BJP’s paradox in Goa

The state promotes Francis Xavier at global level amid claims of resurrecting Hindu heritage

Panaji: In a curious twist of irony, Goa’s BJP government helmed by Chief Minister Pramod Sawant has found itself extolling the virtues of St. Francis Xavier, a symbol of horrific colonial Catholicism, even as it seeks to reshape the state’s identity in line with Hindutva ideals.

On Sunday, the State Tourism Department announced that Goa will be participating in the upcoming World Travel Mart in London and highlight regenerative and spiritual tourism in the coastal state and the exposition of the relics of St Francis Xavier.

The three-day event, slated from November 5 to 7 will bring together industry leaders from around the globe, offering Goa a prime opportunity to present its distinctive tourism experiences. The display will include wellness tourism with Ayurveda, MICE (Meetings, Incentives, Conferences, and Exhibitions) opportunities, wedding events, and the Ekadasha Teertha Circuit, a spiritual trail featuring eleven historic temples.

State Tourism Director Suneel Anchipaka said exposition of St Francis Xavier will also be one of the highlights of the event. The exposition will be held from November 21 to January 5, 2025 in Old Goa.

The CM Sawant has long condemned the Portuguese colonial era for its brutal destruction of Hindu temples, even allotting funds earlier this year for the rebuilding of some of these temples. This rhetoric contrasts sharply with the ongoing promotion of Xavier, the revered patron ‘saint,’ whose legacy includes a controversial and painful history of the Inquisition and forced conversions.

Xavier’s relics, which are displayed for veneration every 10 years, attract devout Catholics from around the world to Old Goa. But alongside this veneration is a disturbing historical legacy often less acknowledged, despite being extensively documented, is the role of Xavier and his associates in bringing the Portuguese Inquisition to Goa, which remained active from 1560 to 1812.

For many Goans, the Inquisition’s legacy is a painful part of their collective memory. In his seminal 1961 book, ‘The Goa Inquisition,’ historian Anant Kakba Priolkar describes the brutal methods used by the Portuguese authorities and Jesuit missionaries to eliminate the practice of any faith but Catholicism.

Priolkar writes of the fervent efforts to rid Goa of “heretical” practices: “The methods employed by the Inquisition to exterminate Hinduism were so ruthless and bloodthirsty that the Hindu population of Goa was reduced to a precarious state.”

Priolkar observes that the first demand of the inquisition in Goa was made by Francis Xavier in a letter addressed from Amboina (Moluccas) to Joao III (John III), king of Portugal on May, 16, 1545.

Under these mandates, countless Goans were subjected to forced conversions, imprisonment, and exile, as any resistance to Catholic conversion was met with swift punishment. Historians estimate that by the time the Inquisition formally ended, over 16,000 trials had been conducted, with countless Goans punished.

In the monumental fifth volume of the Cambridge History of India (1929), Sir E. Denison Ross, in the chapters on the Portuguese, writes that the “arrival of St Francisco Xavier in India in 1542 was an event of the most far-reaching importance and laid the foundations of that ecclesiastical supremacy in Portuguese India.”

Ross notes that after the arrival of the Franciscan missionaries in 1517 Goa had become the centre of an immense propaganda, and already in 1540, by the orders of the king of Portugal, all the Hindu temples in the island of Goa had been destroyed.

All this was even before the nightmare of the Inquisition, which was introduced into Goa in 1560, eight years after Xavier’s death.

In his ‘Papacy: Its Doctrine and History,’ Sita Ram Goel notes that the “star performer in this devil dance (The Goa Inquisition) staged by the Catholic Church, in the very first phase of its arrival in India, was St. Francis Xavier.”

Last month, Subhash Velingkar, a prominent figure in Goa’s BJP and former chief of the state’s Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS), had courted controversy when he had called for a “DNA test” of Xavier’s relics.

Stephen Neill, in his History of Christianity in India, quotes Xavier’s views on Brahmins thus: “These are the most perverse people in the world... they never tell the truth, but think of nothing but how to tell subtle lies and to deceive the simple and ignorant people... If there were no Brahmins in the area, all Hindus would accept conversion to our faith.”

Despite CM Sawant’s vaunted claims about the ruling BJP planning “a new journey” for Goa, the promotion of Francis Xavier’s at a major international event flies in the face of the government’s claims.