Paradise lost

The news of a young German girl having been raped by a minister's son in Goa came last week. In quick succession to the Scarlett Keeling murder case a year ago, this just confirms that rot from the rest of India has finally caught up with the hitherto insulated paradise.

So far, mention of the word "Goa" instantly engendered visions of unending white sandy beaches, palm-fringed shores, narrow, winding roads, pristine white, European-styled churches and the laid-back but friendly Goanese.

I had first visited Goa in 1994. Watching the entire state from the window of a descending aircraft (one circle of the plane covered whole of the tiny state), it looked like God's imagination and man's dreams had converged to create this paradise. Picture-postcard was too trite to describe the place when you actually travelled around the state, from its secluded, blissful north to the bustling and sunny southern beaches.

Lashed gently by the Arabian Sea on one side and grounded by the western ghats on the other, it was a land you never wanted to come back from....until your money ran out.

It was also difficult to imagine that this was indeed part of the larger chaos called India.

Unlike the rest of India, there were no dirtly slums, the roads were smooth and people friendly. Crime was low, there were enough tourists to keep the state and its inhabitants reasonably affluent. The Goans, otherwise prompt and cheerful (our cab driver --Joe--used to appear every morning at 9 smartly dressed, with his sunglasses), however, kept their shops closed in the afternoon, to ensure they had their feni drink and their 'siesta' every day.

Except for a couple of crowded beaches like Calangute and Miramar and a couple of 'shady' beaches like Anjuna and Vagatur--where European hippies from the 60's had settled down to peddling soft drugs--the rest of the state was, indeed, 365 days a year on holiday. That was Goa then. Sedate yet fun.

But how long could El Dorado hold out while the rest of India was falling prey to corrupt and mostly criminal politicians, cut-throat commercialisation, and a general descent into jungle-raaj.

First came the rape and murder of Scarlett Keeling, a British-teenager-gone-astray, who had wandered into the drug and crime infested underbelly of Goa. The three men who allegedly committed the crime, supplied her with drugs when she needed them and expected sexual favours when they needed those. She probably protested one night, with a fatal result: she was raped and killed on a beach in the middle of the night.

The top suspect in the Scarlett Keeling case is being protected by the state government and the drugs mafia, which is now well-entrenched in the state, alleged Scarlett's mother while vowing to pursue the authorities until justice is done.

Now, a 14-year-old German girl has gone to the police and registered a rape case against the son of Goa's education minister. His son has disappeared and the minister is claiming that he is innocent and that all this is a political conspiracy hatched by his opponents.

Sound familiar? I bet it would, to anyone who has lived his life in the rest of India.