Casinos in Goa: The House Always Wins (Mint, 17/2/2020)

[V M]

https://www.livemint.com/news/india/why-the-house-always-wins-in-goa-11581866065592.html

When I arrived in Goa at Dabolim airport last week, the first thing I
saw when exiting the plane was a huge casino advertisement, showing an
Indian man flanked by two enthralled foreign women. The slogan was
“Always in The Game”. At the baggage claim, the carts bore another
casino’s logo, and the billboards above the carousels featured yet
another casino ad, but this time the Indian man had three blondes at
his elbows. On to the exit, past casino company booths offering
“gaming packages”, another casino installation in the middle of the
aisle literally blocked my way. This one dispensed with the Indian man
altogether, and featured just a pole dancer with flowing brown hair
under the hashtag #FeelAlive.

If all this is heady insinuation, the messaging becomes even more
explicit when driving into my hometown of Panjim, where the
once-spectacular heritage waterfront is now dominated by lurid neon.
The longstanding ban on obtrusive signage is conspicuously flouted by
wall-to-wall outdoor screens depicting foreign women dancing, foreign
women pouting, foreign women driven into apparent ecstasies by the act
of playing roulette, with one ubiquitous slogan barely wink-winking
“Get Lucky”. This past New Year’s Eve, taking it all one step further,
city residents found actual, live, scantily-clad foreign women posted
outside the casino entrances, but this time each one was outnumbered
by dozens of Indian men, all of them scrambling to grab suggestive
selfies.

Fully aware the scenario is deteriorating, and poses an explosive
social problem, the Goa government has responded characteristically
inscrutably. On 30th January earlier, chief minister Pramod Sawant
announced “From February 1, we are stopping all the original Goans
from entering casinos. They will be banned. I have already moved the
file. For now, the GST Commissioner can enter the casinos at any time
and ask for an identity card if he suspects anyone to be a Goan.”

Sawant’s declaration met with instant ridicule, including within his
own chamber. The former deputy chief minister Sudin Dhavalikar, said
“There are ministers, MLAs, panchas, sarpanchas, zilla panchayat
members, playing in casinos. They should be banned first, and then the
issue should be discussed.” Others pointed out that “original Goans”
is bizarrely framed, with the veteran Goa-based editor Ashwin Tombat
writing, “if the state government does manage to properly legally
define who is a Goan and who is not, then it can and must go ahead and
fulfil another, more important and longstanding demand of the Goan
people. Non-Goans must be banned from buying land in Goa!”

Entirely predictably, February 1 has long gone, and there isn’t any
ban. The chief minister has gone silent again. But no one expected
anything different. This is because the history of casinos in India’s
smallest state is an expansive litany of the double cross. Every
promise has promptly been broken, with the most egregious examples
coming in the tenure of Sawant’s predecessor, the late Manohar
Parrikar, who represented Panjim for 25 years (there was an interlude
while he served as Narendra Modi’s defence minister), eventually dying
in office a year ago.

While in the opposition, and running for elections in 2012, Parrikar
led protests on the Mandovi waterfront, decrying casinos as “dens of
vice” and “a social evil” which he pledged to eradicate if he became
chief minister again. But when granted a landslide victory, the
biggest casino operator in the country showed up on the celebratory
dais, and immediately the gambling boats proliferated, becoming
ever-larger and more intrusive. Panjim’s idyllic Latinate beauty was
steadily overwhelmed by tawdry casino imagery. Now, each evening, the
river road is paralyzed, with hordes of low budget domestic tourists
thronging to the ersatz glamour.

One night earlier this week, I walked up to the entranceway of the
newest entrant into the casino marketplace, which splashes its logo
boldly in the most expensive slots in the local newspapers. Each ad
prominently features foreign (read “white”) women exuberating in
various gambling settings, but as I waited and watched from close
quarters, exactly zero examples showed up to try her luck. Out of
roughly 150 punters who headed in over the course of nearly three
hours, 7 were women. Everyone else was an Indian man, often spilling
out 8 and 9 from a single overstuffed Innova.

Atish António Fernandes‎, of the prominent Panjim-based 28-year-old
First Class Holidays, and Executive Member of the Travel & Tourism
Association of Goa, told me “the casino industry plays a part in the
hotel business in Panjim and surrounding areas, but I don’t think it
plays any role in what we could call the high end tourism marketplace.
Our own business largely caters to higher spenders, and we see very
minimal footfall of our guests into casinos. I would say only a
handful of people every year.” This highlights an essential paradox,
“despite what seems like large advertising budgets, casinos have not
been able to capture much interest from any actual premium visitors.”

Fernandes also told me, “although not very open and visible,
prostitution seems to be a big draw for some visitors on the casino
boats. From all accounts, and what we know has happened everywhere in
the world from Las Vegas to Macau, it is natural for the flesh trade
to flourish in the background of the casino business. What is
especially interesting is these “gaming packages” with several layers
of player categories. The sales and marketing teams of these casinos
are very proactive in dealing with special requests. What’s now
happening is that beside hotels, preferred customers are being given
accommodation in villas and apartments. In these environments, there’s
obviously much more privacy, but it is quite toxic to have these kinds
of guests out in the community, alongside young children and
families.”

