phr
Bluelighter
Another Day In Paradise
Tehelka Magazine
Vol 5, Issue 12
Dated Mar 29, 2008
WHITE GIRLS are easy to bed. They come to Goa for quick fun with no commitments, and men like me give them that,” says Rocky, a cashier at a booze-n-food shack on north Goa’s Anjuna beach, the shore most preferred by foreign tourists for nude sunbathing. Up on a cliff, behind the string of Anjuna’s straw-and-bamboo shacks, is the Nine Bar. This entire area, where Rocky works and hangs around, is Anjuna village — notorious for its drugs, sex and crime. It is 9 pm on Saturday, the fourth since British teenager Scarlett Eden Keeling was drugged, raped and murdered at a shack named Lui, just half a kilometre from Nine Bar. Tonight, Nine Bar throbs with techno-trance music as 200 bodies move in rhythm on a patch the size of a basketball ground, overlooking the beach. Many eyes are glazed in the smoke-filled haze. Hashish is being puffed. Hiding behind a jutted tree, cocaine is quickly snorted. Couples and groups pass Ecstasy around quietly. Presently, Rocky charms a lissom, stoned Westerner and walks away with her. These are times of caution though, even within this subculture, which is increasingly all that the world knows of Goa. The music willstop at 10 pm and the motley crowd will have to disband. The tenacious fight for justice by Fiona MacKeown, the mother of 15-year-old Scarlett Keeling who was mercilessly raped and left for dead by at least two local Goan men at Lui’s shack in the early hours of February 18, has forced a defensive Goa government to pretend enforcement against the drug trade and turn the loudspeakers off at the scheduled time at Nine Bar and similar haunts.
MACKEOWN HAS boldly alleged that Goa’s home minister and topmost police officer, the Director-General of Police, are shielding the prolific drug business and the rapist-murderers of her minor daughter. This has made most operators lie low for a while. Hundreds of shacks across Goa’s beaches, normally alive until early morning with music and easy drugs as they were the night Scarlett was murdered, have been pretending to be law-abiding for the last four weeks. Nine Bar — which denies it sells illegal narcotic and psychotropic substances, though their consumption is evident on its premises — will now open only the next night. But of course, drugs and sex are available just as easily as before, if not as openly. The happy operators say that the supply will never run out because Goa’s tourism survives on
these twin pursuits.
Earlier this month, two Japanese tourists drowned at Anjuna beach in separate incidents after suspected drug overdoses. As many as 22 foreign tourists have died in Goa since the beginning of this year; Scarlett was one of the 11 Britons who died. For the last two years, British nationals have topped the death lists. Foreigners routinely troop into the St. Joseph’s Hospital at Anjuna for treatment for drug overdose and counselling. “Seven times this tourist season [since October], I have been called to treat a tourist with an overdose, only to pronounce the man already dead,” said Dr Jawaharlal Henriques, the hospital’s owner-director. “Freely available, the drugs are killing people.” Dr Henriques recalls how lastyear a high-profile patient, an Italian, asked permission to stroll to the Anjuna beach after a month of detoxification. “In just ten minutes, five peddlers approached him, right outside the hospital.”
Often it is severe intoxication that makes it impossible for young female tourists to protect themselves, as was the case with Keeling. As common as the drugs are rumours of drug-related crime. In January, a European couple’s wedding was gate-crashed by two young Goans who went around offering bottled water laced with Ecstacy to guests. A Western couple claimed they knew of a Swiss girl who had been raped on Anjuna beach a week before Scarlett’s murder; she decided against filing a police complaint and flew out immediately. “We live far away, secure in our parallel, middle-class Goa and pretend that the dirty drug business doesn’t exist,” says paediatrician Nandita DeSouza, a Goa native who runs an NGO for child and family guidance. “The allnight alcohol and drug culture is now Goa’s biggest problem.” Goa gets over a tenth of India’s foreign tourist traffic.
