Portugal’s prime minister, finance minister and planning minister are all of Goan origin in a delightful little twist of history
Election results aren’t due for India’s smallest State until March 10, but the biggest victory for any Goan politician was announced on January 30. That’s when results came out from Portugal’s snap elections, validating the go-for-broke political instincts of Prime Minister António Costa. The charismatic 60-year-old leader of the centre-left Partido Socialista had preferred to appeal to voters rather than submit to the increasingly strident demands from far-left parties in his coalition government. The electorate rewarded him handsomely, with an unexpected majority of 119 out of 230 seats.
But here’s the twist. This famously personable former Mayor of Lisbon, who looks visibly desi, is Goan; his father was the anti-colonial Goan novelist Orlando da Costa. One wing of the family remains rooted in Margao. It is an intimate, flourishing connection, which both India and Portugal have been eager to celebrate. In 2017, during the first-ever standalone bilateral visit by any Indian prime minister to Lisbon, the Portuguese leader was embraced by Narendra Modi, who personally handed him his Overseas Citizen of India card.
The story doesn’t end here: Costa isn’t the only Goan at the pinnacle of government in Portugal. His finance minister is another — João Leão earned his Ph.D in economics from MIT, where his thesis advisor was economist Abhijit Banerjee. His planning minister is Nelson de Souza (who was actually born in India in 1954, just a few years before Nehru’s troops decapitated the 451-year-old Estado da India colonial state in 1961).