VARSHA KAMAT
Governor generals and their deeds
Some of the men Salazar sent to Goa as administrators were equally duplicitous. Dr Jose Silvestre Ferreira Bossa, the Governor General was a great enemy of the nationalists in Goa. Goa’s famous poet Bakibab Borkar once addressed a poem to him questioning his policies. Another Governor General, Paulo Benard Guedes was embarrassed by his own wife, who during her long stay in Goa took valuable treasures, like relics and paintings from St Caetano Church in Old Goa and also carried away a number of Goan antiques to Portugal. When Fernando de Quintanilha e Mendonca Dias was the Governor General of Goa, he was generally known as Quinquilheiro or the Haberdasher. He was branded, a model of administrative stupidity and a real vilao com bastao na mao (a villain with a baton in the hand). While he was the Governor General, he got involved in the transfer of big sums through the Reserve Bank of India and the case caused a scandal, as it was known that his best friends were all rich businessmen. He also became infamous after he was physically attacked in the Governor’s palace by the Goan lawyer Bruta da Costa from Margao, when he was caught eavesdropping on a conversation between da Costa and the Overseas Minister Commandar Manuel Maria Saramento Rodrigues in 1952.
However, the last Governor General of Portuguese India Manuel Antonio Vassalo e Silva acted generously and with the purpose for which he was sent by the dictator. After reaching Goa, he first toured the whole State, spoke to the public at large, visited prisoners in Margao and Aguada and enquired about what facilities the women prisoners wanted (they asked for a radio and electric fans), promised about releasing political prisoners and visited the Ranes at Sanquelim. These promises and requests, he soon fulfilled. He replaced the Portuguese police by appointing native police personnel at various places and allowed Marathi schools and libraries to hold lecture series and meetings, which were banned earlier. He also lifted the ban on Indian newspapers and magazines coming into Goa.
Party politics and elections to the parliament
In 1945, Salazar for the first time, decided to permit the opposition parties after nineteen long years to contest the Portuguese Parliament elections held on 18 November. At the elections, Dr Froilano de Melo was elected for the second time to represent the Portuguese India. He was the only independent member to serve in the Portuguese Parliament of the National Dictatorship during the period from 1945 to 1949, all others being members of Salazar’s National Union. However in 1949, he was not tipped as a candidate for elections in view of his differing stance with Salazar. Harassed and humiliated, Dr Froilano ultimately left Goa, his motherland and migrated to Brazil in 1951, where his children had settled. There, the distinguished Goan scientist breathed his last on 9 January 1955 in Sao Paulo at the age of 67 years. For the year 1949, Dr Socrates da Costa and Canon Castilho de Noronha were nominated by the Uniao National in the elections held on 13 November for the appointment of Portuguese Indian representatives to the Assembleia National in Lisbon. In fact Canon Castilho de Noronha, a priest and professor at the Rachol seminary represented Portuguese India for three consecutive terms (25 November 1949 to 05 June 1961) in the National Assembly.
In its issue of 16 October 1953, the Portuguese newspaper Republica in the Metropolis described in caustic terms the situation of the political parties in the country in following words: ‘Political parties, which are the very essence of democracy…are explicitly forbidden by Laws promulgated by the Estado Novo. Only a single party is allowed, which is Uniao National, of which the President of the Council Dr Salazar is the chief guiding agent and the party contests the elections in the face of the most pitiful and afflicting popular indifference. In fact on the day of the elections contrived by the Estado Novo, the polling booths resemble small cemeteries, sad and abandoned, where the electoral board –if there happens to be a sufficient number to form a board– plays the inglorious role of the gravedigger of public liberties in the tragic silence of deserted ballot boxes. Still on the following day, one reads that 70 per cent of the electors voted in the elections! That is how the Estado Novo is organised’.
In the elections for Parliament concluded on 3 November 1957, Purushottam Ramnath Quenim was elected from Goa in addition to Canon Castilho de Noronha to represent Portuguese India. Quenim was the first Goan Hindu to reach the Portuguese Parliament, which was filled with steadfast supporters of the dictator. The 1959 amendment of the Constitution had resulted in increasing the strength of the National Assembly to 130 and with this enhancement the Portuguese India was to be represented by a total of three members. The last elections to the National Assembly were held on 12 November 1961 in the midst of political and diplomatic turmoil in Goa and Salazar this time played the Hindu appeasement policy, by nominating again Purushottam Ramnath Quenim together with Voikunta Srinivassa Sinai Dempo – two influential Hindus from Goa besides, Antonio Tomas Prisonio Furtado as people’s representatives in the Portuguese Parliament.
Popular propaganda through the print media
When the rumblings of the freedom movement, started off as a civil liberties movement in 1946, became louder with each passing year within and outside Goa, the Portuguese government’s think-tank found ways and means to put an end to this discontent. From spreading rumours, making public denials and misleading announcements; following a policy of appeasement to reprisals, arrests, imprisonment, exile and third degree methods – the Portuguese attempted it all. Side by side they carried on with the propaganda ploy adopted so well by all 20 century dictators of Europe, who portrayed themselves as friend, helpmate, protector, innocent victim and wronged victim and so on.