Visitors are predominantly British, although the numbers of Spanish, German, Israeli and Russian (the biggest per-capita spenders) tourists are increasing. Last year, about 380,000 foreign tourists visited Goa. For European travellers looking for a cheap bikini holiday, Goa has been the Asian answer to the French Riviera and Ibiza.Not surprisingly, Goa — especially the north Goan coastal belt of 25 km — has changed. It is a no man’s land typical of the world’s seaside tourist paradises. When night falls, many Goans hurry home. Around the beaches are mostly tourists: the quiet Westerners and now, increasingly, raucous young Indians — software engineers, MNC executives, doctors and even students from Delhi, Mumbai, Bangalore — many dropping in for a boozy, drug-fuelled weekend of excitement. But young Goan men too hang out at the beaches.
Working the beaches gives a young man easy and quick money, especially if he catches the fancy of a white woman who will pay for his upkeep for the season. Simultaneously, the traditional livelihoods of coconut and rice farming are receding as farmlands are being converted into real estate and are sold for upwards of Rs 30,000 per square metre. Goan newspapers are full of advertisements for high-priced properties. Times Business Properties, a division of The Times of India group, held a two-day property exhibition in New Delhi this week, offering prime land to a high-profile clientele. Maharashtra’s Revenue Minister Narayan Rane has interests in a massive hotel at Calangute. Last year, the locals had to fight off a plan for a Special Economic Zone (SEZ). “The government and the property developers are cutting our hills and killing our ecology and culture,” says an angry Dr. Francisco Colaco, a cardiac surgeon and a leading social worker.
The state government has tried to sell hundreds of acres of prime land to what locals call “land sharks” in the name of the Regional Plan 2011, which was reluctantly scrapped after massive protests; however, its variants keep coming back to scare Goans. Hundreds of flats have been built for rich Gujaratis and NRIs on a two-kilometre ridge in Siolim village, uprooting trees and driving out hundreds of monkeys from their habitat who now devastate Goan houses nearby. Three months ago, Newtons, a huge departmental store, came up near Calangute on a patch that until last year had lush mango trees.
Near Goa’s airport, blocks of high-rise apartments depressingly resemble suburban Mumbai. Residents of Carmona village in south Goa have been angry at the construction of 800 flats, a gated colony cut off from the rest of the village. “These flats are totally out of scale,” says Goa’s leading architect Dean D’Cruz. “Such construction strains the resources of the villages without adding to them.” Thanks to such unplanned development, property owners are increasingly discharging sewage in open pits, which have contaminated the water.
Much of Goa’s farmland was communally owned in a system created during the Portuguese-ruled era. Such land was later auctioned to local bidders who would harvest its produce, be it cashews or coconuts. After accession to India, corrupt officialdom connived to name the harvesters as actual owners, who promptly began selling the land to property developers from across India. Most residents now want the government to ban the sale of Goa’s land to outsiders, whether foreigners or Indians. But the drug trade is the crux of Goa’s tourism and closely linked to ScarlettKeeling’s death.
Interviews with a restaurateur who allows drugs at his shack, a senior police officer and three Western tourists (speaking on the guarantee that their identities would not be revealed) confirmed that the inflow and consumption of narcotics, available as freely as drinking water, is now at its highest in Goa. The interviewees say hashish and marijuana are harvested in the Himalayan valley of Kullu- Manali in fields held in proxy by Israelis who were once ordinary tourists but have now been here long enough to man several levels of Goa’s drug business. Cocaine flows in from Colombia. Ecstasy is imported from Sweden. Ketamine — a chemical that Fiona MacKeown has seen used in England to subdue horses before castration — is mixed with cocaine in Europe and smuggled into India. The purest heroin, which many Westerners crave as they only get impure varieties back home, is a rage in the shacks.
Part of the drug business in Goa is now reportedly managed by Russian settlers, who have made Morjim, a beach north of Anjuna, their base. But, of course, no illegal business could function without the patronage of politicians and the police, and this one, too, has infiltrated all levels. Beach shacks are supposed to shut by midnight but a simple change of rule allows them to remain open until 5 am by paying a one-time fee of Rs 12,000 for the season (October- May). A British policewoman holidaying in Goa spoke during the recording of an episode of We The People on NDTV, “I have pictures to show that policemen on the beach are openly taking money from the shack owners,” she said. Minutes later, she had vanished. Her friends say that she regrets the impulse to speak up. Goa’s power minister Aleixo Sequeria admits, “It’s true that Goa has a serious drug problem that has been compromised by the failure to check it. But it is wrong to single Goa out because this is a problem with any tourist spot.” The police officer TEHELKA interviewed agreed that Goa’s anti-narcotics division will not act against drug-running establishments since they are protected by Goa’s politicians and police.
