorim. THREE seats were won by the NCP — the Benaulim seat, which was won by a very narrow margin by Mickky Pacheco, the Vasco seat which was won by Jose Philip D’Souza and the Tivim seat, which was won by Nilkant Halarnkar. The MGP won the two seats, held by Dhavlikar brothers, Sudin and Deepak. Babush Monserrate, at the last moment changed his mind about contesting as a Congress or UGDP candidate and won the seat as an independent.

BY RAJAN NARAYAN
IF IT was Babush Monster Rat who sought to concretise Goa through the diabolical Regional Plan 2011 and Aleixo Sequeira and Pratapsingh Rane who sought to gift away large areas of land to land sharks masquerading as promoters of special economic zones, Praveen Agarwal, the chairman of the Mormugao Port Trust, has the dubious distinction of not only having blackened the faces and lungs and roads of Vasco with coal dust, he has also been responsible for privatising public utilities for the benefit of bhaile industrialists. In his megalomaniacal obsession with expanding the port and making it more profitable to impress his political bosses at the Centre, the Chairman of the MPT has been encroaching on land belonging to traditional fishermen and increasing the exposure of not only the port city but the entire Mormugao taluka to the consequences of the MPT becoming the principal entry point for dusty cargo — or should it be dirty cargo? The primary source of the pollution in densely populated Vasco city and the neighbouring areas like Chicalim and Cortalim is pollution caused by the increasing amounts of coal that is imported through the Mormugao Port to meet the requirements of the Jindal Aluminium and Steel Plants located in Vijaynagar in Karnataka.

BY RAJAN NARAYAN

THE SCANDAL in the performance or non performance of the Corporation of the City of Panaji (CCP) goes far beyond diverting its daily wage workers to work at the residence of the Taleigao MLA and Education Minister, Babush Monserrate. Indeed, a close scrutiny of the audit report of the CCP, secured under the Right to Information Act by councillor Surendra Furtado, reveals that the CCP is the mother of all Satyams. K V K Raju, the promoter and chairman of Satyam, admitted to having manipulated the accounts of the multinational information technology company. He also admitted to inflating the numbers of those working for Satyam. But the sins of omission and commission of the CCP under the former mayor Tony Rodrigues, who functioned as a puppet of the Taliegao MLA Babush Monserrate, are much worse than that committed by Raju. Indeed, the audit report of the CCP is a sordid saga of incompetence, misappropriation and rampant corruption. The dishonourable mayor and the councillors have been bleeding the CCP for their own personal benefit.

Ever since I read your novel Karmelin I have wanted to reach out to you. It is a very moving novel. You have so sensitively portrayed the anguish of a Goan migrant worker and her special vulnerability to sexual exploitation. I want to tell you stories about the migrant workers who have come from the North East to work in Goa.
North East and Goa are two extreme ends of our country. Yet there have been connections. I am not referring to the fact that Goa has had a Naga governor or a chief secretary. Perhaps you know that there are Naga and Meitei football players in all the Goan football teams. You may not know that some of these football players were able to get into the teams because of help from a former army officer from Goa who was posted in Manipur many years ago. He has not only kept up with his friends in Ukhrul all these years and helped the boys get into the football teams, he has preserved the words of Tangkhul love songs which he sings whenever he gets an opportunity! (Ukhrul is a district of Manipur and the home of the Tangkhul Nagas).

WHAT WAS supposed to be a regular meeting of the Assagao gram sabha turned into media fodder when panch member Ajit Sawant inadvertently revealed that the bungalow in which the construction of a swimming pool was granted - and being protested by villagers - belonged to Haryana chief minister Bhupinder Singh Hooda. The local and national media pounced on the story and Sawant’s comment has been recorded in newsprint. Now in the eye of the storm, Ajit Sawant - not surprisingly - deines ever having said the bungalow belonged to Hooda.
“The reports are baseless. I did not mention anybody’s name with regard to the bungalow,” claims Sawant. He defiantly asks anyone to prove he said it: “You can check the minute book of the gram sabha meeting. Nothing has been mentioned about me saying anything about the bungalow.” Considering the panchas-secretary nexus in every village panchayat, it does not come as any real surprise that the minutes of the meeting recorded by Assagao Village Panchayat (VP) secretary Subhash Kambli do not mention a debate over swimming pools in the village on that particular day, leave alone Hooda. This has raised doubts over the credibility of the secretary, who is supposed to note the proceedings of meetings in detail.

