Will Goa trust Congress's vocal for local?

Congress campaign drew contrast to last ten years of BJP's top-down decision making and reached out to stakeholders

On the eve of polling, the primary battle in Goa is poised between the Congress and the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), with the Aam Aadmi Party (AAP) and the Trinamool Congress, receding into the background despite a sustained campaign, except for pockets based on the individual prowess of a candidate or two.

The BJP, which lined up a phalanx of winnable candidates, shows signs that it is on slippery ground. Its central plank is that it provided a stable development-oriented government, showcasing its mega highway expansion projects and other infrastructure facilities constructed over the past ten years. Citizen disenchantment, however, is high over a sliding economy, unemployment, inflation and strained state finances, compounded by poor handling of the pandemic, high Covid deaths and shoddy public health, education and civic services beyond the showpiece infrastructure projects.

Attack on Nehru betrays BJP's nervousness

Signs of the BJP's nervousness were visible when a series of central leaders, led by Prime Minister Narendra Modi, chose to rake up an attack on India's first prime minister Jawaharlal Nehru to target the Congress. Modi claimed Nehru had let Goans down by delaying the liberation of Goa 14 years later until 1961, when he sent Indian troops in to annex the Portuguese ruled territory.

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Historians, academics and freedom fighters have already rubbished the allegation as a distortion of history, exhuming it from its context at that time, given that NATO and the USA were backing colonial Portugal, who had by then extended citizenship to all Goans and considered Goa an overseas territory of their country. The matter was also under the ambit of the United Nations in those post World War II decades, when a Cold War raged internationally between the USA and the USSR. It had taken long drawn diplomatic manoeuvring to create the basis for an intervention, and even then, India had to stave off an adverse international reaction to the annexation.

Sixty years after the event, Goa's BJP politicians led by Chief Minister Pramod Sawant first raised this criticism against Nehru last year, as Goa readied to celebrate 60 years of liberation (1961-2021). But the suggestion of a delay had been firmly refuted here at the time.

At a press conference in Goa on February 11, Congress leader Rahul Gandhi made a confident dismissal of the non-issue. Turning the spotlight instead on the PM, he called out the intention of the prime minister in raking up a flawed reading of history at this juncture, saying it was to distract attention from the fact that Modi had failed on the economic front -- unemployment is a massive crisis in the state and the country, the economy had slumped and the government had been unable to deliver.

Congress fusillade on BJP

In the last leg of the campaign, the Congress has placed the Goan economy and unemployment in the state at the forefront of its attack on the ruling BJP. It slammed the ten-year-old BJP government for failing to restart sustainable legal mining. It said a Congress government in Goa would restart sustainable legal mining and had a clear plan to do so within six months. Every party has made sustainable legal mining a poll promise, given that the sector was vital to the state's economy. Jobs, machinery, trucking, barging, shipping and ancillary sectors had been hit hard by its closure in 2012.

The Congress also upped the firepower against the BJP for being "anti-Goa" on tourism, mining and coal hub creation and being anti-environment. Its poll promise includes a pledge to scrap a contentious 16B clause of the Planning Act that permits exemptions in protected green areas of the Goa Regional Plan. It said it would scrap and resist the Centre's three linear projects for Goa, namely laying a double railway track and power line and expanding an existing highway through the Western Ghats forests and sanctuaries in Mollem in Eastern Goa.

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The projects meant for coal transportation from private-corporate run berths of the Mormugao Port Trust/Authority(MPT/MPA) to steel mills in Karnataka are being prioritised but face opposition from local citizens. They point out that the coal imports could be channelled from any of the five ports in Karnataka over a shorter distance instead of creating new infrastructure by razing heritage village clusters, forests and a hotspot ecosystem.

The tussle for Goa's iron ore

The real skirmish, though, is over Goa's iron ore resources. A tussle for control of the state's ore resources has been simmering since liberation. The export-oriented Goa-based mine owners are reluctant to cede control to national players eyeing a slice of the resource and keen to muscle in. During the 2005-2011 boom in Chinese demand, excesses by fly-by-night bit players attracted the focus of environmentalists and media. It became an opportunity to bring the local sector to a standstill due to court and executive action in 2012.

Court action by environmentalists saw the 88 leases cancelled in 2018. Meanwhile, private players — Jindal South West (JSW)'s South West Port Limited and the Adani Mormugao Port Terminal Private Limited (AMPTPL) — started handling imported coal via two privately leased berths at MPT after iron ore handling stopped. From an iron ore port, MPT became a coal handling port. The Centre-backed Sagarmala projects to create new jetties and road networks for coal handling and 'nationalising' key rivers in Goa became a new front for local environmentalist and citizen protests. They seemed to have exchanged iron ore mining-related problems in interior Goa for coal hub pollution in densely populated, tourism centric, coastal Goa.

While dragging on resumption of iron ore mining, the Union government's overt facilitation of coal movement became contentious, with overtones of a weakening state economy in a strong Centre-weak state relationship. The local iron ore industry found itself without a skilled negotiator after the illness and untimely demise of late chief minister Manohar Parrikar and the talent vacuum of the local BJP. Parrikar had opposed double-tracking and linear projects. His successor, Pramod Sawant, handpicked by the central BJP, overlooking more experienced candidates, has tended to go along with the Centre's wishes, green lighting all the projects and increased coal movement volumes. This has escalated local disenchantment, both within the industry and among greens and citizens. Under the hapless Sawant, Goa has been unable to place its case against the MPA's extended control over coastal and riverine jurisdiction under the 2021 Major Port Authorities Act.

As a small-sized coastal state, the MPA's extended jurisdiction has bled into state government administrative territory, creating friction the Sawant government has not addressed or sorted out adequately. Additionally, iron ore mining stoppage and pandemic-hit tourism slumps have placed the state economy in the red, increasing its dependence on the Centre and borrowings in the past three years.

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The Congress has foregrounded these issues in its campaign, contrasting its economic vision for Goa and the BJP's. There is little currency for the BJP's poll time assertions that it would resume mining after the elections. "Goa has a public debt of Rs 24,000 crore and is still borrowing... The Reserve Bank of India's State of the States report places Goa last. Of all the 35 states of India, Goa showed minus 8 per cent growth in 2020, and it can't be better in 2021, " former union finance minister and Congress in charge of Goa, P Chidambaram, said in videos posted on the Congress Twitter handle.

To draw contrast to the last ten years of top-down decision making, the Congress took suggestions from citizens for its manifesto, reached out to key sectors of the economy, and Rahul Gandhi held meetings with tourism stakeholders on a previous visit.

The BJP, meanwhile, seemed oblivious to the tourism sector's repeated assertions that it preferred quality tourism to quantity tourism, which was degrading beaches and villages due to littering and overcapacity. At the release of its manifesto last week, the BJP said it would upscale infrastructure to double tourism inflow, a big red flag to an already stressed local hospitality environment.

Goa receives 80 lakh tourists every year, five times its resident population. Union Minister of Tourism and Culture G Kishen Reddy's December 2021 statement that Goa was unofficially known as the casino capital of India and could be officially named the same if it stood to benefit has only caused irritation in the state. The February 14 hustings will determine whether Goa checks in with the economic vision of the BJP or the Congress.

(Pamela D'Mello is a journalist based in Goa)

Disclaimer: The views expressed above are the author's own. They do not necessarily reflect the views of DH.