BY RAJAN NARAYAN

While Jack Sequeira is being lionised, his mentor Alvaro Loyola Furtado and the Konkani group have not recieved recognition for the crucial role they played in securing Goa’s unique identity.

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.

ASSERTING IDENTITY

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. During the Samyukta Maharashtra Movement, there were sharp differences on what should constitute the new state of Maharashtra. Even during the movement for an independent Maharashtra or a state of Marathi-speaking people, the people of Vidarbha wanted a separate state. The people of Konkan, who considered themselves distinct from Maharashtra, or at least resented the fact that the Samyukta Maharashtra Movement was dominated by the Marathas, were not very enthusiastic about the prospects of a Maha Rashtra, just as the people of Andhra Pradesh were not happy with Jawaharlal Nehru over ruling the State Reorganisation Commission and adding the coastal parts of Andhra to Telangana, which was originally conceived as the Andhra state.

During the liberation struggle, it was principally leaders of the Socialist Party, ranging from Ram Manohar Lohia to Madhu Limayee and Madhu Dhandavate who played significant roles in the liberation struggle of Goa. The Congress Party did not play as significant a role as it could or should have partly because, through the 50s, Jawaharlal Nehru persisted in the belief that the problem of Goa, as in the case of then French settlement of Pondicherry, should be settled by diplomatic negotiations, instead of the use of arms. It was only after liberation that the Congress party in Maharashtra launched a vehement campaign for merger. Indeed, the MGP itself was the creation of Congress leaders in Maharashtra.

PROTECTING IDENTITY

MANY people played a significant role in preserving and protecting the unique and distinct identity of Goa. Among the first of the national level leaders who remained steadfast that the unique and distinct identity of Goa would be protected even after liberation of Goa was Jawaharlal Nehru. In the face of persistent pressure before and after liberation from Maharashtra to merge Goa with it, Nehru reiterated at a rally of Goans on June 4, 1956 in Bombay that post liberation: “There is going to be no compulsion, no merger into a district or state. The people will maintain their separate identity so long as they wish.” Nehru went out of his way to reassure Goans that he would not succumb to pressure from any quarter to merge Goa with Maharashtra or Karnataka.

At the same rally, he stressed, “I am saying all this to you because some people are misled either by false propaganda or by over enthusiastic people in India who say that Goa should be attached to Maharashtra or the Karnataka province. But the point is that we feel that Goa’s individuality should remain.” Even after liberation when the chorus for merger of Goa with Maharashtra became extremely strident and Nehru was under pressure from his own senior cabinet colleagues from Maharashtra, Nehru stood firm.

The pressure to merge Goa with Maharashtra intensified when the Mahrashtrawadi Gomantak Party won the largest number of seats and formed the government after the first elections held in December 1962. The political leaders from Maharashtra, including senior members of the union Cabinet from Maharashtra prominently Y B Chavan, insisted that the victory of the MGP in the first elections held for the union territory of Goa was a mandate for merger of Goa with Maharashtra. Never mind that the MGP, which fought the election exclusively on the plank of merger with Maharashtra, did not get a majority on its own in the first assembly of the union territory of Goa. Indeed part of the reason why the Congress party lost the first ever elections held to the union territory of Goa was because of the ambivalence of the Congress High Command, which was heavily influenced by leaders from Maharashtra about the future status of Goa.

Nehru stood steadfast not only on maintaining the distinct geographical and political status of Goa, but also rubbished the claim of those who were pro-merger that Konkani was a dialect of Marathi. At the public meeting on May 22, 1963, Nehru made it clear that, “There is a certain specialty in Goa of the people here, rather in the common use of the Konkani language. It is quite absurd to put Konkani against Marathi or Marathi against Konkani. This kind of linguistic approach of suppressing a language is bad. Therefore, I think that while all the languages should flourish, particular attention should be paid to Konkani, which is the common people’s language.” This stand by Nehru was very important because of the then Maharashtrian claim that, linguistically, the people of Goa were Maharashtrians on the specious claim that Konkani was not an independent language, but just a dialect of Marathi.

GOA ORPHANED

JUST when Goan nationalists and Konkaniwadis felt a little reassured that the Centre would not succumb to pressure from senior Maharashtrian leaders to merge Goa with Maharashtra, Nehru died in May 1964. But just before his death, he had told the Press Trust of India that the so called victory of the MGP in the first general elections was not a mandate for merger. Replying to a question, Nehru, for what turned out to be the last time, reiterated, “The issue was not there. The election to the assembly of the union territory was not fought on the issue of merger.” Unfortunately, when Nehru died, Goan nationalists and Konkaniwadis lost their principle champion.

Lal Bahadur Shastri, who succeeded Nehru as prime minister, was a consensus candidate. Or rather the candidate of what was then called ‘the syndicate’, which comprised a coterie of senior leaders, including powerful leaders from Maharashtra. Lal Bahadur Shastri could not resist the pressure from the Maharashtra lobby to merge Goa with Maharashtra. The Congress leaders from Maharashtra, particularly Y B Chavan who was then the home minister, engineered resolutions both in by the Legislative Assembly of Goa and the Legislative Assembly of Maharashtra demanding that Goa should be merged with Maharashtra. Fortunately for Goa, Pakistan attacked India and the decision was postponed. After the war, when Shastri went to Tashkent in Russia to discuss a ceasefire between Pakistan and India, he died under mysterious circumstances. If Shastri had continued as chief minister, the probability is that Goa would have been summarily merged with Maharashtra.