Tellingly, Goa’s home minister Ravi Naik acknowledged drug-running this week when he accused MacKeown of being a drugpusher, a charge she vehemently denies. Another source within the administration claims the anti-narcotic cell’s list of drugrunning businesses is actually used to demand protection money. Mapusa’s previous deputy collector was once suspended for taking money from organisers of raves and issuing loudspeaker licences. Attempts to contain drug abuse verge occasionally on the absurd. Urban myth has it that ecstasy and cocaine users find it impossible to partake of their poison without tranceand techno music. So Deputy collectors in Goa are armed with the equipment and authority to check noise pollution. But this kit is used only when anti-peddling campaigners raise a stink.
A rare raid a few weeks ago saw the drug-using tourists chasing the small raiding party. The raiders ran for dear life but were caught — only to be implored to accept a bribe. The business has been adaptable. Many shacks and hotels, closed under public pressure quietly, reopen a few weeks later. Hilltop, an Anjuna hotel had been closed for inconveniencing a convent across the road with its all-night parties. It was back with raves until Keeling’s murder. Two years ago, after persistent campaigning, some rave venues were shut down, including a bamboo forest and an abandoned quarry that held as many as 2,000 people. So smaller raves are now being organised at the shacks. “It’s not that large or open any more,” says the police officer. “Information is put out at the very last minute and spreads quickly through word of mouth.”
The shack owners have evolved a mutually beneficial system: they rotate the night party licences among themselves over the week, ensuring that no one squeals. One Russian who was deported two years ago — not for drug work, as that would take too long to establish, but for overstaying his visa — kept returning to Goa through a popular practice — hopping to Colombo or Kathmandu every six months to get his visa extended at Indian consulates. “I urge all Indians to go back to the Bhagwad Gita that teaches non-possession,” says singer Remo Fernandes. “Please leave Goa to the care of the Goans.” A utopian plea, for as long as the lure of Goa stays strong as a hub of drugs and sex, crime and real estate will continue to soar.
Link!
Tehelka Magazine
Vol 5, Issue 12
Dated Mar 29, 2008
WHITE GIRLS are easy to bed. They come to Goa for quick fun with no commitments, and men like me give them that,” says Rocky, a cashier at a booze-n-food shack on north Goa’s Anjuna beach, the shore most preferred by foreign tourists for nude sunbathing. Up on a cliff, behind the string of Anjuna’s straw-and-bamboo shacks, is the Nine Bar. This entire area, where Rocky works and hangs around, is Anjuna village — notorious for its drugs, sex and crime. It is 9 pm on Saturday, the fourth since British teenager Scarlett Eden Keeling was drugged, raped and murdered at a shack named Lui, just half a kilometre from Nine Bar. Tonight, Nine Bar throbs with techno-trance music as 200 bodies move in rhythm on a patch the size of a basketball ground, overlooking the beach. Many eyes are glazed in the smoke-filled haze. Hashish is being puffed. Hiding behind a jutted tree, cocaine is quickly snorted. Couples and groups pass Ecstasy around quietly. Presently, Rocky charms a lissom, stoned Westerner and walks away with her. These are times of caution though, even within this subculture, which is increasingly all that the world knows of Goa. The music willstop at 10 pm and the motley crowd will have to disband. The tenacious fight for justice by Fiona MacKeown, the mother of 15-year-old Scarlett Keeling who was mercilessly raped and left for dead by at least two local Goan men at Lui’s shack in the early hours of February 18, has forced a defensive Goa government to pretend enforcement against the drug trade and turn the loudspeakers off at the scheduled time at Nine Bar and similar haunts.
MACKEOWN HAS boldly alleged that Goa’s home minister and topmost police officer, the Director-General of Police, are shielding the prolific drug business and the rapist-murderers of her minor daughter. This has made most operators lie low for a while. Hundreds of shacks across Goa’s beaches, normally alive until early morning with music and easy drugs as they were the night Scarlett was murdered, have been pretending to be law-abiding for the last four weeks. Nine Bar — which denies it sells illegal narcotic and psychotropic substances, though their consumption is evident on its premises — will now open only the next night. But of course, drugs and sex are available just as easily as before, if not as openly. The happy operators say that the supply will never run out because Goa’s tourism survives on
these twin pursuits.
