Monika Ghurde's rape and murder: The growing friction between locals and 'outsiders' in Goa

The restrictions that exist in our legislation, for foreigners to acquire real estate, have contributed, without any conscious effort on our part, to keep our heritage intact. Even Portuguese citizens from other parts of the nation do not own any property here.

– Amadeu Prazeres da Costa, editor of the Portuguese language newspaper, O Heraldo, Goa, dated December 15, 1950. From an editorial, translated by Shanti Colaço

As the new century broke, a noted national TV anchor – looking dapper and self-assured as he always did – addressed a gathering of students in what Bengaluru, which still went by its colonial name of Bangalore. With TV getting into the mix, he told them in a measured voice, the media had changed, the news has to be made 'sexy'. More than 15 years later, those words sound eerily prophetic.

A tale of two murders

On October 7, 2016, a well-known news channel’s website reported the murder of Monika Ghurde in Goa, with the headline “Goa perfumer found dead in apartment, her hands tied to bed”. No less lascivious, one newspaper’s Bengaluru edition had their front page story on October 8 with a photograph of the murdered woman elegantly draped in a grey and off-maroon silk sari, the headline reading “High-profile perfume maker killed in Goa flat” in 28-point font – below that, in 16 points, the words “Her naked body found in bed with hands tied”. 

The paper’s infographic made basic and relevant information, was prurient, a capsule noting “She and her estranged photographer husband Ramamrutham (They got the spelling wrong) lived separately”? Did they want to imply that as a single woman she may have been of questionable character? Or were they pre-empting the work of the police and sexing it up a bit to cast suspicion on her husband? 

Joining this orgy of dissemblance, a local paper front-paged the story on their website on October 9, with an even more striking photograph of her and the headline, “No confirmation of sexual assault in Monika murder”. 

The morning following the night of Ghurde’s murder, a decidedly ‘unsexy’ robbery-murder was also reported to the local police. Some time between 9 am and 10.30 am—when her body was found—65-year-old homemaker Shobha Karmali’s mouth was taped by thieves who then strangled her to death and robbed her house of Rs 1.25 lakh and a television set. 

Her murder barely made it to the inside pages of newspapers, while Ghurde’s was splashed across front pages of the local, even national media. Most of the local media didn’t even deign to mention Karmali’s name in the headline.

Ghurde was murdered in the swanky ‘village’ of Sangolda that beckons more to the stereotype of a laid-back, more ‘soulful’ Goa—where a glazed ceramic vase in a swish boutique for instance, could set you back a few thousand rupees. 

Karmali was robbed and murdered in her house Curchorem, a small town touching the farthest backwaters of the Zuari River. Most tourists have probably never heard of, leave alone seen, Curchorem, its recent prominence, its wealth, and, indeed, its very own growth story fueled by barge and truck owners who, between 2005 and 2012, hauled illegally mined iron ore and sent it down the Zuari River.    

While affluent settlers in the social circuit linking the better-known, more tony ‘villages’ of north Goa, including Sangolda, will likely grieve at this senseless murder, their anguish is limited to a circle of privilege that carries the vicious reminder their own bubble could burst. 

Karmali’s murder on the other hand took place in Madegal, one of the wards of the town, in a crowded neighbourhood, in a town which is now seeing its first slums that house Goa’s increasing migrant workforce. Her neighbours, relatives and friends have fears that are more grounded. They can’t sell the villa they bought six years ago for Rs 30 lakh for a few crore and move to New Zealand. 

A local doctor told the Goan press that it was not just this murder that worried him, but the increased robberies. Two women, school teachers, said that the murder happened in broad daylight – and what did this mean for them?

Susegad no more

Robberies and thefts in Goan villages were rare well into the late 70s. People never locked their doors; if neighbours wanted something, they opened the door, took what they wanted, and shut the door. Those days, Anjuna was a sleepy village of traditional fishermen and locals who grew rice, harvested their coconuts and fruit trees, and tended their vegetable gardens. 

Today, it parades the accoutrements that come with excessive and unregulated tourism, a ‘Tourist Satellite Town’—one like any other ‘village’ in north Goa cursed by the sea breaking on its shores. The fields lie fallow while permissions are sought to change the land use, so another ugly building can rise up. With Goa’s government de-recognising the coconut tree as a ‘palm’, it means one can now cut them with impunity.  Most of the giant jackfruit and mango trees have already disappeared.  

In north Goa, the so-called villages provide a sameness that make one sad. You can expect traffic throughout the day and night.  Cheap budget lodges, expensive home-stays, posh boutique hotels, iconic restaurants, village bars, dance clubs; crossroads where you can meet a dealer to sell you enough for a couple of joints; bad acid if you want it; coke cut with powdered sugar; the whispered hisses of a pimp saying “Hey man, you want girls?”. 

This, then, is what Goa has come to. Susegad has given way to a frenzy that presses in from all sides as the state becomes a magnet for domestic and international tourists who come looking for cheap thrills, and cheaper drugs.  