Even after Shastri’s death when Indira Gandhi was installed as the prime minister by the syndicate, there was continuous pressure to merge Goa with Maharashtra. It was at this stage that Purushottam Kakodkar, who was close to the Nehru family, played a very important role. He tried his best to persuade Indira Gandhi that she should uphold the promises made by her father to Goans that the unique and distinct identity of Goa would be maintained at least for a decade after liberation. When Kakodkar did not get the support he expected from his Congress colleagues in Goa and in Delhi, he renounced politics and took refuge in an ashram in Rishikesh in the Himalayas. His sudden disappearance became a matter of concern to Indira Gandhi, the then prime minister and K Kamaraj, the then Congress president. It goes to the credit of Purushottam Kakodkar that he persuaded Indira Gandhi to at least hold an Opinion Poll to ascertain the will of the Goan people as to whether they wish to merge with Maharashtra or not.

The decision to hold the Opinion Poll was clutched at by Marathiwadis, both within Goa and Maharashtra. They were extremely confident that the pro-merger group would emerge victorious in the Opinion Poll that was decided to be held on January 16, 1967. Though a significant section of the Congress in Goa was against merger, they were helpless as the Maharashtra Congress virtually hijacked the campaign for merger with Maharashtra. Senior leaders from Maharashtra not only bankrolled the campaign for merger, but also sought to polarise the people of Goa along communal lines.

TIDE TURNED

IN retrospect, quite apart from the spirited campaign carried out by what came to be called the Konkani group, it was perhaps the intemperate language used by leaders from Maharashtra that turned the tide during the Opinion Poll elections. Even Goan Hindus, who were perceived as being pro merger, did not appreciate Y B Chavan’s remarks that Goans who opposed merger were anti-national. The merger forces also had another huge advantage. Virtually the entire media, particularly the Marathi newspapers which had wide circulation in Goa, supported the merger issue arguing that it would be in Goa’s interest to merge with Maharashtra.

The lone voice of dissent in the media was the Rashtramat, a newspaper started by a group of Vasco-based industrialists headed by the late V M Salgaocar. When the Opinion Poll was announced, the other industrialists who had co-founded the Rashtramat withdrew and V M Salgoacar assumed absolute ownership of the paper. When a group of Konkani mogis approached V M Salgaocar for support, he responded with tremendous enthusiasm. Overnight, the Rashtramat became the voice of those opposed to merger just as the Herald became the voice of those who wanted Konkani to become the official language much later in the eighties.

V M Salgaocar did not limit himself to encouraging the Rashtramat to vehemently oppose merger. He also got personally involved in the anti merger campaign, even at the face of pressure from the then MGP chief minister, Dayanand Bandodkar, and senior members of the union cabinet like Y B Chavan. Indeed, the story goes that when the industries minister of Maharashtra sought his support for merger with Maharashtra, V M Salgaocar very politely and firmly told him that he was committed to preserving the identity of Goa. V M Salgaocar is the only industrialist who risked his industrial empire to preserve the unique and distinct identity of Goa.

The challenge before those who were opposed to the merger of Goa with Maharashtra was to persuade at least a significant section of the Hindu population to vote against merger. The Catholic population was predominantly in favour of maintaining the unique and distinct identity of Goa, which is not to minimise the roles played by Alvaro Loyola Furtado, the founder of the United Goans Party, and Jack Sequeira in mobilising the minority vote against merger. But given the demographics, with Hindus comprising over 60 percent of the population then, the battle against merger could not have been won unless a significant proportion of the Hindu community was persuaded that it was not in the interest of Goa and Goans to merge with Maharashtra.

The Konkani group realised very early that support for the MGP was not necessarily support for merger. The MGP’s popularity was due to the charisma of Dayanand Bandodkar and the fact that he had promised land reforms which would free lakhs of Goans belonging to the backward classes from the tyranny of bhatkars. The Konkani group also realised that there were many Hindus who loved Marathi as a language but did not, as a corollary, believe that Goa should be merged with Maharashtra. Their challenge was to counter the attempts of the mergerists to equate merger with Maharashtra with safeguarding the interest of the Marathi language.

The communalisation of the pro-merger campaign by the MGP and political leaders from Maharashtra who sought to exploit religious sentiments by projecting merger as the coming together of goddess Bhavani of Maharashtra with goddess Shantadurga did not go well with many secular Hindu Goans. The Konkani group, which comprised of stalwarts like Chandrakant Keni, Uday Bhembre, Ulhas Buyao, Anna Sarmalkar, Ravindra Kelekar, Shankar Bhandari and many others, refrained from attacking Dayanand Bandodkar. On the contrary, they pointed out that if Goa was merged with Maharashtra the beloved Bandodkar would cease to be the chief minister and Goa would be reduced to an insignificant district of Maharashtra.

Going by the fact that the anti-merger group lost by over 35,000 votes and secured 11 % more votes than the merger group, it became clear that a significant proportion of Hindus voted against merger. Going purely by demographics, the Hindu majority, whose numbers exceeded that of the Catholics by 19% or 60,000, the pro-merger group should have won by a significant margin. But as it has happened repeatedly, wherever there has been a threat to the unique and distinct identity of Goa, both Hindus and Catholics — cutting across the community divide — have opted to preserve Goa’s identity and reject any attempt to undermine its distinct identity.

The victory of the anti merger forces in the Opinion Poll marked the triumph of secularism. It also defeated the designs of Maharashtra’s prominent leaders to merge Goa with Maharashtra. That the people of Goa did not equate the MGP with merger, or at least not the MGP leader Dayanand Bandodkar with merger, was dramatised by the fact that, in the elections held after the Opinion Poll, the MGP returned to power. The language divide persisted till Konkani was made the official language of the state after a hard fought agitation in 1989. And though the ghost of the linguistic divide persists, even senior MGP leaders, including Shashikala Kakodkar, agree in retrospect that merger of Goa with Maharashtra would have been a disaster for Goans, irrespective of whether they were Hindus or Christians.