Earlier this month, two Japanese tourists drowned at Anjuna beach in separate incidents after suspected drug overdoses. As many as 22 foreign tourists have died in Goa since the beginning of this year; Scarlett was one of the 11 Britons who died. For the last two years, British nationals have topped the death lists. Foreigners routinely troop into the St. Joseph’s Hospital at Anjuna for treatment for drug overdose and counselling. “Seven times this tourist season [since October], I have been called to treat a tourist with an overdose, only to pronounce the man already dead,” said Dr Jawaharlal Henriques, the hospital’s owner-director. “Freely available, the drugs are killing people.” Dr Henriques recalls how lastyear a high-profile patient, an Italian, asked permission to stroll to the Anjuna beach after a month of detoxification. “In just ten minutes, five peddlers approached him, right outside the hospital.”
Often it is severe intoxication that makes it impossible for young female tourists to protect themselves, as was the case with Keeling. As common as the drugs are rumours of drug-related crime. In January, a European couple’s wedding was gate-crashed by two young Goans who went around offering bottled water laced with Ecstacy to guests. A Western couple claimed they knew of a Swiss girl who had been raped on Anjuna beach a week before Scarlett’s murder; she decided against filing a police complaint and flew out immediately. “We live far away, secure in our parallel, middle-class Goa and pretend that the dirty drug business doesn’t exist,” says paediatrician Nandita DeSouza, a Goa native who runs an NGO for child and family guidance. “The allnight alcohol and drug culture is now Goa’s biggest problem.” Goa gets over a tenth of India’s foreign tourist traffic.
Visitors are predominantly British, although the numbers of Spanish, German, Israeli and Russian (the biggest per-capita spenders) tourists are increasing. Last year, about 380,000 foreign tourists visited Goa. For European travellers looking for a cheap bikini holiday, Goa has been the Asian answer to the French Riviera and Ibiza.Not surprisingly, Goa — especially the north Goan coastal belt of 25 km — has changed. It is a no man’s land typical of the world’s seaside tourist paradises. When night falls, many Goans hurry home. Around the beaches are mostly tourists: the quiet Westerners and now, increasingly, raucous young Indians — software engineers, MNC executives, doctors and even students from Delhi, Mumbai, Bangalore — many dropping in for a boozy, drug-fuelled weekend of excitement. But young Goan men too hang out at the beaches.
Working the beaches gives a young man easy and quick money, especially if he catches the fancy of a white woman who will pay for his upkeep for the season. Simultaneously, the traditional livelihoods of coconut and rice farming are receding as farmlands are being converted into real estate and are sold for upwards of Rs 30,000 per square metre. Goan newspapers are full of advertisements for high-priced properties. Times Business Properties, a division of The Times of India group, held a two-day property exhibition in New Delhi this week, offering prime land to a high-profile clientele. Maharashtra’s Revenue Minister Narayan Rane has interests in a massive hotel at Calangute. Last year, the locals had to fight off a plan for a Special Economic Zone (SEZ). “The government and the property developers are cutting our hills and killing our ecology and culture,” says an angry Dr. Francisco Colaco, a cardiac surgeon and a leading social worker.
The state government has tried to sell hundreds of acres of prime land to what locals call “land sharks” in the name of the Regional Plan 2011, which was reluctantly scrapped after massive protests; however, its variants keep coming back to scare Goans. Hundreds of flats have been built for rich Gujaratis and NRIs on a two-kilometre ridge in Siolim village, uprooting trees and driving out hundreds of monkeys from their habitat who now devastate Goan houses nearby. Three months ago, Newtons, a huge departmental store, came up near Calangute on a patch that until last year had lush mango trees.
Near Goa’s airport, blocks of high-rise apartments depressingly resemble suburban Mumbai. Residents of Carmona village in south Goa have been angry at the construction of 800 flats, a gated colony cut off from the rest of the village. “These flats are totally out of scale,” says Goa’s leading architect Dean D’Cruz. “Such construction strains the resources of the villages without adding to them.” Thanks to such unplanned development, property owners are increasingly discharging sewage in open pits, which have contaminated the water.
