How food and drink play a role in Goa’s political scene
All political parties have played the beef card in elections, but this has been at the cost of complex social realities
It’s a game of shadow-boxing where the nation pretends that there are no restrictions on eating beef in Goa, and the ruling BJP (except for an occasional hiccup) also acts as if it has no interest in implementing the same. But, on the ground, the facts are quite different. Reflecting the soft communalism that has almost consistently ruled postcolonial Goa since the first elections were held here in 1963, Goa has consistently played ‘beef politics’.
More surprisingly, reflecting the shifting loyalties of politicians, who have seamlessly moved across party divides, beef politics have been played when a range of political parties were in power – from the Maharashtrawadi Gomantak Party (MGP) which was in power from 1963 to 1979, the BJP under Manohar Parrikar (from 2012) and even the Congress.
Contrary to perceived wisdom, Goa was among the first states to ban cow slaughter (in 1978), and this stand was further toughened with the Goa Animal Preservation Act 1995 (prohibiting unless written certification of the authorities was obtained, the killing of even bulls, bullocks, male calves, male and female buffaloes, castrated buffaloes and buffalo calves). These actions came when the MGP and Congress respectively were ruling Goa. Earlier, in 2013, when Parrikar was chief minister, a little known “NGO” called the Govansh Raksha Abhiyaan, some of whose key members were ideologically linked to the ruling party, approached the courts on technical grounds, causing another meat crisis in Goa.
Political statements which make it to sensationalism-loving headlines are often out of sync with the ground reality. Often overlooked too are lobbying efforts by various actors wanting the limelight, whether politicians or ‘activists’ with agendas.
But what is ignored are complex local realities, which go beyond majority-minority equations, and also an interdependence of an unusual kind built across obvious divides over several generations in Goa. Like in the case of the recent liquor ban, it affects many different sections in unexpected ways. Alcohol has played a social (and even minor religious) role in life of the Catholic community, but it is also not absent from the socialising aspects and occasionally even the rituals of Hindu Goans, as Dr Biula V. has explained in her book ‘One For The Road: The Social Role of Alcohol in Goa’.
With business, social, entertainment and cultural roles intertwined in a manner that can happen only in Goa, despite its low-intensity communal conflict that is played out in elections since the 1960s, the issue can be described by the two-word Facebook term: “It’s complicated.”