The assault on Rama Kankonkar is not just about one activist. It is about silencing an entire ecosystem of digitally empowered voices
As a citizen born in the capital city, Panaji, I have been a close witness to its transformation over the past 60 years. On April 9, 2018, in this column, I had written an article, ‘Sad plight of motorcycle ‘Pilot’ Ramnath. He didn’t like the matka agent sheltering behind the Hindu religious structure, a small Ghumati in front of the office of the Congress party, to protect his illegal activity. The person abused, attacked, and manhandled him. Ramnath from the ST community of Taleigao was beaten and thrown to the ground. Fortunately, he escaped without injury. An 80-year-old senior citizen fell on the ground in front of onlookers, and nobody came to his rescue. Seven years later, the gambling dens have allegedly flourished in Panaji with the rapid expansion of a powerful parallel economy. Ramnath expired last year, but he had warned me about the growth of urban gangsters. The brutal assault on activist Rama Kankonkar in Caranzalem, on the outskirts of Panaji, is not simply another crime story. It is a chilling reminder of how deeply Goa’s parallel economy has embedded itself in our society and how easily it can mobilise violence when challenged. This is not a Panaji-specific issue. It is a Goa-wide problem that strikes at the roots of our democracy, our economy, and our civic life. Goa has long been presented to the world as India’s most affluent and cosmopolitan state, with one of the highest per-capita incomes and a society that embraces education, cultural diversity, and civic order. But alongside this official economy, another economy has flourished, largely invisible in the state’s GDP figures yet immensely powerful.
Economists like Arun Kumar have estimated that India’s black economy could be as large as 60 percent of official GDP. If that is true at the national level, in Goa, the proportion is likely higher, given the state’s dependence on high-cash sectors like casinos, tourism, land development, and narcotics. The parallel economy here is not a sideshow — it rivals or surpasses the official economy in size, and it fuels activities that cannot survive without violence. What does this economy consist of? It includes the obvious: dubious land deals and property scams, drugs, sex trade, all forms of baiting and gambling, money lending and laundering, benami transactions, antique smuggling, siphoning of petroleum products, human trafficking, smuggling of gold and liquor, and illegal mining. Each of these sectors generates unaccounted wealth. Each of them creates vested interests with strong incentives to protect their flows of money. The attack on Rama fits exactly into this pattern. His activism threatened the silence on which the parallel economy depends. That made him dangerous. So he was targeted, beaten with chains, smeared with cow dung, and humiliated while being recorded on a phone camera. The message was not for him alone. It was a signal to every citizen in Goa who might be tempted to follow his example. It said: This is what happens if you challenge the networks of money and power.
In the past five years, young Goans have discovered that a smartphone and an internet connection can be as powerful as a newspaper column or a rally. This digital turn has amplified dissent and brought new confidence to activists. It is precisely this widened civic scrutiny that has unsettled the parallel economy. Rama was part of this wave. He knew how to use social media to connect with wider audiences, to challenge narratives, to make corruption visible. His assault is therefore not just about one activist. It is about silencing an entire ecosystem of digitally empowered voices. Globally, scholars have studied how shadow economies sustain themselves. Teresa Caldeira’s research in São Paulo showed how urban violence rose when illicit economies outpaced state regulation. Diego Gambetta’s classic work on the Sicilian mafia demonstrated that every act of violence was also a public announcement of credibility: the mafia killed not just to eliminate an enemy, but to advertise its ability to enforce. Carolyn Nordstrom, tracing illicit trade across Africa and Asia, called these flows the “shadows” and showed how intimidation was essential to their operation. In the Philippines, Alfred McCoy documented how the shadow economies of drugs and gambling absorbed sections of the police and judiciary themselves. These are not distant cases. Goa’s trajectory mirrors them. The state is not collapsing, but the underground wealth is growing confident enough to challenge state authority openly. Why should this concern every Goan, even those untouched by such networks? Because the parallel economy does not remain confined to casinos or back alleys. It reshapes politics, policing, and society. When unaccounted wealth grows larger than the official economy, political parties of all colours become dependent on it for campaign financing. Police forces, already overstretched, are pressured or compromised. Civil society is intimidated. Ordinary citizens begin to accept that silence is safer than the truth.
We cannot comfort ourselves by saying the police have arrested the assailants. Yes, arrests have been made. But they are pawns, not patrons. The masterminds remain unnamed. The networks that launder money, run rackets, and finance gangs remain untouched. Without dismantling those networks, no number of arrests will change the fundamentals. Experts on organised crime are clear: unless the financial flows are choked, the violence will continue. Goa’s underground wealth is not only vast but liquid. It can always hire more proxies, more bouncers, more delinquents. The cycle will repeat unless we confront the source. This is why the assault on Rama should be treated as a turning point. It is a reminder that the parallel economy has reached a stage where it feels confident to challenge the state openly. It no longer hides in the shadows. It uses public humiliation, recorded and shared, as its method. This is urban terrorism — violence staged as performance, meant to be witnessed and feared. It is not only a crime against one activist but a declaration of strength by the parallel economy. The attack on Rama is a warning we cannot afford to ignore. It tells us that Goa’s parallel economy is no longer content to operate quietly. It is willing to strike openly, to humiliate activists, to challenge the state in its own capital. If we treat this as just another crime, we will have lost the chance to confront the real danger.
(Dr Nandkumar M Kamat, who has a doctorate in microbiology, is a scientist and science writer)
