Reflections: Small signs of India in Portugal

Wandering about the near empty streets of a somnolent Lisbon on Sunday it seemed incredible that for years I was expressly forbidden to visit the Portuguese capital.  Not me alone. No Indian could. Those were the years when Indian passports were not valid worldwide. Just as New Delhi grudgingly issued a travel document it also decided the countries to which one could travel.  A stamp in my passport ruled out South Africa, Albania and Portugal. No reason was given.  No reason needed to be given.

The Indian government was sole and supreme arbiter of the destiny of all Indians until the courts stepped in and insisted no government’s power was limitless.  South Africa was out of bounds because India disapproved of the white racist regime’s apartheid policy. Albania’s exclusion was a mystery. Some said Albania supported China but, then, I wasn’t banned from visiting China, at least in theory, even after Hindi-Chini bhai-bhai euphoria exploded into war. The restriction on Portugal was India’s way of showing its displeasure when the Salazar regime refused to hand over Goa.

Britain, too, came in for criticism. I was a student in Manchester in 1955 when Craveiro Lopez, the Portuguese President, paid a state visit to London. “Britain’s Oldest Ally” gushed the newspapers, waxing eloquent over the Anglo-Portuguese Alliance (Aliança Luso-Britânica) that the 1386 Treaty of Windsor ratified.  It’s the world’s oldest alliance still in force, dating back to the Anglo-Portuguese Treaty of 1373. An India Office education officer, ironically a man with a Portuguese name, came up to Manchester and told us that inviting Mr Lopez was Britain’s way of showing support for Portugal over the Goa dispute. 

“Burra hoosiar hai!” exclaimed Mr Ribeiro or Sequira, covering up his Goan lineage. All that is ancient history. But the past never dies. It will be 518 years next week since Vasco da Gama landed at Calicut, Kerala, on May 27, 1498 to inaugurate a new form of alien rule in the subcontinent that lingered till 1961 when India liberated Goa.  But as a bemused Jawaharlal Nehru wondered when China made the same claim regarding Tibet, liberated from whom? A few years after the liberation, I took a boat from what was still Bombay for the overnight voyage to Vasco da Gama port in Goa. There wasn’t a proper jetty, so I dragged my suitcase down, dumped it on the ground and went up to a taxi standing nearby.

The driver wouldn’t get out of his vehicle to fetch the suitcase. “You Indians very strong”, he blurted out, “you take Goa, you carry own suitcase!” Drinking cashew liquor with young Goans throwing dice that evening, I heard their version of the liberation.  The consensus was that V.K. Krishna Menon needed the Goa “victory” to be elected to the Lok Sabha from North Bombay. Those Goan youths were also convinced Bombay’s rich and influential people coveted Goa’s material goods. Whether or not shops were looted I don’t know, but their shelves were soon emptied out. Bombaywallahs had the money to pay for the wine, cheese, caviar and the antique colonial furniture in those days of import substitution austerity.

The exodus of Goans to Portugal might suggest that many Goans are still not reconciled to absorption in India. On the other hand, it could illustrate the opportunism that is often the dominant Indian characteristic. It is said Chinese immigrants will go wherever there is land and water. Indians will go wherever they are accepted. The Portuguese government grants full citizenship rights to anyone born before 1961 in Goa, Daman and Diu and to their children and grandchildren. According to some estimates, between three and four lakh Goans took advantage of this clause after Portugal joined the European Union in 1986. Another assessment is that 11,500 Goans opted for Portuguese citizenship between 2008 and 2013.

Moreover, at least 20,000 Goans have settled down in Britain with their Portuguese-EU papers. Many have never set foot in Portugal. They are like the Indian Jews I met packing flowers in Beersheba in Israel. There was no conversation for those so-called Jews were Malayalis who had picked up some Hebrew but didn’t have a word of Hindi or English. They were servants of Cochin’s extinct Paradesi Jews, and labour-hungry Israel had accepted them, too, as Jews.

Three years ago I read of two Goan legislators who had also taken Portuguese nationality but, since India doesn’t allow dual citizenship, kept it a dark secret. Caetano Silvia belonged to the Vikas Party, and Glen Ticlo to Narendra Modi’s own BJP. Court cases were instituted against them but I don’t know what happened. No one here in Lisbon seems to have heard of them. But there are some small signs of India. Driving in from Humberto Delgado Airport we passed a modest sweet shop called Annapoorna. An inconspicuous brass sign a little later proclaimed the Hare Krishna Centre.

Occasional Indian faces surfaced in the taxi queue or at the ATM. They explained the question by an Australian businessman who regularly suffers the fourteen-and-a-half-hour flight from Brisbane to Dubai, and the further seven-and-a-half hours from Dubai to Lisbon. “Going home?” he asked conversationally, settling down in his adjacent slumberette on board the last Emirates lap. He had turned in before I could ask what he meant. Now I know. Portugal was once an enemy nation with which India fought a war. That makes no difference. An Indian passport’s value for most holders lies not in allowing him or her to roam the world but as a bridge to another — preferably Caucasian — passport.