The politics of land and its uses

Goa's politics has coalesced around families entrenched in their satrapies, along with perennial politicians with deep roots in their backyards

Jawaharlal Nehru famously said that Goa’s people are ajeeb. In the first election after the demise of the Machiavellian Manohar Parrikar, the fulcrum of Goa’s recent politics, next month’s poll promises to be its most ajeeb.

With Assembly seat electorates averaging 30,000, the axiom all politics is local could have been invented for Goa. In 2017, the winning candidate averaged just 10,998 votes with the runner-up at 7,025. The saying goes that the archetypal Goan knows at least one minister and one MLA whom he can confidently expect to solve his everyday problems.

Local journalist Sandesh Prabhudesai’s just published book Ajeeb Goa’s Gazab Politics notes the winnability factors in Goa as the candidate’s “education, social status, performance, competence, capacity to deliver etc but certainly not caste or religion”. Notably, party affiliation is also absent.

What matters more than anything is wealth and in Goa wealth is mostly land-based. Prabhudesai says pithily: “Goa’s politics has always moved around its land,” referring to the state’s mining barons, legendary king-makers, and to the builder-politician lobby, which has prospered as land values have soared since Goa became a tourist destination and, lately, a magnet for the country’s celebrities and the new rich.

The brazenness of this lobby can be breath-taking. Soon after Parrikar led a defection-fuelled coalition to power in 2017, the state government amended the Town and Country Planning (TCP) Act to authorise the TCP Board to change land category on a case-to-case basis or, as widely dubbed, “suitcase to suitcase” basis. Prabhudesai’s book has two revealing compilations on this audacious move, since stayed by the High Court.

After the amendment, Prabhudesai notes, the TCP Board was flooded with 6,548 applications for land-use change to settlement land, which, if approved, will convert cultivable land totalling over 22.5 million square metres! Of this, applications for converting 806,182 square metres were from 16 MLAs and ex-MLAs who were self-declared land developers, from the state’s three main parties: The BJP, the Congress, and the Maharashtrawadi Gomantak Party (MGP).

Goa’s politics in these parties has coalesced around families entrenched in their own satrapies with family members or protégés as MLAs. Then there are the perennial politicians with deep roots in their backyards. Both sets, with fickle party affiliations, have mastered the dynamics of Goa’s transactional politics: How to win elections and then leverage power to coop the small-sized electorate.

These two sets with high winnability quotient control the bulk of the states’ 40 seats. Almost without exception, they figure in the candidates’ list of the BJP, Congress and the MGP and its ally, the Trinamool Congress, whose rich coffers pilot its foray into Goa in pursuit of its national ambitions. The Aam Aadmi Party has stood apart for not prioritising winnability as its criterion for selecting candidates.

Topping the satraps’ list is Goa’s richest MLA, Michael Lobo from Calangute, whose move to the Congress from the BJP has dramatically improved the party’s prospects. Lobo’s clout pervades seven seats in North Goa, perhaps decisively so in Siolim (wife Delilah), and through two protégés in Mapusa and Saligao.

The BJP has the largest number of candidates from these two sets. The Monserrates — Babush and Jennifer — whose combined declared assets topped Lobo’s in 2017, dominate capital Panaji and surrounding three seats; they jumped to the BJP in 2019 from the Congress. Vishwajit Rane, son of Pratap Singh Rane, preceded the Monserrates to the BJP from the Congress, and is entrenched, along with wife, Deviya, in their ancestral seats in north-central Goa. Brothers Sudin and Deepak Dhavalikars of the MGP, dispensed from the ruling coalition post-Parrikar, hold sway in four seats around Ponda. Digambar Kamat from Margao (Congress since 2007, and three-time BJP MLA before that) tops the list of the perennials.

Chief Minister Pramod Sawant, who belongs to the BJP, is secure in Sanquelim despite being the face of the shambolic administration. The state has the ignominy of topping, on a per capita basis, all national Covid indicators from incidence to fatalities. The party election plank gives top billing to the government’s infrastructure roll-out, most notably the Atal Setu bridge over the Mandovi. But the state debt has doubled under the last two BJP governments, threatening Parrikar’s legacy of a sound state balance sheet.

The RBI data, crunched by The Indian Express, is damning on the government’s employment performance. Goa’s employment rate was 49 per cent in December 2016 and is under 32 per cent now. Less than one in three Goans has a job now, against every second person five years ago. Absolute numbers light up the ground despair. While Goa’s working-age population has grown from 1.229 million to 1.313 million, the number of people with jobs has fallen from 606,000 to 420,000.

The state’s deeper fault lines find scant mention in the election rhetoric, and where they do, the remedies proposed are rarely strategic. Goa has a vast educated workforce but the proportion in value-add sectors is sparse. Its 61,256 low-productivity government employees vastly outnumber the 27,500 employed in the pharma and IT sectors Goa is primed for. And Sawant pledges to add 10,000 more to the government rolls!

A hard-nosed list of candidates with no place for sentiment — Utpal Parrikar’s bid for Panaji, the seat his father held since 1994, was in vain — and the four-way split in the Opposition vote, despite the TMC’s late attempt at an alliance with the Congress, are expected to buoy the BJP to the leading party position, despite palpable anti-incumbency.

The Congress was historically the default vote of the state’s 25 per cent Christian population till Parrikar broke through. The GOP could surprise itself should a Black Swan event happen and the Christian vote consolidates behind it on an anybody-but-the BJP sentiment in the eight seats in the heavily Christian-dominated Salcete taluka.

Likely, the real verdict will be after the counting and it would be a foolish person who will discount the BJP then, given its ruthless pursuit of power and the ajeebness of Goa politics.

The writer is former managing editor, Business Standard, and lives in Goa