BY RAJAN NARAYAN
ON MAY 22, 1992, which happened to be the birthday of Churchill Alemao as well as the wedding day of Kennedy Alemao, a landing of smuggled gold allegedly took place at Fatrade beach virtually in front of the Ramada hotel, which was nearing completion. The Customs Department had received a tip off that a major consignment of smuggled gold would land at Fatrade beach and deputed a young customs officer, Costao Fernandes, to keep watch. At around noon, the landing took place. The gold biscuits, packed in empty car batteries, was loaded on into a Contessa belonging to Churchill Alemao, which was driven by Alvernaz Alemao. The customs officer followed the Contessa carrying the smuggled gold. In an act of great daring and courage, the customs officer jumped from his moving motorbike into the Contessa through an open window. There was a scuffle in the moving car between Alvernaz Alemao and Costao Fernandes. Alvernaz Alemao is reported to have pulled out a knife. Costao, an expert in martial arts, turned the tables on his assailant who was mortally wounded.

BY RAJAN NARAYAN

RAHUL GANDHI need not have wasted his time interacting with students of the Goa University to find out how pathetic the state of education is in the state of Goa. Never mind that the Congress-affiliated non existent National Students Union of India did not succeed in hijacking the interaction. It will be recalled that the NSUI and the Goa Pradesh Youth Congress Committee, instigated by Dayanand Narvekar, had threatened to demand the revival of the IT Habitat project in Dona Paula to spite Babush Monserrate, the Education Minister, who had hijacked the people’s agitation against the allotment of plots to land sharks in the IT Habitat.
Under pressure from the BJP’s student wing, the Akhil Bharatiya Vidyarthi Parishad, the Registrar of the University, Dr Mohan Sangodkar, had to withdraw the notice he had sent demanding that all post graduate students should compulsorily attend the interaction with Rahul Gandhi. The Registrar was also forced to stipulate that no political party’s flags or politicians would be allowed to attend the meeting with Rahul Gandhi on the sports grounds of the University. But Rahul Gandhi need not have gone through the exercise of interacting with the University students. He only had to look at the First Report of the Demands Related Ad Hoc Committee on Education, which was placed on the table of the house in the winter session of the Legislative Assembly last year to realise how retarded educationists and education in Goa is.

STATEHOOD DAY is celebrated with great fanfare and fervour in Goa. But for some reasons that remain inexplicable, the event which established the basis for statehood for Goa is, at least officially, not given any importance. If in the historical Opinion Poll that was held on January 16 1967, the pro-merger forces had won, there would have been no state of Goa today. Instead Goa would have been a district or perhaps just a taluka of Maharashtra. Indeed the very fact that an Opinion Poll was held to determine whether Goa should maintain its distinct and unique identity or should merge with Maharashtra was a miracle. If the pro-merger forces had their way, Goa would have been merged with Maharashtra during the tenure of Lal Bahadur Shastri as prime minister in 1965. The Opinion Poll is a landmark because it was the only time a referendum was held in the history of post independent India to decide whether a region or a ethnic group should be allowed to maintain its distinct identity or should be merged with one of the neighbouring states.
THE story of the Opinion Poll goes back to the pre-liberation period when Maharashtrians themselves were fighting to assert their identity. After independence, present day Maharashtra and Gujarat were part of the administrative unit, which was referred to by the British as the Bombay Presidency.

BY RAJAN NARAYAN

WHEN FORMER Haryana director general of police, S P S Rathore, got away with a six month sentence for molesting teenager Ruchika Girhotra and walked out of the Court with a triumphant smile on his face, there was an outrage in both the national electronic media and the print media. Forcing the Union Home Minister P C Chidambaram himself to take a personal interest in the matter and compelling the Union Law Ministry and the Union Home Ministry to issue orders that every complaint filed by any citizen should be registered by the police station. The order was provoked by the fact that in the Ruchika case as in several cases in which the serial killer of Goa Mahanand Naik was involved, the police did not register an FIR. Under the present procedures, the police have discretionary power on whether to register an FIR or not. A discretionary power which has been misused and abused, the latest case being the allegation by the Russian victim of rape that the police were reluctant to register an FIR and threatened her with cancellation of visa if she insisted that the police should register a complaint of rape against John Fernandes.
UNLIKE the public outrage in the national electronic and print media over the six-month sentence awarded to former DGP Rathore for molesting a teenager, there has been no sense of outrage even in the local media let alone the national media over the fact that the serial killer Mahanand Naik, who has confessed to killing as many as 16 women over a period of 15 years from 1994 till 2009 when he was arrested in a rape case, was acquitted in the first of the cases that came up for trial before the additional sessions judge of South Goa, Desmond D’Costa. The first of the 16 cases of murder that Mahanand Naik is alleged to have confessed related to the murder of Surat, daughter of Harishchandra Gaonkar, resident of Matt, Vizor Pachawadi, who went missing in March 2006. An FIR was filed against Mahanand Naik only on June 8, 2009 after he had allegedly confessed to her murder.