History
The sheer inaccessibility of Goa by land has always kept it out of the mainstream of Indian history; on the other hand, its control of the seas and the lucrative spice trade made it a much-coveted prize for rival colonial powers. Until a century before the arrival of the Portuguese adventurer Vasco da Gama , who landed near Kozhikode in Kerala in 1498, Goa had belonged for over a thousand years to the kingdom of Kadamba . In the interim it had been successfully conquered by the Karnatakan Vijayanagars, the Muslim Bahmanis, and Yusuf Adil Shah of Bijapur, but the capture of the fort at Panjim by Afonso de Albuquerque in 1510 signalled the start of a Portuguese occupation that was to last 450 years. As Goa expanded, its splendid capital (now Old Goa) came to hold a larger population than Paris or London. Though Ismail Adil Shah laid siege for ten months in 1570, and the Marathas under Shivaji and later chiefs came nail-bitingly close to seizing the region, the greatest threat was from other European maritime nations. While the Dutch made several unsuccessful attacks, the British at first preferred the avenue of diplomacy. Their East India Company signed the Convention of Goa in 1642, granting them the right to trade with the colony, and use its harbours. Meanwhile, conversions to Christianity , started by the Franciscans, gathered pace when St Francis Xavier founded the Jesuit mission in 1542. With the advent of the Inquisition soon afterwards, laws were introduced censoring literature and banning any faith other than Catholicism - even the long-established Syrian Christian community were branded heretics. Hindu temples were destroyed, and converted Hindus adopted Portuguese names, such as da Silva, Correa and de Sousa, which remain common in the region. The transnational influence of the Jesuits eventually alarmed the Portuguese government; the Jesuits were expelled in 1749, which made it possible for Indian Goans to take up the priesthood. However, standards of education suffered, and Goa entered a period of decline. The Portuguese were not prepared to help, but neither would they allow native Goans equal rights. An abortive attempt to establish a Goan Republic was quelled with the execution of fifteen Goan conspirators. A spin-off of the British conflict with Tipu Sultan of Mysore (a French ally) at the end of the eighteenth century was the British occupation of Goa, which lasted sixteen years from 1797. The occupation was solely military; the Goan authorities never gave up their administration. Despite a certain liberalization, such as the restoration of Hindus' right to worship and the final banishment of the dreaded Inquisition in 1814, the nineteenth century saw widespread civil unrest. During British occupation many Goans moved to Bombay, and elsewhere in British India, to find work. The success of the post-Independence Goan struggle for freedom owed as much to the efforts of the Indian government, who cut off diplomatic ties with Portugal, as to the work of freedom fighters such as Menezes Braganza and Dr Cunha . After a "liberation march" in 1955 resulted in a number of deaths, the state was blockaded. Trade with Bombay ceased, and the railway was cutoff, so Goa set out to forge international links, particularly with Pakistan and Sri Lanka. That led to the building of Dabolim airport, and a determination to improve local agricultural output. In 1961, prime minister Jawaharlal Nehru finally ran out of patience with his opposite number in Lisbon, the right-wing dictator Salazar, and sent in the armed forces. Mounted in defiance of a United Nations resolution, " Operation Vijay " met only token resistance, and the Indian army overran Goa in two days. Thereafter, Goa (along with Portugal's other two enclaves, Daman and Diu) became part of India as a self-governing Union Territory , with minimum interference from Delhi. Since Independence , Goa has continued to prosper, bolstered by iron-ore exports and a booming tourist industry, but is struggling to hold its own against a tidal wave of immigration from other Indian states. Its inhabitants voted overwhelmingly to resist a merger with neighbouring Maharashtra in the 1980s, and successfully lobbied for Konkani to be granted official-language status in 1987, when Goa was finally declared a fully fledged state of the Indian Union. Since then, however, its political life has been dogged by chronic instability . In the 1990s, no less than twelve chief ministers held power over a succession of shaky, opportunistic coalitions, which saw standards of government plummet to depths hitherto unseen in the region. Elections were invariably followed by periods of deal cutting, in which old scores were settled and revenge exacted for past defections and betrayals. As a result, policy-making has been rendered nearly impossible, while corruption has eroded the fabric of government. Among the main beneficiaries of the ongoing chaos have been the extreme right-wing Hindu fundamentalists, the BJP (Bharatiya Janata Party). In the past, their pro-merger stance made them unpopular with the Goan electorate - even Hindus - despite the party's dominance in the national arena. But at the time of writing - in the wake of the political coup of November 1999 when a Congress splinter group came to power under the leadership of Francisco Sardinha - the BJP occupied one quarter of the seats in the Goan assembly.
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