Election results aren\u2019t due for India\u2019s smallest State until March 10, but the biggest victory for any Goan politician was announced on January 30. That\u2019s when results came out from Portugal\u2019s snap elections, validating the go-for-broke political instincts of Prime Minister Ant\u00f3nio Costa. The charismatic 60-year-old leader of the centre-left Partido Socialista\u00a0had 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.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
But here\u2019s the twist. This famously personable former Mayor of Lisbon, who looks visibly desi<\/em>, 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.<\/p>\n\n\n\n The story doesn\u2019t end here: Costa isn\u2019t the only Goan at the pinnacle of government in Portugal. His finance minister is another \u2014 Jo\u00e3o Le\u00e3o 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\u2019s troops decapitated the 451-year-old Estado da India colonial state in 1961).<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Portugal\u2019s prime minister, finance minister and planning minister are all of Goan origin in a delightful little twist of history Election results aren\u2019t due for India\u2019s smallest State until March 10, but the biggest victory for any Goan politician was announced on January 30. That\u2019s when results came out from Portugal\u2019s snap elections, validating the go-for-broke … Continue reading ** With three of our men in Portugal\u2019s government, there\u2019s much to be said about\u00a0Goa\u2019s relationship with its former coloniser<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"nf_dc_page":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[2,18,26,15,20],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-14320","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-amazing-feats","category-history","category-leaders-on-the-world-stage-politics","category-pios","category-records-india-national"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.globalrecordsindia.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/14320","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.globalrecordsindia.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.globalrecordsindia.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.globalrecordsindia.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.globalrecordsindia.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=14320"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/www.globalrecordsindia.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/14320\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":14323,"href":"https:\/\/www.globalrecordsindia.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/14320\/revisions\/14323"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.globalrecordsindia.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=14320"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.globalrecordsindia.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=14320"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.globalrecordsindia.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=14320"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}