The International Monetary Fund has an excellent term for what has
gone out of control at dizzying speed with casinos in Goa. In that
organization’s quarterly magazine for September 2001, authors Joel
Hellman and Daniel Kaufmann summarized, “We define state capture as
the efforts of firms to shape the laws, policies, and regulations of
the state to their own advantage by providing illicit private gains to
public officials.” This is precisely what is happening here, with
every party and politician thumping chests against gambling in
opposition, then mutely turning around in exactly the opposite
direction when established into any position to follow up on those
promises.

The industry itself reserved no doubt about its hold on Goa. The best
illustration came last year, when Atanasio ‘Babush’ Monserrate
competed to win the Panjim legislature seat for the Congress Party (it
was his fifth different party alignment). This astute “people’s
representative” correctly surmised his best possible plank was to
emulate his one-time mentor Parrikar, and jolted the race by pledging
to remove the casino boats within 100 days of his victory. Shaken by
this, and realizing the potency of public feeling on this issue, the
BJP rather lamely followed suit, stating it would also remove the
casino boats in the case of vitory, while failing to furnish any
reason why it failed to act all the years it enjoyed office.

That’s when Narinder Punj, the “Chief Visionary Officer and Mentor” of
the newest gambling boat told IANS the bare realities of where Goa
finds itself, “Awarding a licence to any casino operator in any other
state, it could topple the government, because there is still public
resentment against it. So most governments are very wary about giving
out licences.” But not here, where public ire is only paid lip service
during elections, “in Panaji, you now have Babush Monserrate who is
saying within 100 days I am going to get casinos out. We heard that
before from Parrikar. Parrikar used to stand outside the Caravela
[note: the first casino in Goa] with a mashal. [But] it won't be long
before the people that speak against us come with us.” And just like
that, when Monserrate did win, he backed off, then compounded his
volte-face by switching parties again to join the ruling BJP.

Punj made another pertinent comment when he admitted many of Goa’s
casino operators opposed any official gambling commission, which would
controls the current, totally unregulated scenario, “if it comes into
place and if it is enforced, then it makes making of money, or the
making of mega bucks difficult.” This highlights two interesting
dimensions of the industry’s co-option of all sides of the political
divide. The state revenue from casinos in 2019 was the relatively
insignificant sum of 411 crores. By contrast the pharmaceutical sector
topped Rs. 10,000 crores in turnover alone. There’s also the total
antipathy of Goans to this type of gambling. The last study by NGO
Sangath found only 1.1% of adult males had used a casino even once,
while 39.5% played matka, the popular street sweepstakes of the
Konkan, which accepts bets as low as 1%. More appreciable was the
67.8% who bought lottery tickets, but that is an ingrained cultural
habit dating back to the colonial Provedoria da Assistencia
Publicalottery that was established to raise funds for social
services.

It’s unpleasant to consider, because so many people from around India
and the world (not to mention the natives) are emotionally invested in
an entirely different idea of Goa, but there’s ample evidence of
exactly how the casino stranglehold is going to play out.

Last year, at an industry event in Macau, the analyst Grant Govertsen
let slip what he’s been told by industry insiders, “The Indian
government has asked casinos to build integrated resorts in Goa.
Gambling operators who did not enter Macau, when the game was
liberalized at the beginning of the millennium do not want to miss the
boat in Goa, and want to bet on what might be the next Macau. We
expect Goa to quickly become a $1 billion market, as it transitions to
land-based casinos.” Then he mentioned India’s biggest casino operator
“purchased a large site located near Goa’s already-under-construction
new airport and was now underway in terms of planning the site with a
world-renown gaming architect.”

This is merely yet another public admission of one of India’s biggest
open secrets, which is the gargantuan, entirely superfluous “second
airport” intended for Mopa in North Goa is being custom-built for the
benefit of massive casinos scaled precisely to become “the next
Macau.” This real estate scam, with an airport attached, was cleared
in astonishingly dubious circumstances, prompting the state’s own
undersecretary for finance and expenditure to put on record,
“unrestricted land use may be used for commercial activities which may
not be beneficial to the state and its people. Handing over such a
land mass to a private entity who may develop it for whatever purpose
may create third-party rights without adequate compensation to the
state government.”

This is why every chief minister in Goa can feel there’s a kernel of
truth when he declares, as did Sawant in a formal reply tabled in the
state assembly just days ago, “The government has taken the decision
to shift the offshore casino outside River Mandovi subject to the
availability of suitable site. Casinos could not be shifted for want
of appropriate site and time period for the same is extended up to
March 31, 2020.”

He’s sticking to the plan to keep delaying until he can declare that
all casino operations must shift to land at the airport. But surprise,
surprise for the citizens of Panjim. There every indication the boats
will stay, with all the tawdry “entertainment” minus the game tables.
Just goes to prove Paul Newman’s famous dictum about gambling, “if you
look around, and can’t tell who the sucker is, it’s you.”


(NOTE: An edited, and somewhat shorter version of this text was
printed in Mint, which available on the link)