Goa's Hindutva architect

This is a book written with affection and sadness about a man who had the talent and intellectual bandwidth to do anything

First things first. This is not a hagiography. The book opens with an account of Manohar Parrikar’s fight against pancreatic cancer and the authors recount with appalled fascination his stubborn refusal to give up the chief ministership of Goa although he’d been catheterised, hooked on to support systems and was skeletal in frame. When he left for treatment to the US, he set up a three-member committee to take key government decisions, with appropriate financial limits. Files were signed on his behalf by his principal secretary, P Krishnamurthy, a clearly untenable arrangement. 

When he returned, he was in even worse health but when Amit Shah went to meet him — maybe to ask him to give up — he must have refused point blank. Mr Shah came out after a short meeting to say Parrikar would continue as chief minister. Parrikar made it clear he was ready to be carried out of his office (which is what happened literally and figuratively) but he would not give up his position.

That said, this is a book written with affection and sadness about a man who had the talent and intellectual bandwidth to do — well, anything. He was the first chief minister in India from an IIT. He was brilliant at maths and also an entrepreneur of sorts, having started his own business. Initially,  the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) in Goa was non-existent. It was because of the efforts of Parrikar and Subhash Velingkar, friend- turned-bitter-critic, that the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh morphed into the BJP, skipping the evolutionary Akhil Bharatiya Vidyarthi Parishad (ABVP) route. The result was a strong, tough Hindutva core but a rather soft and malleable periphery. 

An Extraordinary Life: A biography of Manohar Parrikar 

Author: Sadguru Patil and Mayabhushan Nagvenkar

Publisher: Penguin

Pages: 220

Price: Rs 499

 

The struggle was between Pramod Mahajan offering the temptingly easier route to power by doing a deal with the Maharashtrawadi Gomantak Party  along the Shiv Sena-BJP model in Maharashtra and Parrikar and Velingkar’s formula of fashioning a BJP that (eventually) brought together the Ramjanmabhumi movement with the Catholic Church in an uneasy alliance.

But the book also chronicles the U-turns Parrikar took and notes his disarmingly frank confession while doing so. The biggest story in the 1990s (through the book, the 1990s is spelt as “noughties”) in Goa was the mining industry. China’s boom was, in part, fuelled by low-grade iron exports from Goa with disastrous consequences for the environment, which environmentalists like Claude Alvares fought to their dying day. In the Opposition, Parrikar took the help of Alvares and others to rain fire and brimstone against the ruling Congress government. The illegal mining scam was thought to have cost the exchequer around Rs 35,000 crore and found reverberations in Parliament. The Justice M B Shah committee found hundreds of violations by some of the biggest names in the mining world. Because of Parrikar’s backing, illegal mining became Goa’s cause célèbre.

Then Parrikar came to power. He told the state Assembly in 2012 that no illegal mines were operating in Goa, adding disingenuously that “illegal extraction” might be going on. Eventually, the Supreme Court order banned all mining in Goa. The ban was partially lifted in 2014 but, because Parrikar was unable to handle the transition, reimposed in 2018. Mining contributed 20 to 30 per cent of the state GDP, and companies were political funders. The book notes that Parrikar called the M B Shah report “inconclusive” and actually renewed the leases in favour of the same miners Shah had red-flagged.

The same goes for the casino industry which needed some regulatory mechanism like a Gaming Commissioner. Parrikar failed to leverage an industry that could have added substantially to the state’s revenues, even as he promised a ban on casinos during his election campaign but allowed larger offshore casinos to replace smaller casino vessels when he came to power.

Parrikar’s move to Delhi as defence minister was forced on him — this much was well known. But his differences with finance minister Arun Jaitley came to a head on the issue of One Rank One Pension . Neither is there any more to tell the tale. And, of course, the Opposition dove into the circumstances of the Rafale deal — when the prime minister was in France signing the deal, his defence minister was in Goa, inaugurating a fish stall.
 

The book offers wonderful glimpses of Parrikar’s world. He was public yet private. He made no secret of his weakness for Heineken beer and non-vegetarian food. He had given up smoking but would often cadge cigarettes off IAS officers. He didn’t mind  gutkha either, though he banned it in 2012 and never went back to it.
 

He was deeply lonely after 2000 when his wife Medha died from leukemia. There was some tittle tattle about a woman IAS officer and when news reached him, he requested home minister L K Advani to transfer her. The authors note he would never meet her unless all the doors and windows of his office were open.
 

Parrikar was not a simple, salt-of-the-earth kind of man. This book captures the complexity unflinchingly even as it describes with tenderness a Goa legend.