Goanet Digest, Vol 21, Issue 333

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Today's Topics:

   1. Absence of Accountability (O Heraldo, 19/7/2026) (V M)
   2. Mumbai's own Mamdani (Mumbai Mirror, 19/7/2026) (V M)


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Message: 1
Date: Sun, 19 Jul 2026 15:25:46 +0530
From: V M <[email protected]>
To: V M <[email protected]>
Subject: [Goanet] Absence of Accountability (O Heraldo, 19/7/2026)
Message-ID:
	<CAN1wPW5vNJHB1ip=vSP98feoC7Uv-B22JX8BszckGpAq_gOH+A-JsoAwUIsXosN+BqQ9rBEUg@public.gmane.org>
Content-Type: text/plain; charset="UTF-8"

https://www.heraldgoa.in/edit/absence-of-accountability/482302/

They will just kill or jail whoever criticizes the government,? warned the
great Manipuri civil rights activist Irom Sharmila Chanu, a few hours
before the Delhi Police stormed Sonam Wangchuk?s protest site at Jantar
Mantar yesterday morning. ?There is no real democracy in India,? she told
Rokibuz Zaman of *Scroll.in*, ?the demand is big, but as the people are not
united [and only a few hundred people showed up in solidarity despite the
capital being home to millions] the impact of the protest on the government
is not there. That?s why the government doesn?t care. The government does
not get threatened by a protest of a single person. The government just
waits and sees, avoids and lets it go.?

Sharmila says ?a protest will be successful only if there is a mass united
agitation? but in 2026 it is painfully apparent that even showing up in
force is no guarantee anyone will listen in this anarchic era of impunity
in Indian governance. Things have become very bad at the Centre ? just see
how the police commissioner was replaced overnight to enable the sneaky
detainment of Wangchuk ? but they?re even worse in Goa, where the utterly
appalling politicians in power continually menace and threaten their own
electorate, secure in the comfort they will get away with it. It has led to
disaster, the total collapse of rule of law, with huge crimes being
committed against the public interest in plain sight every single day. See
what the casinos are getting away with in Panjim, entirely illegally but
with absolute connivance, or the shocking destruction of Kala Academy
(where the slab collapsed precisely three years ago) by the same
administration making empty promises ahead of the next election.

 ?These days, it has become the norm for government ministers, civil
servants, or recently retired decision-makers to write about their
departments with impressive expertise,? wrote Pratap Bhanu Mehta in his
keen-eyed *Indian Express* column earlier this week. He observed how
powerful stakeholders ?outline lofty goals, even share citizens? concerns.
But the one thing missing in all that writing is the fixing of
accountability. You will read hundreds of op-eds on air pollution,
including by policymakers. But no one will name or shame, as it were. For
example, no one will pointedly say who decided to relax pollution norms for
coal-fired power plants and why. Who makes the decisions to give clearances
to build roads and buildings in ecologically sensitive zones? I was
recently at a meeting where there was eloquent holding forth on ?ease of
doing business, especially for MSMEs?. But not one policymaker could
actually name and explain why particular regulations were put in place or
even who put them.?

Mehta points out that ?across an astonishing range of policy challenges,
from war to pollution, exam scandals to crumbling cities, we encounter
seemingly causeless phenomena; sentences without subjects. At the
international level our Prime Minister sets the tone. ?This is not an era
of war,? he intones with sagacity, without ever naming who the actors are
who start the wars. You might think this is diplomatic finesse. But it
turns out to be a full-blooded technique of ruling. If there are no agents
behind the action, no one needs to be held accountable. Your success is not
stopping the war, condemning aggression, or upholding the law. Your success
is that you can immobilise the need for responsibility altogether without
appearing immoral. Now, just think how useful this strategy is
domestically. Sentences without grammatical subjects or in the passive
voice can easily make passive citizens. Exam leak. Happens. Cities
Flooding. Happens. Himalayas crumbling. Happens. Stampedes. Happen. Air
Pollution. Happens. Just as we know this is not an era of war, but we don?t
name who starts it, we also know this is not an era of crumbling cities,
polluted air and rivers, disenfranchisement and corruption, and any other
evil you can mention. But no one makes it happen.? The bottom line is
?before institutions can be repaired, we must acknowledge who specifically
broke them. If you want to stop war, you have to name and shame those who
start them.?

 It is that almost anachronistic insistence on the government taking
responsibility for its own actions that made the Cockroach Janta Party and
Sonam Wangchuk?s protest in New Delhi potent enough to trigger the police
being sent in. Actually, in any other era in Indian politics since 1947,
education minister Dharmendra Pradhan would have long since resigned (or
been replaced) after public opinion turned against him, following an
extraordinary string of debacles from paper leaks to testing failures. But
who can ?bell the cat? in the Cabinet of the compromised? It is amply clear
that not only Pradhan has failed miserably, but if he goes ? and it seems
clear he must ? then who is next? Is the entire house of cards about to
fall apart? These are the calculations being made in New Delhi this
weekend, and recent history tells us paranoid over-reaction is likely to
follow.

