Panaji: Retired Bombay high court judge Justice Gautam Patel on Saturday termed Section 39A of Goa’s Town and Country Planning Act “fundamentally, frontally unconstitutional”, and said that it “obliterated community-driven decision-making and agency in self-determination and replaced it with the godlike wisdom of a chief town planner”.“This clever little legislative sleight of hand allows the chief town planner to almost whimsically change land-use zoning. True, there is a provision of a one-month period for suggestions and objections, but as we all know, this is simply cosmetic. The decision is already made. There is a far more fundamental issue here,” said the retired judge, speaking at a book release function at Kala Academy.Section 39A is “reducing Goa and its people to irrelevance, land to a backdrop” and is “in full cry the infantilisation of an entire populace”, said Patel. “What are we being told? That each one of us, in whichever village, all of us are too childlike, too infantile, too mutton-headed, just too stupid to understand just what is best for us. The chief town planner god will decide, and you will then go to him as a supplicant, and you will say, ‘I object’, and he will wave away your objections, and there goes your land and your rights,” he said.“This is not how it should be. There is the strongest possible judicial principle in support of the right to environmental self-determination, and it is the April 18, 2013 SC decision by Justice Radhakrishnan in the Odisha mining case involving Sterlite and Vedanta…,” he said, adding that the parallels with Goa are uncanny.The tribals were assumed to be too poor to know their rights and what was good for them, and therefore authorities said the mega project should go through, but the Supreme Court ordered a referendum and the villagers voted out the project.“Let there be a referendum on any one of these proposed land-use zoning changes, not just suggestions and objections. Put it to the vote and let the chief town planner behave as he should, as a public servant, with emphasis on servant, and not like some self-inflated satrap exercising dominion over that which is not his but is yours and your community’s, and I daresay the plan will be lost and voted out,” he said.“If you want public participation, then suggestions and objections and formalities are not the answer. Let the community vote on it and let us see what happens, and this is the reason I’m saying that Section 39A is fundamentally, frontally unconstitutional,” he added.Patel said the feeling of despair came back to him this morning “because you walk into the airport and the first thing you see is an advertisement for a casino”. He said he was also told of a restaurant being put up within spitting distance of an Olive Ridley turtle nesting site, and of sand dunes in South Goa being mowed to accommodate a 5-star hotel chain. “The question is when will it end, and the answer you’ll find from Justice Rebello is when you say enough is enough”, he said.“Resisting this pressure is difficult, and this is how developers and planners succeed: by balkanising your communities, dividing you, the people, taking away your land, your right of self-determination, your right to decide what should and should not be allowed to happen to your community, and criminalising protest. There’s a word for this pattern, one that runs throughout recorded human history: it’s called conquest,” he said.When, on his farewell at the end of his stint at Goa bench of the Bombay high court around eight years ago he was asked whether he would ever get a house in Goa, he said no, unless he could make a home here. “This land is not a piece of meat in a butcher’s shop to be carved up and distributed. It’s a home, and it needs to be treated like one,” he said, adding that a fundamental problem is the “stereotyping of Goa”.“For those not from here, but from Mumbai and Delhi and Ahmedabad, who buy up tracts of land and construct monstrous houses with not even a nod to Goan architecture, heritage, culture, climate, environment, or ecology, all done in pretty much the same style, one that we might call Dubai-chic, or perhaps more accurately the post-aesthetics school of architecture, Goa is just one thing: it’s a backdrop. It might as well be CGI scenery painted on a screen and laid behind the trophy dwelling,” he said, adding, “In a word, Goa is made irrelevant, and in popular imagination too, there are nothing but stereotypes: the rubbish portrayal of a typical Goan in Hindi movies, for example, one devoted only to drink and Church in equal measure, or sometimes the cassocked Catholic priest. There’s nothing in between. This imagery sunk deep roots.”He said Goa is being “dismantled bit by bit”. “The sheer number of environmental issues affecting Goa is staggering: forests, wildlife corridors, coastal and marine and estuarine areas, lakes, water bodies; the list is endless. Fling a dart and you will hit an ecological or environmental disaster, whether it is Mopa or Chimbel, saved because of these ladies, or Mirabag or Reis Magos or Mollem. It is precisely for the one reason that those elected to power just don’t seem to understand that Goa’s ecology is especially fragile, and the smallest intervention here has an outsized effect. This may partly be because the state is very small, but also because of the quality and richness of the ecology.”Goa is facing the problem of “othering” today, “where Goans have become the others, the lesser, immaterial ones who do not matter, and those who are not Goan, who make no attempt to know or understand Goa, are the ones who take all decisions about the land, people, and culture. This is being done not just by outsiders but is being actively facilitated by those within Goa,” he said.When he was in Goa, he said he learnt about the quiet contribution of Goa to everything from food, music, art, culture, and a variety of art forms, and more. “Like the rain, Goa seeped into my heart, and I understood that you do not need alcohol in Goa to be intoxicated.”
