Wear clothes that don’t ‘tease’, Goa BJP tells tourists
By IANSSunday, February 21, 2010
PANAJI - Foreign tourists in Goa must have a “minimum dress code” as the clothes they wear “tend to tease”, the Bharatiya Janata Party’s (BJP) state unit chief said Sunday.
Goa BJP president Laxmikant Parsenkar, while speaking at a gram sabha (village council), said thqat “a minimum dress code is necessary” to thwart the cultural invasion by foreign tourists in Goa.
“At least a minimum dress code is necessary. With the kind of clothes they wearit tends to tease. Then if something happens, it is splashed in the media,” said Parsenkar, a legislator from the coastal constituency of Mandrem.
Parsenkar said he had also received many complaints about nudism in popular beaches like Morjim in his constituency.
“They cannot come here and behave in a culturally insensitive way. These people who roam around here naked and half naked, do not do the same thing in their own country,” he said, adding that Goa was the only place on the tourist circuit in India, where foreigners dared to roam around in the nude.
Commenting on the recent nine-year-old girl’s rape case at Arambol beach, 65 km from here, the state BJP president said the mother had “complained too late” and that “it was not right”.
“First, she (the mother) talked to them (the accused duo), then they said good bye and then after that she files a complaint. This is not right. The media also splashes these things,” Parsenkar said.
The rape of a nine-year-old Russian girl Jan 26 triggered a nationwide media debate on the safety of women tourists in Goa. The union tourism ministry even shot off a letter to the state government, seeking details on the safety of tourists in the state.
Earlier, a 25-year-old Russian woman was allegedly raped by a Goan politician in December last year.
Police have also been unable to crack the mysterious death of Russian teenager Elena Sukhonova, whose mangled body was found on the railway tracks near Thivim, 25 km from Panaji, in May last year.
Goa receives nearly two million tourists annually, about half a million of whom are foreigners.