One of the Portuguese regime’s propaganda units was the Portuguese India News Bulletin – GOA in English, targeting non-Portuguese speaking Goans in Goa and its diaspora in Pakistan, Africa and the rest of India. Besides, their radio broadcasts (the Emissora de Goa) continuously disseminated Salazar’s views as the views of the Goan people. The News Bulletin – GOA commissioned with the aim of drilling readers with the ‘truth’ about Portuguese Goa, was published by the information service of the State of Portuguese India and printed at Imprensa Nacional in Goa. In the issue of 5 January 1956 it stated, that the change in its garb had been called for owing to the demand of Goan readers residing in English speaking countries. It hoped that they would regard this publication as a message from home, a voice from their beloved land. It aimed to enlighten honest Goans on the actual situation, which was being deliberately falsified by the malicious propaganda of a greedy neighbour. The paper promised its foreign readers through its columns that it would describe Portuguese India as she was and not exaggerate nor stoop down to malice, as it was not afraid of the truth and desired nothing more than that the world know them as they were.
After 1955, the Portuguese government woke up to the truth that their days in India were numbered and made desperate attempts to save their rule. Suddenly, the government became proactive sanctioning projects, like building bridges over the Mandovi and Zuari rivers, constructing edifices for various purposes, allocating funds for programmes related to health, sanitation and education, enhancing salaries and assuring Goans that they would be protected from terrorists (meaning the freedom fighters, who sometimes fired upon Portuguese officials or threw bombs at police stations or cut off communications).
The Portuguese government highlighted its development programmes and reminded people of the good deeds done by them. It extolled the inauguration of the agricultural front and of the air transport service as two major developments in the economic life of Portuguese India. It tried to point out to Goans how cruel the Indian government was, which claimed territorial rights on Goa, yet prevented Goan residents and students in the Indian Union from sending money to their dependents in Goa causing needless suffering to their families. It also highlighted the plight of the seamen, who could not reach Bombay from where they embarked or disembarked, as well as the problem of Goan emigration. The Portuguese India news bulletin also asked prominent Goans in high government positions to write articles in support of retaining Goa under the Portuguese regime, which received a favourable response from many, filling the pages of the newspapers. One such proclaimed: ‘Portuguese India does not belong to Bharat’; another emphasised: ‘Portuguese India was the creation of the Portuguese’. Most issues published Salazar’s articles lambasting India pointing out the errors made by the Indian government and its political leaders. Salazar took great advantage of Indian fumbling and called it anti-Goan, which underlined clearly that newspapers were mere tools in the hands of the government and had to abide by the diktats of the censor committee. Through such newspapers, Salazar played the emotional, religious and every other card hidden in his pocket. He wrote: ‘We are fighting without offence to anybody so that Goa may continue to be the monument of the discoveries made by the Portuguese and a small focus of the western spirit in the East, which in order to keep alive must be tied to its origin as a book to its source’. He tried to make Goans believe that Portugal was trying to maintain the separate identity of Goans and preserve their socio-religious and cultural heritage even as the Indian government was bent on merging Goa into greater India, diluting and destroying its heritage.
The newspapers in Goa allowed to survive were only those which not only sided with the Portuguese government but praised the Portuguese and took up cudgels against those fighting for independence. These sycophantic publications were mainly in Portuguese and a few were Roman Konkani dailies and weeklies. One among them was Heraldo, published from Panjim. In one of its issues under an article titled The Task Ahead, it stated: ‘it was Portugal that had given Goans their faith, character, morality and law and order and made them partners in their glorious legacy. It had encouraged their culture to blend the East with the West and Goans should be indebted to the Portuguese for having kept Goan lands in Goan hands. And for this alone they needed to be ever grateful to the Portuguese’.
The same edition of newspaper in another article titled Most Satisfactory Government, maintained: ‘the Portuguese people never tolerated for long any government whose policies they disliked. The best example of this policy was the years from 1910 to 1926, when they overthrew one unsatisfactory government after another’. Curiously, it further concluded: ‘since no serious attempt was ever made to overthrow the government of Dr Salazar, it was the most favourable government of the Portuguese people’. Further it said: ‘Salazar never resorted to the two favourite weapons of dictatorship – the machine gun and the concentration camp to maintain himself in power’. It pointed out: ‘Portugal had a free and secret ballot and periodically the people did have the opportunity if they chose to exercise it of replacing Salazar’s regime with another. But they did not do so and the fact that Salazar and his associates returned successfully after each election was testimony that the people were not dissatisfied with his administration’. To justify further support to the Portuguese government it elaborated: ‘the sons of Goa took seats not only in the Chamber of Deputies but also in the Chamber of Peers and on the staff of the University of Coimbra, in the army school, in the medical faculties of Lisbon and Oporto and in the institutes and Lyceums. They held posts of Governors, Secretaries, Generals, Magistrates, High Court Judges and even as Chief Justice in the Portuguese empire’. These ridiculous arguments put forward by the above news magazine totally ignored the fact that Salazar had eliminated or suppressed all opposition in the country and had withdrawn civil liberties of the people, who were under the brutal supervision of PIDE (the Portuguese Gestapo).