Just a few years back, Atala, an Israeli drug-dealer,  was caught in a video posted by his disgruntled girlfriend, mentioning the names of a minister and his son who worked with the police to give him seized narcotics that he would sell. Enough has been written in the local newspapers showing the complicity of the police and politicians’ in such nefarious goings-on. North Goa on the sea fell to organised drug trafficking, the Israelis taking the northernmost tip, the Russians the next bit, the Nigerians the third. It was in Anjuna, where eight years ago Scarlet Keeling, a 15-year-old British girl, was drugged, raped, and left lying in a few inches of water where she drowned. Everyone that could colluded to brush it under the carpet. It was declared “an accidental death”. The girl’s mother and her lawyer forced a further investigation that showed she was murdered. The two Goans who allegedly gave her the drugs and were last seen with her, were arrested.  At the end of September, both were acquitted.

The sins of the hippies

In the late 1960s, when young men and women dropped out of college following their  existential drives; when deserters from Vietnam travelled overland to Sweden to seek asylum, or musicians got all Mahesh

‘Transcendental Meditation’ Yogi, courtesy The Beatles—it was only natural that the beaches of Anjuna, Baga and Calangute and their bucolic lifestyle beckoned to them.  

The hippies had the best music on cassette decks that we Goans saw for the first time; books we had only heard about. They gave Goan college students  their first taste of what modernity could be. 

They extolled the virtues of love and peace. They smoked weed, they took off their clothes and went swimming in the nude, and made love in the dunes. The locals who owned the local tea shops, provision stores, or who had an extra room to let, loved them. 

They made many friends, the best the fishermen whose nets they helped haul in every day. Today, you would say they were seamlessly assimilated.

The Catholic priests and assorted Pharisees of that time, however, hated them. They lobbied with the newspapers in passionate letters,  organised protest marches in villages, carried placards reading ‘We don’t want hippies’; ‘Hippies bring drugs’; ‘No nudity on our beaches’; ‘Nudity is a sin’. The hippies just moved on to more welcoming places where they could take off their clothes, smoke grass peacefully, and make love on the beach. 

In college, we faced parental wrath and slept on the beach, burying ourselves in the warm sand between the dunes that protected us from the chilly breeze.  Now those dunes are toilets for migrant workers. If we were in Anjuna and wanted a change of scene, we hiked over the cliff and came down to the Baga Creek. From there, it was a twenty-minute walk to places where there would be good music playing. 

If you were to make that hike today, chances are you will get mugged.

The outsider conundrum

At the root of the recent perception of Goa is that same fear of the outsider as the corrupter. So, the blame for the idyllic state’s transformation into the party capital of the country, with its attendant accoutrements, is laid lazily at the feet of the ugly tourist, the foreign dealer, the migrant worker. 

But even as locals latch onto ‘outsiders’ for everything going wrong, it helps to keep in mind that there are two kinds of ‘outsiders’. 

There’s the affluent, persons here to get in touch with their souls, and to work in a more creative atmosphere. But have they, like the hippies in the 60s, integrate themselves into the local population? If they’ve been living in Goa more than 10 years and not treating it as a holiday retreat, in all probability, they have, and their hurt at being labelled as an outsider is palpable and real. 

Those here a few years will leave soon. If they didn’t have the means when property prices were already sky high, they wouldn’t have been here in the first place. They’ll feel sad, shed a few tears, write an article for The Guardian. But they’ll move on, just like the tourists.

Provisional data for 2015 from the Goa tourism department shows that tourist arrivals jumped a shade over 30 per cent for the second year in a row. A total of 52.9 lakh persons visited Goa last year, with an overwhelming 47.5 lakh of those from India itself. 

And then there’s the outsider that has neither affluence nor hope, ‘environmental refugees’ from Jharkhand and Chhattisgarh whose lands, if they had any, have fallen to industrial hunger and greed. Merely an aspirational destination for ‘People Like Us’, for them, Goa is a faraway journey that gives them enough to send home to feed the family. In a village  close to Mapusa where some of them live, they sit in a shabby bar and  drink. If you greet them with “Johar”,  “blessings upon you”—‘their’ form of greeting—their eyes glow.  By the third drink, they get homesick; they pine for kinship. If their call gets through, they cry, telling those calling how much they are missed. Later, before it’s time to leave, they tell you of the times they are most unhappy. 

“When we walk past, they send their dogs to bark at us,” they say. 

“If  there’s a robbery here, the police first come to talk to us, ask us for papers.”

“I went to touch a baby’s cheek and the man carrying her slapped me and yelled. Two other men came and slapped me.”

Goans rent their outhouses and storerooms to them. They bathe in the open, defecate where they can, orphans of an economy believing they can and ought to be kept disenfranchised—their welfare secondary to the compelling interest of growth rates.

There is truth in the axiom that Goans are brave in numbers when the opponents are few. In less shabby bars, one witnesses jingoism that suggests violence in Goa against these lesser privileged ‘outsiders’ could easily take a nasty turn. Never mind that they are their countrymen, and that the drugs that draw the other, more well-heeled, outsiders are brought in by foreigners. 

The epigraph opening this piece haunts me. Goa today is like Kashmir, the pellets replaced by self-inflicted injuries of bitterness and cynicism. Goa too, in spite of many promises made, was never given the ‘special status’ once promised to it by none other than Jawaharlal Nehru. 

—Hartman de Souza
The writer is the author of the recently published book ‘Eat Dust – Mining and Greed in Goa’ .