Liberty has been taken in this column to coin an unfamiliar term in the caption above to drive home a point of considerable relevance and importance to the country in general and its people in particular, fully aware of the fact that the English language lexicon has not yet included it but in the hope that at a date in future the term may eventually join the rest of the hundreds of thousand words in noun, adjective, verb or any other parts of speech that teachers of English grammar used to teach years ago in elementary schools across the country. Feeling confident that the readers of this daily in particular, who are heard ungrudgingly declaring as its addicts, may not have serious objection not only for exercising liberty of using a not-yet-in-usage term but also clubbing together visitors, read tourists to our land and saboteurs, the much-glorified pseudo-economic activity called tourism, which is touted as a prosperous industry and also has Ministers in charge of that portfolio in both the Union government and various State Governments, including Karnataka. The many clear positives of tourism, being highlighted by speakers of all hues on many platforms should not make one blind to many negatives of the industry. The debating point is which one set of these two sides (of the same coin!) scores over the other in a trade off.

Pages of history portray events of visitors to our land during several centuries in the past reading which can be undoubtedly fascinating on different counts. Alexander the Great (356-323 BC), the ambitions conqueror, Fa-Hien and Hiuen Tsang (4th century), the celebrated Chinese travellers whose recordings throw light on life in the country of the past, Babur (15th century), who founded the Mughal Empire in India, Robert Clive (1725-1774), who established the political and military supremacy of the East India Company leading to British Raj are names of conspicuous visitors to India that flashes across one’s mind.

While the kind of visitors featured above, as a random sample of the galaxy of distinguished visitors to our land, which also includes many scholars of excellence, philosophers of eminence and leading lights of their days in different fields such as music, art, dance, sports, literature, education, healthcare, movies, State craft and what have you carried with them and also left behind long-lasting positives, the land got battered by the many most undesirable kind of visitors in the past whose iconoclastic acts cannot but be described as negatives of tourism. Destruction of sculptures of rare quality, planned shut down of enterprises with artisans of many skills that have gone into pages of history of India, aggressive as well as hidden assault on the long-standing cultural practices that bound the people of different regions together and so on have been the unquestionable negatives.

Vainglorious claims are being made in official declarations about India hosting the highest number of visitors from abroad. The nation’s administrative machinery is palpably wanting in the task of ensuring that saboteurs don’t infiltrate into the country, unlike the stiff protocol followed in various countries abroad, such as Israel, China and USA. But for the limited space of this column, many more negatives of tourism could be listed to drive home the point of tourism assuming the face of saboteurism on the sly.