By Mário Cabral e Sá
Thus ran the headlines of the English papers - “Pandemonium in House over drug news.”
The target is the Home Minister who was absent from the House because of an ailment, may he recover soon. In his absence, Chief Minister, Digambar Kamat answered the question in his usual calm manner.
Had Ravi Naik to be present my guess is that the pandemonium would add much to its sting. Because you know, and so do I, who the target of the fusillade was. “Give it to the CBI,” demanded the opposition. “No need for it,” responded the CM. The number of seizures our police made had increased manifold, and all of it because of our ANC’s intelligence, said the CM.
Not everyone will buy that. It is years since seized drugs were destroyed by the set procedure. And, sadly, seized drugs are found missing. Anybody’s guess is that they were recycled. We do not need Lucy Lovelace’s secret cameras.
Interestingly, Agnelo Fernandes, a Congress MLA residing in the area, and Dayanand Narvekar spoke about it. He has his reasons, which have, one suspect, little to do with drug runners and more with the unceremonious and inelegant manner. Congress general secretary supervising Goa, B Hariprasad, demanded that Narvekar resign then and there as minister because he had been charge-sheeted not proven guilty. But Hariprasad had a mission to somehow accommodate in the cabinet MGP MLA Dhavlikar.
Now, Agnelo knows the drug scene very well, like palm of his hand. He once sketched for me the areas of operation of drug runners. And he was dead right.
The fact is that tourism, particularly of back-packers, depends a great deal on consumption of drugs and alcohol, a deadly combination. Remember the Scarlet’s case and the police failure to detect it and the then IGP Krishna Kumar’s absurd forensic theory?
Goa once was a consumption market. No longer, sadly. It is said that tourism is a clean non-polluting industry. A UN report had disabused Goa of such a notion when she had only one five star hotel. The report made it explicitly clear that tourism, in fact, is the most polluting industry. It spreads cultural pollution. Go to Anjuna if you have any doubts. That was where it all started. The five star hotels on their part have taken possession of the beaches around the hotels. Sun-bathers do not want to be ogled by the locals. They call it privacy. The result is that beaches have been literally privatised. There is a luxury hotel which has broken every environmental rule on the justification that it is a river front, not a sea front. Additionally, the same has been done on the opposite bank of the river. The result is that the beach is silting and the navigational channel narrowing and getting more dangerous by the hour. It is barges, it is the casinos that are parked in the river, and it is the trawlers parked at the Britona jetty and cruise vessels loaded with tourists.
On top of it, tourism in Goa is seasonal. Off season we have unemployed youth who have to earn their living by fair means and foul. CM, Digambar Kamat told the Assembly the other day that the crime branch of the CID is probing “advertisements on Goa’s sex hub”. It was found that the telephone contacts provided in the ads were registered outside Goa, even in other countries. “But why take the trouble”? The internet gives all the details at the touch of a key.
Hoteliers claim innocence, saying “what do we do?” A star hotel hushed up the case of a bathroom cleaner in its employ of the hotel touching the private parts of two sub-teen girls. It must have been quite a hefty sum because the parents of the girls suddenly checked out and withdrew the complaint lodged at the customer service desk. As for the cleaner, he remained at his job, perhaps to avoid scandal.
It goes on in Thailand, which boldly advertises itself as a sex location. To our bad luck, the last season was a very poor season with a drop of 30 per cent in tourist arrivals. And there is no indication that the end of the current global recession is in sight. It may take another five years for world economies to stabilise.
The drug nexus that was mentioned in the opening para has its logic.
