Independence as a long work-in-progress
By AMITA KANEKAR
The declaration by Chief Minister Pramod Sawant during the Independence Day celebrations, that the Portuguese looted Goa for 400 years, surely counts as a self-goal, with many Goans retorting that the real loot of Goa only began in recent times, especially thriving under Sawant’s own government. But there is no point in wondering where Sawant gets his ideas from, nor indeed in informing him that, while historians have criticised the Portuguese empire and its rule over Goa for many things, ‘loot’, or economic exploitation, is not one of them. History lessons from Sawant will not stop so easily. He was not even embarrassed when his big plan – and budget outlay – for rebuilding temples destroyed by the Portuguese, turned out to have no data on such temples to back it. Who cares about the facts? The point is just to continuously raise distracting non-issues, the more communally divisive the better, so that real issues get ignored. Bashing colonial rule is the easiest option, with Independence Days and Liberation Days providing a golden chance to indulge in this to the maximum. (more…)