Author: Albertina Almeida

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Thinking Goa, Thinking Kashmir

By ALBERTINA ALMEIDA

On August 5, 2019, exactly a year ago, Government of India effectively abrogated Article 370, in the name of expediting development and ending militancy. Kashmir was subjected to a lockdown which included blockage of communications. One felt concerned, and definitely angry at the fact that the Indian State had stomped all over Kashmir, worsening an already bad situation, and without giving the people of Kashmir a voice in the determination of their future. One may say that these two, Goa and Kashmir, cannot be compared. True, they can’t be compared, in that, in the one, it was a forced and heavily militarised lockdown meant to gag, but introduced in the name of checking terrorism, and in the other, the police-enforced lockdown was said to be meant as a safety measure to prevent spread of COVID 19. (more…)

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COVID 19 Statistics – Lies, Damned Lies and Statistics!

By ALBERTINA ALMEIDA

There is the oft repeated saying popularized by Mark Twain, that there are three types of lies:  lies, damned lies and statistics. And that is what comes to  mind as one tries to grapple with the basis on which the COVID 19 statistics, that are released each day to the press, are computed. Reliance is said to be placed by the Government on tests conducted. Fair enough, there had to be an yardstick by which an designation of someone being COVID 19 positive qualified to be entered as a statistic. So one would assume that it is after testing positive that a number would be entered in the statistical records. (more…)

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COVID-19 cannot be a pretext to trample democracy

The pandemic or, it seems to me, the actions taken in the garb of measures to address the pandemic, has resulted in many people being rendered jobless and incomeless. I don’t know whether to call what is happening a health crisis or a crisis caused by manipulated or negligent or incompetent political decision-making. But the outcome of it all is a humanitarian disaster. People have suffered innumerable indignities in India, and closer home in Goa. (more…)

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“Don’t do politics”. But why not?

By ALBERTINA ALMEIDA

‘Physical distancing’ is one thing, and ‘social distancing’ plus ‘not crossing the Lakshman Rekha’ quite another. In all publicity or educational material around COVID 19, the word social distancing is used, and in Goa, the Chief Minister of Goa has repeatedly told us that ‘the Laxman Rekha should not be crossed’. (more…)

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Addressing COVID-19 in a Sick System

By ALBERTINA ALMEIDA

On reading so many different takes on COVID-19, I am confused. I don’t belong to the world of medicine. We live in an age where there are genuinely serious health concerns globally on the one hand, and selective unscientific hyping up about certain virii or diseases on the other hand. And both of these happen at international levels as well as at the hands of the nation state. I was reading an article titled False Alarms and Pseudo-Epidemics: The Limitations of Observational Epidemiology” by David Grimes and Kenneth Schulz, for instance, which pointed out that “all observational research has bias (which can include selection, information, and confounding bias)”. (more…)

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The Citizenship (Amendment) Act, 2019: A Dangerous Law

By ALBERTINA ALMEIDA

The Citizenship Amendment Act 2019 (CAA), got onto India’s statute book on 12th December, 2019, after it was passed in the Lok Sabha on 10th December, 2019, in the Rajya Sabha on 11th December, 2019,   and got the assent of the President on 12th December, 2019,   and was promptly notified in the Government Gazette on the same day. This Act comes at a moment when there is widespread discontent on account of an economic slowdown. It comes at a time after the National Register of Citizens in Assam, a Supreme Court directed exercise, has resulted in 19 lakh people, most of them Hindu, being excluded from the register. (more…)

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Citizenship Amendment Act – What about Goans?

By ALBERTINA ALMEIDA

The December 2019 amendment of the Citizenship Act, 1955, once again brings the issue of citizenship of Goans (with Portuguese passports) to the fore. The new amendment provides for citizenship to be granted to persecuted minorities (read in the Act as Hindu, Buddhist, Sikh, Jain, Parsi and Christian) from Pakistan, Bangladesh, and Afghanistan, who have been residing in India from before 31st December, 2014, and it also allows the Government to cancel the registration of the Overseas Citizen of India Cardholder ‘in case of violation of any provisions of the Act or any other law for the time’. Already much has been said of the Act, about the Government’s selective ‘humanism’ by which only certain persecuted communities, and that too from certain nearby countries which the ruling dispensation refers to as theocratic states, are being considered for citizenship. (more…)

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Perceptions of Justice and the Road to Justice

By ALBERTINA ALMEIDA

Questioning the meaning of justice and what sense it makes happens every day, based on ordinary people’s lived experiences of the justice system. The Judgement on the Ayodhya issue has only brought the issue in sharp limelight. The concluding words in a book titled Justice: What’s the Right Thing to Do by Michael J. Sandel are reverberating in my mind, “A politics of moral engagement, is not only a more inspiring ideal than a politics of avoidance. It is also a more promising basis for a just society.” (more…)

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Stop Son Preference in Laws and Their Implementation!

By ALBERTINA ALMEIDA

At a recently held state-level training programme on the Pre-Conception and Pre-natal Diagnostic Techniques  (Prohibition of Sex Selection) Act, 1994, social circumstances that drive the ‘son preference’ were factored as responsible for the adverse sex ratio. It is to be noted that Goa’s child sex ratio, according to the last census of 2011, stands at 942 females per 1000 males. It would seem that the son preference even informs law making, law implementation, law interpretation, or omission in synchronizing new laws with relatively progressive past laws. There are umpteen examples that can be given to illustrate this problem. (more…)