Dire Straights: A Præmunire!
©Prakash John Mascarenhas, Bombay. 15th October 2003. This page is copyright! See also, "Is Goa Economically Viable?"
To
The Members
Malaysian Indian Club list.
Friends — I hope that you will permit me to call you that.
I am not an Indophobe. I live and work in the Indian Union, amongst and for citizens of that country. And I have never hidden my beliefs from my employers, colleagues and other acquaintances.
It is unfortunate that the Indian Union is pitted against my country, the EIP or Goa, as it is more popularly called, but this is a fight that began when India wronged us, and India continues to wrong me. Therefore, though this is not at all a personal fight — a hate-Indian campaign — it is a fight against India and all that it stands for — its inspirations for its crime against the EIP.
I am fully aware that many of you have a sentimental corner for the Indian Union, although you have been settled for generations in the Straights of Malaya, in Malaysia.
Nor is it that you have committed wrong against me. Merely a few members of your list has wronged me, wronged my country — principally the one who goes under the grandiose pseudonym of "Solitary Hunter".
This person has plagiarised the words of the infamous Goan traitor, Dr. José Colaço, and purveyed them on your list as his own, without giving credit to its true author.
Again, he has conveniently borrowed only a part of the original text, and left out the rest which shows the Indian Union in a bad light. (I would recommend you read these interesting pages by Dr. Colaço: HardTalk on 1961: Page 1, Page 2, Page 3 & Epilogue)
But even so, it remains that these arguments, against the Movement to Liberate Goa from the Indian Occupation, whether of Dr. Colaço or of his plagiarist, are false. Patently false.
And not only are they false, you, as citizens of Federal Malaysia should recognize that they are false and misanthropic, against your rights as citizens of Malaysia, and therefore, you should have protested against them.
This is because Malaysia itself, at its birth, was threatened by Indonesia with forcible annexation, much as it did later with East Timor, and it took a long and bloody effort — jointly with England — to overcome the invading guerillas of Indonesianism and ensure the safety and security of free Malaysia.
If India levies claim upon Goa on basis of common ethnicity, then Indonesia has a far better claim on Malaysia, for both the Javanese and the people of the Malaya Peninsula are predominantly of Malay ethnicity. That makes the Java-Sumatra-Malaya stretch far more ethnically homogenous than there is any homogenity between Delhi and Goa!
India, again, while not preferring any claim on Burma, Ceylon, Pakistan or Bangladesh, which states have separated from it only in 1937 and 1947, pretends to have some kind of automatic and divine right over Goa, which, it insists, cannot be mediated in between by the Goans themselves.
Effectively, India claims that Goa was automatically hers regardless of the rights of the Goan people! But this claim is a monstrousity, misanthropic!
When one examines the basis of India's claim, one realizes that it is not so much an argument about ethnicity, as much as it is an argument to possess territories uninterrupted by enclaves not under one's control. That is, it was an argument for territorial continuity.
If India's argument is right, then China is well within its rights to invade and annex Outer Mongolia — which interrupts and disrupts her territorial continuity in a broad sweep from Manchuria to Sinkiang (Uighuristan or Chinese East Turkistan)!
Does not Malaysia have enclaves interrupting its continuity? Singapore and Brunei both interrupt its continuity. If you believe that India has an automatic right over Goa, regardless of the rights of the Goan people, then you must, by extension, believe that it is immoral to permit Singapore and Brunei to remain separate from Malaysia, regardless of what their peoples may desire!
Continuing again: Does not Malaysia itself interrupt and disrupt the continuity of Indonesia, between Sumatra and the Natunas, and between the Natunas and Dutch Borneo? Therefore, if you believe that India has an automatic right over Goa, regardless of the rights of the Goan people, then you must, by extension, believe that it is immoral to permit Malaysia to remain separate from Indonesia, regardless of what its people may desire!
Therefore, I make this challenge to whichever Malaysian Indian who wishes to make Dr. Colaço's arguments his own: You must publicly agitate and insist with the Malaysian government to invade and annex these two enclaves — Singapore and Brunei! You must also publicly agitate and insist that Indonesia has the right to invade and "reunite" Malaysia to itself!
Which of you is willing to take up this challenge?
Dr. Colaço states that Goa is a part of the Indian family. Not so. Goa is no more a part of the Indian family than South East Asia was part of Tojo's Greater Japanese family; or that Poland, Denmark, Norway, Netherlands, Belgium, etc., were a part of Hitler's German family.
The only relationship between Goa and India is that of Victim and Perpetrator.
Certainly, as far as ethnicity goes, Germany has a very good claim over Austria — which is German. But even the Netherlands — the Dutch — are ethnically a part of the German people — the Platdeutsch!
Yet, no one will agree that Germany has a right to bludgeon the Dutch into the German "family", anymore than it has a right to bludgeon the Austrians or Swiss Germans...
In a like manner, tommorrow some chauvinistic nut in the US Executive Mansion could levy claim on Anglophone Canada, as an extension of the USA!
I ask you: Did Kuwait become part of the Iraqi family under Saddam's invasion?
I ask you: Did Lithuania and Estonia and Latvia become part of the Russian family under the Soviet occupation?
