The darker side of sunny Goa

Sitting in sunny Goa one might feel all worries wash away. Tourists come to Goa for its famous susegad, best explained as a languid, laidback attitude that allows everyone to take things as they come rather than be rushed. And that is exactly what one starts feeling moments after landing when your vehicle travels through rural roads with palm fronds and fields on either side.

That much is well known. What is not is that while the tourists may feel relaxed, Goans are anything but. A certain sombreness has crept into the local mood, obvious to anyone soon after getting here. A combination of factors, from the immediate to the more long-term, from the economic to the cultural have combined to create an angst among Goans who are beginning to ask some fundamental questions about themselves and what their state has become.

The most obvious reason stems from fears of a downturn in tourism which looks imminent if it has not already happened. At the budget level, owners of shacks, beachfront restaurants, curio shops and so on say that already tourist numbers are much less than before — it shows up in the poor sales and bookings. Though tourists can be seen in the bazaars and on the beaches, any regular will confidently say it is not as it used to be, even till last year. The bigger hotels say they have advance reservations which have still not been cancelled, but a little digging shows that there are rooms to be had even up to mid-December, a situation that is extremely rare otherwise. As for the post-New Year season, when the party crowds have left, no one knows...

In a sense it was bound to happen. Though the trigger is the global financial meltdown — which means fewer foreign tourists — there are other reasons behind this slump.

Two very high-profile crime incidents, both concerning young western girls have been well-publicised abroad and have tarnished the state’s image among travellers. It is not the fact of the crimes — such things happen elsewhere too — but the manner in which the cases were handled and the powerful people said to be involved that have shaken confidence in the state’s administrative and law and order machinery. Who wants to come to a place where minor girls are assaulted and where the police come up with convoluted theories and botch up the investigations?

These incidents have exposed a very ugly side of the state, showing up a xenophobic and intolerant face that is at odds with the image of a gentle, peace-loving and friendly populace that had built up over the years. To be sure, most people are all that and more and a visitor does not feel threatened, but just beneath that veneer lies a xenophobia that is now becoming apparent. Goans are unhappy at the notoriety their state has attracted, but there is no getting away from the tendency among many here to blame outsiders — tourists, homebuyers and migrants — for everything, even when they may be the victims of a crime.

Goans have been nervous about migrants taking jobs — usually at the bottom rungs — and unhappy even about the well-heeled from Mumbai and Delhi who have bought old bungalows and swanky new apartments as holiday homes. They reluctantly admit that these properties were sold by other Goans, but say it is because the ‘outsiders’ are throwing money around.

An echo of these fears can be felt in the Movement for a Special Status, a campaign to demand that the Union government confers a special status on Goa. The details are not spelt out but one of the proposals is to somehow ‘freeze’ the population to its current level of around 15 lakh. “We are not against migrants, but Goa does not have the carrying capacity for a huge influx,” says its promoter. Translated, it means that no more ‘outsiders’ should be allowed to take up jobs or buy houses, though presumably tourists with their spending dollars and pounds (and roubles and shekels) will be more than welcome.

The people of Goa find themselves strangers in their own land, the chairman of the Movement says (that will sound familiar to Mumbaikars.) More sober Goans say that such movements come and go and most citizens do see economic value in outsiders coming in — after all there are Goans working and living all over the world — but not everyone is sanguine. Talk to a few of these so-called outsiders, especially those who moved in from other parts of India to set up home here, and there is acknowledgement that tensions are slowly simmering.

These worries may be exaggerated, because nothing suggests that there will be any kind of social explosion. Everyone understands the value of tourism on which thousands of jobs depend. The new residents of Goa have brought with them an international culture that has enriched the state and boosted the local economy with demands for housing, goods and services. No one is yet packing their bags to leave — the lifestyle is too comforting to give it up and rush back to the big city. But it will be foolish to ignore these socio-cultural shifts which can be easily exploited by parochial politicians, of which Goa has no dearth. Add to that a slowing economy and it could become a deadly cocktail.

Email: sidharth01@dnaindia.net