What can Goans hope for from the opposition? On one hand, our attention is drawn to what is happening within the opposition rather than what is happening within the ruling party. And yet, things are not rosy in the ruling dispensation either. One of its own MLAs has publicly stated that he will have to think whether he will even accept a BJP ticket in the coming election. Still, we seem hyper interested in the state of the opposition. Perhaps we need a new lens to understand politics in Goa. Here, I wish to view the political scenario through the dynamic perspective of emergence.
Emergence enables us to think about the coming of novel qualities that cannot be reduced to their parts. When hydrogen and oxygen come together, what emerges is water. Water does not possess the individual properties of hydrogen and oxygen; it acquires new, emergent properties. It can quench thirst, flow, freeze, become monsoon. None of these belong to hydrogen alone or oxygen alone. It acquires a synergistic character that is more than sum of its parts.
Philosophy distinguishes two forms of emergence. Weak emergence is when a new property appears that is surprising but can still be explained by its parts if we look carefully. Strong emergence is when something radically new appears that cannot be predicted from or reduced to earlier elements. It reorganizes the whole field and forces everything to be seen anew. Water is weak emergence in chemistry. Consciousness from neurons, life from chemistry, are thought to be strong emergence.
Goan politics today is witnessing strong emergence. The split in the opposition, with the rise of the Goa First alliance, has not in itself given us anything entirely new that was not there before. All its constituents existed earlier, all its issues existed earlier. But their coming together has produced a new political quality that did not exist before. That quality is this: Goa itself has become the political.
Let me explain. For a long time, politics in Goa treated Goa as object, as backdrop. National parties counted Hindu faith, national security, double engine, as one. They counted Goa as zero, as remainder. Issues central to Goa, land, comunidade, khazan, fish, jobs for Goans, ecological fragility, demographic anxiety, were footnotes. What the Goa First emergence has done is to invert that count. It has forced what Alain Badiou calls a truth procedure. It says, count Goa as one.
Hence, even the Congress, the principal opposition party, is said to be looking to name its own alliance with the RGP as the Goa Opposition Alliance. The word Goa enters its nomenclature. This is not cosmetic. This is morphogenesis. Politics in Goa cannot forget Goa anymore. Goa now breathes through everything political. It is indeed the political of politics in Goa. The political, in Schmitt’s sense, is the friend enemy distinction that sustains all politics. In Goa, that distinction will certainly translate in coming days into friend and enemy of Goa. This has already set in. Goa and the Goan have become central coordinates of all political discourse.
This is good news. Politics now has Goa in its morphogenesis. Morphogenesis means how form emerges. For years form of Goan politics was shaped elsewhere, in Delhi, in high command, in national narrative. Now form is being shaped from inside Goa, from its own anxieties, its own lived world. This hits directly at BJP, which in Badiou’s sense does not count Goa as one. It excludes Goa and Goans while embracing Hindu faith and national issues. It counts faith as one and nation as one, but Goa becomes void. That void is now returning to haunt.
This formation also puts Congress in awkward position. Congress cannot claim to be natural guardian of Goemkarponn while counting Goa as second to Delhi. It has tried to at least turn towards Goan issues, to point of trying to make Goa part of very nomenclature of its alliance. But emergence shows that naming is not enough. Fidelity matters.
But with Goa finding its rightful locus in political discourse, BJP will have to hide behind discursive objects like good administration, law and order, infrastructure, services and their delivery, jobs, for Goans. Sadly, it is found wanting on those very deliverables. Land conversions, failing law and order, joblessness, cost of living, ecological destruction, cannot be hidden by nationalist rhetoric anymore because Goa as political asks concrete question: what have you done for Goa?
Both opposition alliances, particularly Goa First alliance, have to be careful not to overdo Goa, lest they as well as Goans lose themselves in fantasy. Coming of Goa as chief coordinate of discursive formations has its advantages as well as its disadvantages. Best thing is that it has disarticulated lofty nationalist ideals and come to embrace Goa specific concrete deliverables. Where political manifestos largely concentrated on deliverables that had little or no reference to Goa, today they will have to align them to Goa and Goans. That is strong emergence at work. New property of Goa- centric evaluation now belongs to whole field, not just to one alliance.
Worst danger is that Goa becomes empty signifier again, this time filled with sentiment rather than substance. If Goa First becomes only slogan, if it becomes only identity card check, it will repeat frozen object politics it sought to replace. Then Goa as political will become ghost, haunting rather than grounding. Then emergence will collapse back into old parts.
Goans will certainly evaluate parties in fray through their fidelity to Goa. Who will be worthy of being counted as faithful to Goa will have traction. In Badiou’s language, Goa has become an Event and Goans have become subjects of truth of this Event. Event is not just incident. Event is break that reveals a rupture and invites fidelity. Goa First alliance has rolled in with both provocation and interpellation. No Goan, nor any other political party in Goa, would like to be Goa Second. Already new President of Congress calls Goa First alliance Goa Last. Thus Goa First has become benchmark against which positions are taken. Everyone who does not agree with Goa First will become other of same, where otherness one embraces becomes opposite of what Goa First stands for.
This othering can be achieved by hollowing out firstness of that alliance, as done by new president of Congress. There are still other techniques of hollowing out this firstness. One may juxtapose that alliance with BJP and name it as B team or C team of BJP, or one may take road of staging personal attack on leaders through fallacy that we may call argumentum ad hominem. This is expected. When Event emerges, old correlations try to reabsorb it.
Hence, in what we may call dark enlightenment, for lack of better word, we Goans have challenge to discern true fidelity to Goa rather than be lost in rhetoric. Dark enlightenment is not cynicism. It is clarity that comes when old lights have gone out and new light has not yet stabilized. It asks: who counts Goa as one and with what effect? Who matters for Goa by right policy, not just poster? Who keeps Goa open as living mesh and not closed as frozen object for vote? These questions will matter.
Emergence therefore is a test. If Goa has truly become political, then water will not go back to being hydrogen and oxygen. It will remain water. It will have to flow, to nourish, to clean. If it is only weak emergence, old elements will separate again after election. If it is strong emergence, field itself is changed. Goa as political will stay, and all parties will have to drink from that water.
That is hope. Not hope from opposition or ruling party alone, but hope from emergence itself. When Goa becomes political, Goans finally have language to ask: are you Goa First, or are you something else?
