Political transition in post-colonial societies

Abstract

This paper is a modest attempt to encapsulate the problems surrounding the liberation, transition and integration of smaller, diversely governed, former colonial pockets, into India. Goa, a former Portuguese possession is offered as a symptomatic case in point, embodying the empirical vicissitudes of transition, with a particularistic emphasis on politico-legal problems, in the aftermath of the end of Portuguese empire and the evolution of a new polity. The merit of such an exercise, besides analyzing the political character of the state marked by the conflictive co-existence of opposing systems – dictatorial and democratic – lies in the fact that it implicitly attempts to emphasize the limitations of colonial historiographies and their epistemic approaches. These approaches make a fundamentally debatable assumption that the transition and integration of smaller, former colonial encrustation, in India, was without substantive problems in the absence of serious armed conflict (as in the case of Portuguese Goa) or smooth transfer of power (as was the case with French Pondicherry on the east coast). This assumption which actually narrows the framework of understanding the dynamics of human politico-cultural encounters, emerges partly owing to perceived critical similarities in the civilizational undercurrents, geo-political and historical settings, socio-cultural, linguistic and religious affinities 1 between India and these smaller territories, apart from the European intellectual preoccupation with “ collapse of empire”.