By IANS,
Panaji : Merely two days after announcing concrete measures to save Goa’s forests and curb indiscriminate mining here, the state’s very own ‘Jairam Ramesh-in-the-making’ Forests and Environment Minister Mathany Saldanha succumbed to a sudden cardiac arrest Wednesday morning.
The death of the 64-year-old former teacher, scarred and willed by decades of social activism, numerous arrests and weathering civil society agitations, has sent Goa into mourning and civil society and anti-mining agitators spiralling into a sense of tragic disbelief, with their man in the ‘system’ dead.
Saldanha was one of the first few Christians leaders to back the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) in Goa – though he formally joined the party only last month. He was one of the first persons to back anti-mining activist Sebastian Rodrigues, when then chairman of the ad hoc committee and now Chief Minister Manohar Parrikar accused him of being a ‘Naxalite’.
“He was also among those who defended me in 2008 when Parrikar labelled me Naxalite… He could have been better than Jairam Ramesh, but that did not happen,” Rodrigues said.
Maverick Jairam Ramesh’s stint as union minister of environment and forests from 2009-11, when he baulked several questionable real estate and mining intensive projects across India, has emerged as the one high point for activists in Goa who have been protesting against illegal and indiscriminate mining here.
Goa’s illegal mining industry has been pegged at Rs.25,000 crore by the BJP, while others have pegged it at several hundred million dollars. The measures Saldanha had proposed earlier this week to fight encroachment of forest land by the mining industry and the environmental toll made his death all the more ‘untimely’.
Two days before he died, Saldanha had told reporters that he would ensure that no more forest land would be diverted for mining purposes and that the toll taken on environment and health caused by mining would be studied before granting more clearances.
“Under your care will our forest, environment and tourism sectors breathe easy now that we have one of our own sitting in its hallowed offices,” asks Ethel Da Costa, director of a local radio station in her newspaper column, which ironically went to print on the day of Saldanha’s death.
At the forefront of civic agitations since the 1970s, the firebrand Saldanha led numerous agitations to safeguard the rights of traditional fishermen, controversial re-alignment of the Konkan Railway tracks, pollution caused by a copper smelting unit, Special Economic Zones and had been a vocal proponent of “Special Status” for Goa in his later days.
Ashley do Rosaio, whom Saldanha taught Biology in the 1980s at the Don Bosco High School, Panaji, recalls the perils of being a school teacher involved in social agitations, which often turned political.
“His activist orientation made his way into the classroom. Once he was arrested for ‘political activity’. The school management sent me along with a peon with answer papers for correction at Mapusa sub jail, where he was lodged,” Ashley said.
Saldanha’s death forced tears out of an otherwise hardened Chief Minister Manohar Parrikar, who was a personal friend and Saldanha’s legislator (he lived in Panaji) for more than a decade and a half.
“He waited for years because he believed in me. And now when he could not wait for five minutes,” a choked Parrikar said. The chief minister was referring to Saldanha’s steadfast decision to support the BJP, even when in the Opposition, and himself even as he was accused of supporting a communal party. Parrikar also rued the fact that he could not see his cabinet colleague alive in his last moments.
A political maverick, but stoic in every sense, in the whimsical, power-crazed, narrow-minded political culture of Goa, Saldanha is best described by Portugal based Indo-Portuguese historian Teotonio R. De Souza, whose has been closely associated with the popular leader in the past.
“I believe that god saved him from Goan democracy!” De Souza told IANS.