Here it is important to listen to what Sharmila says. Wangchuk has been
detained after 20 days, but she spent 16 years on hunger strike in Manipur
from 2000, including force-feeding by the state for 500 weeks. By that
time, this icon of resistance had become disillusioned ? ?nothing had
changed in people?s mindsets? ? and decided ?I really wanted to change
myself? via marriage to Desmond Coutinho, her unlikely ?Afrikander? Goan
suitor from London, with whom she had twin daughters at the age of 47, and
moved to Kodaikanal. Looking back, she told Zaman at *Scroll* she felt her
fellow Manipuris were willing ?to sacrifice me. Because they saw that I was
the only one who was protesting, all the responsibility and burden was on
my head despite it being a collective cause. The people were only singing
my glory that I was protesting for years. But the people did not help when
I needed help.? Similarly, ?it is not Sonam?s burden alone and people
should not expect him to be martyred. It is a collective cause and demand,
and everyone should join him and if everyone comes to the street, the
security forces won?t be enough and the government will have to address the
issue. For collective causes, persistence and united voices are needed for
social change. You cannot just let the individual protestor become a
martyr.?


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Message: 2
Date: Sun, 19 Jul 2026 15:20:05 +0530
From: V M <[email protected]>
To: V M <[email protected]>
Subject: [Goanet] Mumbai's own Mamdani (Mumbai Mirror, 19/7/2026)
Message-ID:
	<CAN1wPW6i-nQi6Bpku9fgWeA474k5wOHm8Xxf7sB_r8QTNggtEA-JsoAwUIsXosN+BqQ9rBEUg@public.gmane.org>
Content-Type: text/plain; charset="UTF-8"

https://mumbaimirror.indiatimes.com/others/sunday-read/mumbais-own-mamdani/articleshow/132484754.html

?From the time I became politically conscious, I remember being resentful
about being born in India,? writes Mahmood Mamdani in *Slow Poison: Idi
Amin, Yoweri Museveni and the Making of the Ugandan State* (Harvard
University Press, 2025), his taut, invaluable eyewitness account of
decolonisation and putative nation-building in East Africa.

Mamdani?s family ?came from a line of Khoja small traders, who were
impoverished during the sleeping sickness epidemic that preceded World War
I in India? and driven to ?make our future across the ?black waters? (kala
pani) of the ocean.? His parents were born in what is now Tanzania, but ?my
father, whom we called ?daddy? in Western fashion, had ambitions to go to
college, in Mumbai. *Ada* thought he should get married before going to the
big city, and so he did. That is how I came to be born in Mumbai, in the
Wadia Nursing Home, opposite Chaupati. We lived in a modest tenement in a
lower-class Muslim neighborhood called Kurla, in two rooms ? one occupied
by my parents, and the other by my mamujaan, or maternal uncle who shared
his bed with me. I was born in 1946, one of India?s midnight?s children. It
was a time of great turmoil.?

*Slow Poison* is an intense, riveting analysis of fraught recent history
from the perspective of one of its integral actors. Mamdani says ?I began
writing this book as a witness, as Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel?s
proverbial Owl of Minerva who takes flight at dusk, trying to make sense of
events in retrospect. As I continued to write, I realised that I had been a
participant and not just an observer in many of the events I was narrating.
Some may think it self-indulgent to straddle the position of an observer
and a participant. But the recognition of ?dirty hands? is also an
opportunity for self-reflection.?

Today, of course, he is better known as the father of Zohran, the
effervescent Democratic Socialist mayor of New York whose international
celebrity status has even eclipsed that of his mother Mira Nair, the
award-winning film director whose signature line during the election
campaign was ?I am the producer of the candidate.? But make no mistake, the
senior Mamdani is an intellectual powerhouse whose deep historical thinking
and refreshingly contrarian angles of approach have profoundly impacted our
contemporary understanding of the world, both via teaching (in
distinguished stints at Makerere University in Uganda, University of Cape
Town in South Africa, and Columbia University in the USA) and many books
(best known so far is the post-9/11 treatise *Good Muslim, Bad Muslim:
America, the Cold War and the Roots of Terror*).

All along, says Mamdani?s friend Anjum Rajabali (the acclaimed screenwriter
who first met him nearly 40 years ago), the city of his birth has been ?a
window of insight? into India, where ?he eagerly looks forward to
returning.? That relationship is only hinted at in his writings, though he
did tell Bhakti Shringanpure in 2013 that he first returned in 1975 while
trying to avoid committing to the USA: ?I knew that it was a habit-forming
society. I was sure I would end up with a family, three kids, two cars, one
house, and that would be the end of me. And I was very tempted to go to
Bombay. It was a weird experience, because it was the first time in my life
that I was in a place where everybody looked like me. And I looked like
them.?

I have been reading Mamdani constantly since *The Myth of Population
Control: Family, Class and Caste in an Indian Village *(1972) was first
assigned to me in college, but it is his stunning, magisterial 2020
masterwork *Neither Settler Nor Native: The Making and Unmaking of
Permanent Minorities* that stands out as the great gamechanger, on par with
Edward Said?s iconic *Orientalism *(1978). It is an extraordinary
achievement, underlined by this message of hope: ?Unmaking the permanence
of political identities begins with the recognition that they are not
natural and are not forever. They were invented by power and are reinforced
by those who mobilize them in a bid for power. If enough people think
through the violent consequences of these authoritarian power struggles,
then they will have the insight to rethink and remake the world.?


End of Goanet Digest, Vol 21, Issue 333
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