Much of Goa’s farmland was communally owned in a system created during the Portuguese-ruled era. Such land was later auctioned to local bidders who would harvest its produce, be it cashews or coconuts. After accession to India, corrupt officialdom connived to name the harvesters as actual owners, who promptly began selling the land to property developers from across India. Most residents now want the government to ban the sale of Goa’s land to outsiders, whether foreigners or Indians. But the drug trade is the crux of Goa’s tourism and closely linked to ScarlettKeeling’s death.
Interviews with a restaurateur who allows drugs at his shack, a senior police officer and three Western tourists (speaking on the guarantee that their identities would not be revealed) confirmed that the inflow and consumption of narcotics, available as freely as drinking water, is now at its highest in Goa. The interviewees say hashish and marijuana are harvested in the Himalayan valley of Kullu- Manali in fields held in proxy by Israelis who were once ordinary tourists but have now been here long enough to man several levels of Goa’s drug business. Cocaine flows in from Colombia. Ecstasy is imported from Sweden. Ketamine — a chemical that Fiona MacKeown has seen used in England to subdue horses before castration — is mixed with cocaine in Europe and smuggled into India. The purest heroin, which many Westerners crave as they only get impure varieties back home, is a rage in the shacks.
Part of the drug business in Goa is now reportedly managed by Russian settlers, who have made Morjim, a beach north of Anjuna, their base. But, of course, no illegal business could function without the patronage of politicians and the police, and this one, too, has infiltrated all levels. Beach shacks are supposed to shut by midnight but a simple change of rule allows them to remain open until 5 am by paying a one-time fee of Rs 12,000 for the season (October- May). A British policewoman holidaying in Goa spoke during the recording of an episode of We The People on NDTV, “I have pictures to show that policemen on the beach are openly taking money from the shack owners,” she said. Minutes later, she had vanished. Her friends say that she regrets the impulse to speak up. Goa’s power minister Aleixo Sequeria admits, “It’s true that Goa has a serious drug problem that has been compromised by the failure to check it. But it is wrong to single Goa out because this is a problem with any tourist spot.” The police officer TEHELKA interviewed agreed that Goa’s anti-narcotics division will not act against drug-running establishments since they are protected by Goa’s politicians and police.
Tellingly, Goa’s home minister Ravi Naik acknowledged drug-running this week when he accused MacKeown of being a drugpusher, a charge she vehemently denies. Another source within the administration claims the anti-narcotic cell’s list of drugrunning businesses is actually used to demand protection money. Mapusa’s previous deputy collector was once suspended for taking money from organisers of raves and issuing loudspeaker licences. Attempts to contain drug abuse verge occasionally on the absurd. Urban myth has it that ecstasy and cocaine users find it impossible to partake of their poison without tranceand techno music. So Deputy collectors in Goa are armed with the equipment and authority to check noise pollution. But this kit is used only when anti-peddling campaigners raise a stink.
A rare raid a few weeks ago saw the drug-using tourists chasing the small raiding party. The raiders ran for dear life but were caught — only to be implored to accept a bribe. The business has been adaptable. Many shacks and hotels, closed under public pressure quietly, reopen a few weeks later. Hilltop, an Anjuna hotel had been closed for inconveniencing a convent across the road with its all-night parties. It was back with raves until Keeling’s murder. Two years ago, after persistent campaigning, some rave venues were shut down, including a bamboo forest and an abandoned quarry that held as many as 2,000 people. So smaller raves are now being organised at the shacks. “It’s not that large or open any more,” says the police officer. “Information is put out at the very last minute and spreads quickly through word of mouth.”
The shack owners have evolved a mutually beneficial system: they rotate the night party licences among themselves over the week, ensuring that no one squeals. One Russian who was deported two years ago — not for drug work, as that would take too long to establish, but for overstaying his visa — kept returning to Goa through a popular practice — hopping to Colombo or Kathmandu every six months to get his visa extended at Indian consulates. “I urge all Indians to go back to the Bhagwad Gita that teaches non-possession,” says singer Remo Fernandes. “Please leave Goa to the care of the Goans.” A utopian plea, for as long as the lure of Goa stays strong as a hub of drugs and sex, crime and real estate will continue to soar.
Link!
