The Goan Question: Basic Facts
© Prakash J. Mascarenhas, Bombay. India.
Goa, the last bastion of the Konkani nation, is being actively colonised by the Marathi nation, while the Konkani natives of Goa and the rest of the Konkan sleep on in negligence and apathy.
In the Indian Union, the unique Indo-Lusitanian and Christian culture and traditions of its "state of Goa," formerly the Estado da India Portuguesa (or State of Portuguese India) is reduced to a curio, an exhibit in a circus, a freak show. Do we have no self-pride? Are we created by God that we and our culture and our traditions should exist merely for the entertainment, nay the titillation of others? Are we a nation of prostitutes?
Our language is demeaned and our land is being robbed, but would we care the least?
Once, we were a great nation in India, in the Indian family of nations. Our homeland extends from the Narmada in the north to the Gangaveli in the south. However, the Far North, Surat and its neighbourhoods, including the Dangs district, has been colonized and is being colonized by the neighbouring Gujerati and Bombay and its hinterland by the Marathi. Not satisfied with robbing us of the Bombay, Thane, Raigad and Ratnagiri districts, the Marathi covet even the remainder of our homeland - the Sindhudurg district, the "state of Goa," and the Karwar-Hubli-Dharwad region of the North Kanara district of Karnataka state.
To drive home the fact of the new ownership, they have imposed on our homeland new, fabricated names, invented to be in accordance with their culture and mentality - Mumbai instead of Bombay, etc. Now, they wish to rename our Goa. They want to call it Govapuri.
This is a direct assault and challenge to us as a nation and a people.
This is Marathi Imperialism and Colonialism. It is also Genocide - Cultural, Social, Linguistic Genocide. The Marathi wish to entirely extinguish our Konkani nation and absorb our homeland as a Marathi colony - which in fact is already an accomplished fact with much of the Konkan.
Do we not have any national pride? Why do we allow the Marathi to rob us? Why do we sleep on in apathy in the face of grave, indeed mortal danger?
Is it not time to wake up, to rise up and drive out the Marathi, not only from the "state of Goa" but indeed from all our beloved homeland - the Konkan? It is time for us to rise up and tell the usurpers that they have lorded over us in our own homeland long enough and that it is now time for them to pack up and be gone!
God has created every nation equal, and every people are equally beloved by Him. Every nation has a right to its rightful place in the sun, to its homeland and its social, cultural, linguistic and ethnic security - to its place in the comity of nations. We the Konkani are not an exception.
It is time for us to rise and reclaim our pride and our dignity - to say enough is enough, and tell the interlopers to quit, peacefully or otherwise. It is time for us to reclaim our homeland and our rightful place in the sun.
Though we are small, weak and inexperienced, God is on our side, for we fight for what is right. Therefore, with confidence I believe that we shall prevail.
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