If India has a right on the basis of common ethnicity, despite the people of Goa being Lusitanized Konkani, while India itself is predominantly Hindi, then Indonesia has a far better right to invade and annex Malaysia. After all, the Javanese — the most significant Indonesian ethnic group, are also Malays!
But, again, if India has the right to extend a claim on the basis of common ethnicity, it must first do so against Pakistan, Bangladesh, Burma, Ceylon and Nepal! Only when it had succeeded and succeeded in reabsorbing these, could it make out a claim over Goa!
To recap: Goa is no more a part of the Indian family than East Timor was a part of the Indonesian family, or Malaysia a part of the Indonesian family, or that Singapore and Brunei are a part of the Malaysian family.
I find it strange — and moreover hypocritical — that the Indians deny that they were a part of or had any loyalty to, the English family, although they have formally — and inconsistently enough — chosen to remain part of the British Commonwealth — evidently enough, a club of family members — members of the British family!
I find it strange — and moreover hypocritical — that the Indians insist that the Goans do not have the right to be part of the Portuguese "family" — voluntarily or involuntarily — and regardless of the rights and desires of the Goan people, but that it, India, has the right to impose membership in itself, in the Indian "family", on Goa, even an involuntary membership, regardless of the rights and desires of the Goan people!
I would advise one and all not to give too much credence to Dr. Colaço. Every people have had its traitors, its brown-nosers, its yeller-bellies.
The American Revolution had its "Loyalists": People who chose to give their loyalty to a demented German who had usurped the crown of England. France under Hitler had a vast majority who had compromised; a small minority of the underground resistance, the Maquis, who refused, and Charles de Gaul who, with a small ragtag remnant, went over to England to fight the Nazis and eventually liberate France. Timor too had a large faction of traitors, bootlickers of the Indonesian colonists.
In like manner with Goa: We have Duarte Faleiro, Francisco Sardinha, the United Goans Party, the Goan Suraj Party ("India's Own Faithful, Potty-trained Goan Lapdog Party") under the esteemable Floriano "Fido" Lobo, the United Goans Democratic Party, the Maharashtrawadi Gomantak Party, other assorted riff-raff such as Mario Soares, Babush, Pratapsinh Rane, the Chougles, the Dempos, the Bandodcars, Lamberto Mascarenhas, Teotonio de Souza, Dr. José Francisco Martins and his son, the witch-doctor Shushrut Martins, Manohar Parricar, Rene Barreto, Frederico Noronha who is his own Quislingist Indian Brown Salad (Coprophagist) Party — not to mention his associated ventures, the two corny Goa-Con-Jobs.coms: Goacom.com and Goanet.com, and then of course, our dear Goan Masochist Party Supremo, Dr. José Colaço e Punecho-Ghanticar de Nassau-em-Bahamas!
You Malaysian Indians are a minority in a country where there had been terrible strife between the indigenous Malays and the Chinese and Indian colonists there. Today, there has been established a kind of peace, a modus vivendi, between the three races.
Should you not be grateful for that and be careful to safeguard this truce, to not do anything that could threaten or aggravate or provoke the Malays?
I therefore suggest that you be careful with your chest-thumping over the magnificence and majesty of your beloved India. It might provoke the Malays!
What the Goans demand for themselves and Goa is similar to what the Malays demanded for themselves and their country: The Right of Pre-Eminence and Preference in their own native land; Preference over immigrants and colonists from China and India!
We merely point out the incontrovertible facts — that we have no obligations to India, that India has no claims upon us, that India is in the illegal occupation of our country, and that we must have this vacated; that we Goans must be the sole determinators of the destiny of Goa.
We Goans are the Bhumiputras of Goa, just as the Malays are the Bhumiputras of Malaya.
However, unlike Malaya, in Goa, the immigrants are totally illegal, come in piggyback with the invaders and secured by the occupation.
We want them out. We will not compromise on this, we will not regularise them!
I would suggest that you make a conscious effort to forget your Indian roots — unless you desire to return there — and to identify yourself with Malaysia. I would suggest strongly that you make efforts to integrate yourself into Malaysian society.
I always wonder why the Indian emigrants are so stubbornly stupid — refusing to integrate, immerse themselves into their host communities!
Everywhere you go, you are hated for your racism and refusal to integrate. You have been booted out of Uganda, Zanzibar, Burma, and recently from Fiji. You are in trouble in South Africa and many other places. When will you learn?
You are not all children, babes in the wood. You are, and I believe, hopefully, all mature and grown up people, excepting the usual exceptions. You are fully aware of how the latest coupists in Fiji, under George Speight, have learnt from, and have a close and intimate connection with the Malay nationalists of Malaysia and with the administration of Mahathir — himself of Indian origins! That is ominous — and if you do not reform yourself, you could suffer the same fate in Malaysia! Wake up, friends, before disaster overcomes you!
But whatever you do, I would suggest — for your own good — that you not meddle and interfere in the Goan Liberation Movement. It is not in your interest. It is not to your benefit. The Malays will not appreciate you getting all hot and bothered about happenings in India — seeing that as evidence that your true loyalty lies with India rather than with Malaysia.
The loss, then, will be only your own.
Do not replay Uganda. Do not replay Fiji. Let it not be that the Indian emigrants to the Staight Settlements, modern Malaysia, should land up ultimately in Dire Straights!
Prakash J. Mascarenhas