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Goa’s Marathi language row is back. The real battle is over who gets to define Goan identity

The demand to grant official status for Marathi has opened a new front in the coastal state’s language politics, reawakening old anxieties that culminated in the Goa Opinion Poll in 1967, followed by the Goa, Daman and Diu Official Language Act, 1987.

A Marathi andolan was underway in Panaji on 31 August. Flag-bearing supporters of the Marathi Rajbhasha Nirdhar Samiti that seeks equal official language status for Marathi alongside Konkani in Goa, attempted to march toward the Goa Legislative Assembly in Porvorim. They blocked the old Mandovi Bridge, an important arterial road connecting the capital with north Goa. Milling among the crowd were a couple of young boys, who were questioned by Prudent Media, a Goan news outfit. The reporter asked the youngsters why they were protesting along with “senior citizens” and what they hoped to achieve. 

They had their talking points ready. One of the boys said they were at the protest to show their love for Marathi. They spoke about “Bharat” and “ekta” (unity), bringing up the Portuguese, and attempted to hint that Konkani was a colonial imposition. When asked why they didn’t want to learn Hindi, considering it was the official language of Indian union, the boys brought the conversation back to Marathi.  

This entire conversation unfolded in Konkani.  

The reel has since been doing the rounds of social media and has almost a thousand comments. Some ask if they got the tea and samosas they came for; others ask if protesters received the Rs 500 they were no doubt promised for their participation. Most people can’t stop laughing at the irony of demanding official status for Marathi in fluent Konkani.

The Marathi-Konkani question

The demand to grant official status for Marathi has opened a new front in the coastal state’s language politics, reawakening old anxieties that culminated in the Goa Opinion Poll in 1967, followed by the Goa, Daman and Diu Official Language Act, 1987. According to the Act, Konkani in the Devanagari script is the sole official language of Goa, but the same law explicitly allows Marathi to be used “for all or any of the official purposes” in the state. 

It stops one step short of according full status to Marathi, but in practice, it means that the state government “maintains a policy of responding in Marathi to any official correspondence it receives in Marathi”.  

That provision was likely meant to hold a fragile settlement together. But the ambiguity has allowed the argument to be reopened every few years. 

The agitation is being spearheaded by Subhash Velingkar, a stalwart of the old RSS guard in Goa, and another fluent Konkani speaker. For four decades, the ace organiser built Goa’s RSS shakhas and mentored a generation of politicians, including former chief minister Manohar Parrikar, before the two famously fell out. 

Over the past year, Velingkar has been whipping up support for the Marathi cause, beginning with small meetings at the taluka level in places like Ponda and Dicholim, traditional Marathi bastions. 

“For years, the........

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