Devika Sequeira

There’s a limit to how far you can go to endear yourself to the Hindutva mob at the expense of the beliefs of others, as Mauvin Godinho learnt from the recent fiasco in Vasco.

Two days after the storm caused by the Hindutva foot-soldier Gautam Khattar’s vicious attack on St Francis Xavier, in which he deliberately chose not to intervene, panchayat minister Mauvin Godinho was compelled to make a statement at the chief minister’s directive. 

Khattar who describes himself as a “spiritual journalist” and “half journalist-half Youtuber” was invited to address the Parashuram Jayanti event organized by Sanatan Dharm Raksha Samiti (an organization that didn’t exist before this) at Vasco on April 18.

Here is a word for word transcript of what the right-wing youtuber said in his speech on the day: 

“We must condemn lies. We must oppose lies. If lies are not stopped at the beginning, they will grow so large that they will swallow our entire society. That is why we must stop them.

“Someone was telling me today that on this land there is a place related to someone called Saint Xavier, who was a terrorist and a cruel ruler. Now his body has decayed, worms have eaten it; neither his soul remains nor his body. Even his bones were eaten and turned to dust. Yet, I don’t know what kind of festival is held every year, where lakhs of followers of Sanatan Dharma go and fold their hands in reverence—toward someone who spent his whole life converting them, who turned lakhs of Sanatan followers into Christians.”

A woman appears on stage at this point and passes a handwritten message to Khattar, to which he responds, “I had just started speaking, and only a few minutes are left—what should we do? No, no, please don’t do that” (this to some gestures for him to stop speaking, even as some worked up Sanatanis in the audience urge him to continue as they chant “jai Shri Ram”).

At this point Khattar asks pertinently: “Are our legislators also present? Did they ask to stop? No, these legislators of ours are very decent and very religious. I am speaking about those who support non-believers. And I have been informed that a minister is also present here—my respects to him as well.”

Alarmed by the way things were unfolding, Vasco MLA Daji Salkar who was on stage along with Mauvin Godinho and Sankalp Amonkar sent a flurry of messages to the organisers to stop him speaking. Neither Mauvin nor Amonkar tried to intervene even once.

Mauvin, on the contrary, praised “Kattarji” for saying what he’d said, implying that he was only righting a wrong that had been promoted by the BJP’s favourite bogeyman, the Congress.

Speaking after the Hindutva influencer, Mauvin had this to say:

“All of us gathered here are connected by Sanatan Dharma. We must come together and think about how to strengthen it and preserve our culture, which is the identity of India…..I know that over the years, some of our leaders and leaders from the other side have worsened this situation a bit. That is probably why Kattarji has to speak like this, and even our people have to speak this way. This is not your fault. It is the fault of our earlier leaders and those from the other side—they led people onto the wrong path. Now you people are correcting it.”

After a public reprimand from the chief minister (“Mauvin should have intervened”, Pramod Sawant said) Mauvin Godinho made a public statement, ostensibly to condemn the attack on St. Francis Xavier which turned out to be more lies than an apology. Sadly for Mauvin and other publicity crazed politicians, the intrusive presence of video-cams these days cuts both ways. No longer can they blame the poor media hack for “misquoting” them.

Once an insider of the Rajiv Gandhi coterie, and Youth Congress president in Goa, Mauvin moved over to the BJP’s protective umbrella in December 2016 under Manohar Parrikar, the very politician who had filed a corruption case against him when he (Godinho) was the power minister in the Congress government. After Mauvin’s switch, Parrikar redefined the Rs 4.5 crore power rebate scam as “not really a scam, but an attempt to scam”. Godinho was acquitted by the courts in the case last year, 27 years after the complaint was filed.

While politicians like Vishvajit Rane and Rohan Khaunte have donned khaki and queued up for the blessings of the Sarsanghchalak of the RSS to prove their loyalties to the Sangh (‘nurtured in the bosom of the RSS’, being the only qualification missing in Rane’s political CV to make it to the CM’s chair), Mauvin has used the public platform to propagate his conversion to saffron. In a 2023 Independence Day speech he took on his critics for reproaching him for performing Hindu rituals in a temple: “I would like to remind them I was first a Hindu before my ancestors were converted,” he said. (An argument valid for a third of Goa, anyway.)

Marvelling at his “natural adoption in the BJP”, Mauvin said in another public address last year that he saw himself as “more Hindu than Catholic”.

Much of that arrogant bluster has been punctured after the Vasco event, when confronted with the ugly face of toxic Hindutva and the fact he lacked the spine to take it on, even as a much-loved adopted son of the BJP parivar.

What rankles most with Hindutva radicals like Khattar is not that St. Xavier converted Goan Hindus some 500 years ago, but that he’s revered across religious lines and that “lakhs of followers of Sanatan Dharma go and fold their hands in reverence—toward someone who spent his whole life converting them”.

It’s interesting too that Khattar was paid Rs 51,000 in cash apart from flights and accommodation for the Vasco “spiritual” event, as his brother Madhav who’s been arrested and brought to Goa, revealed. Propagating hate is after all a paying business in New India.