Rajan Narayan is a professional doing a job and taken up with a cause which he would just as well drop like a hot brick if he got a better challenge somewhere else. However, the turn he has given to the O Herald has taken its circulation to 12,000 from the 4,000-odd it was selling before he took over its editorship. "I don't make any pretensions that I'm being objective," says he. "I'm here to fight for Konkani."
Come what may, the two Narayans, both non-Goans, are slugging it out through reams of newsprint. And both are accused of polarising Goa's good people as never before. (The Week, Jan 18-24, 1987)
The figures noted above of the Herald's circulation don't seem to be very accurate. It was more like a few hundred in its Portuguese days — specially towards the fag end of playing the role of being the "only Portuguese language daily published in Asia". But Row Kavi raises a point long back which probably didn't get the attention it deserved.
By the time the 1985-87 language agitation was drawing to a close, this writer was a chief sub-editor at the Herald. Perhaps the cynical games visible all round convinced one about not getting caught up in the meaningless emotionalism that was ruling both linguistic camps. Basic questions were not being raised. What primarily was a caste-fuelled was being fought out along linguistic lines. Many of those who took up these issues — as subsequent events showed — were more keen on cornering a share of the spoils for themselves and their kin, rather than really empowering the commonman (and woman) to utilise a language they could be more at home in. Rajan's own role was critical in shaping the language issue the way it worked out. The average Catholic became a hard-core, if later disillusioned by the subsequent twist of events, supporter of the Konkani camp, without quite understanding the unstated issues involved.
On the language front, like many other controversies in the state, this one too polarised journalists. The United News of India news agency, though its then Goa correspondent Jagdish Wagh, then put out a 10-take article which echoed the Marathi side of the arguments. Rajan's first response was to dump it in the waste-paper basket. To one's mind, it made sense that both 'camps' knew each other's positions on the issue. Specially because this was one issue where the average Catholic reader — who hardly reads Marathi — was largely unable to keep abrest with the thoughts of one side of the debate. To Rajan's credit, he was quick to accept a suggestion from a junior, and decided that the article be carried on the edit page. But if one thought he did this because of the need for a diversity of voices, that was simply untrue. Some days later, a gleeful Rajan informed that it was just as well he had taken up that suggestion, since the UNI write-up had, in turn, provoked a series of lengthy polemical responses from the Panjim-based Konkani hardline supporter Datta Naik written to project the Konkani cause. It was a point-by-point attempted refutation, and more. A whole lot of more grist to the linguistic mill that ultimately served to build circulation, allowing Rajan to boost his bargaining power on this basis.
If Rajan played a crucial role in stoking the language controversy, he was also vital in bringing it to an abrupt and unexpected end. On the day the language bill was passed in the Goa assembly, an angry Churchill Alemao stomped into the Herald office. He demanded to know how the screaming headline read something to the effect: 'Konkani made official language'. Alemao's criticism (with some validity, even if ironical in the backdrop of his own exclusivist approach which sought compltely illegitimise the Marathi demand, in what was in is more of a caste-defined battle) was that the headline was not justified when the dialect and script used by a small minority had been given official acceptance.
Later realties also elaborately demonstrated that the Rane-Khalap drafted official language bill was extremely ambivalent, if not wholly unimplementable. Nobody knows for certain whether Goa has one or two official languages, or almost-official languages. Each official purpose for which it is to be used would have to be specifically notified, leading to further bickerings. Besides, almost everyone would like to leave the act unimplemented, since it would open up a can of worms and endless more problems if anyone went ahead implementing it. The official invitation cards, now printed in four languages — English, Hindi, and Konkani and Marathi — are enough of an indication of what a joke this has become.
Nonetheless, the Konkani experience did not stop Rajan from subsequently claiming that the paper under his steering had "demonstrated dramatically its influence by succeeding to get more than 75,000 people for the Konkani language". Of this, he tried to make a case for better terms — service conditions, allowances and possibly commissions on advertisements "generated" for the paper.
EVEN AS HE ANNOUNCED recently his decision to quit the Herald and launch his own weekend paper, Rajan is back to donning his role as a 'protector of the minorities'. But even as he stokes fears here, a genuine question could be whether this is anything more than a marketing strategy. His claims of being committed to secularism could be dismissed by critics as little more than a cynical strategy of stoking minority fears, to build a potent constituency, just as some politicians in Goa have done — to convert into a permanent votebank of sorts a large segment of the Catholic electorate. In July 1987, Rajan told his staff, this writer then being one of them: "Our basic constituency are the Catholics, whether we like it or not. So much so, anything on the Pope or developments in Christianity should be interesting to our readers."
Rajan was however quick to understand — unlike most of the other editors brought into Goa to head papers here, who sometimes take years just to understand that this small state doesn't need a scaled-down version of a national newspaper — that local news was of vital importance. To cite a Rajanism, in the form of a blunt directive to the news-desk: "The Rajya Sabha election in Goa is of much greater consequence to use than a peaceful Yath Ratra (sic) in Ahmedabad. In Punjab, for instance, I do not think we should take cognisance unless the death toll is above 10." (This was in times when the Punjab violence was as Kashmir today.)