Meet the 102-YO Lawyer Who Ran a Secret Jungle Radio During Goa’s Freedom Struggle
On 19 December 1961, the people of Goa looked towards the sky, baffled at the downpour. Leaflets were raining down. Each bore a message: ‘Rejoice! Rejoice! Brothers and sisters. Goa is free after 450 years.’ The news rai
The news rained down from a plane carrying two messengers of freedom: Libia Lobo Sardesai and Vaman Sardesai, who would later marry each other. Both played instrumental roles in Goa’s liberation movement, which sought to free the state from Portuguese rule after India gained independence in 1947.
I observe Libia while she retells this riveting tale; it’s almost as if it were just yesterday that she’d flown over Goa in that plane. Neither time nor age has tarnished that memory in the slightest.
I must admit, securing this interview was akin to finding the treasure at the end of a 20-month-long hunt. It began the day I stumbled upon a feature about the luminary in Vogue. I then began scouting for anyone who could put me in touch with her, eventually chancing upon someone who knew someone who knew one of Libia’s grandnieces. She put me in touch with the legend herself. Before I knew it, I was taking a trip to Goa to meet Libia.
It’s not every day that you meet a centenarian. It’s definitely not every day that you meet one who has been integral to shaping a state’s identity.
Libia Lobo Sardesai’s story
Condensing decades' worth of history into a one-hour story is no mean feat.
And I half expect Libia’s recounting to be sporadic, but no. She’s like a history book, with the chronology intact, and each one of her stories makes for a great page-turner.
The only details she grows hazy about are the accolades. As she tells me, the awards and recognition have continued to pour in over the years, but she has never been one to keep count.
But even when she does forget to mention a win or two, the walls and shelves of her home oblige. I gaze around and take in pictures of Vaman and Libia being awarded the Padma Shri, which Vaman was awarded in 1992 and Libia in 2025. There are also gallantry medals by the Indian Army and Navy, certificates, invitations to address events, and several other awards.
But the biggest recognition of all sits right across from the home, emblazoned on the wall of a building — a giant mural by street artist Solomon Souza. It’s a younger version of the 102-year-old standing in front of me. Though the two look strikingly different, they share the same unmistakable sprightliness. And as we stand on the balcony, hugged by the Goa breeze, Libia begins her tale.
“I was schooling in Bombay (now Mumbai) when the freedom struggle was on. Even though I was just 12 years old at the time, I watched patriots die for their country. The visuals are still clear in my mind: hordes of people dressed in white and khaki, walking alongside Gandhiji from Chowpatty to Dhobi Talao, shouting slogans of ‘Jai Hind’ (Long Live India) and ‘Inquilab Zindabad’ (Long Live the Revolution). We’d watch as the police commissioners would come on horseback and trample upon them. They would fall and get wounded and die. These visuals stuck in my mind; they were like seeds that grew as I grew.”
Her voice betrays a sadness as she continues, “I did not know exactly what the movement was all about. I did not understand what terms like colonialism meant. But what my friends and I did understand was that we were being ruled by a foreign power, and we wanted freedom.”
The Bombay girl with a Goan heart
Right before I made my way to Libia’s home, I had been spending time with my editor’s toddler.
She was amused when I told her I’d be interviewing a 102-year-old later that day. “That’s so many years,” she remarked. I silently shared in her amusement. “It’s almost like you’ve been a timekeeper of Goa’s changing face,” I later tell Libia. She laughs. It’s an infectious laugh that coaxes me to imagine her younger self, then the secretary of the Goa Youth League, parading across the streets of Mumbai, partaking in morchas (protests), and speaking truth to power, untethered by fear.
Even as India gained independence in 1947, Goa remained under the grip of Portuguese dictator António de Oliveira Salazar, who arrested anyone who dared to oppose the rules. Libia explains, “You could not say ‘Jai Hind’. There was censorship. Even an invitation card had to be censored because they were suspicious. The vigilance of the Portuguese was such that if four people were talking on the road, there would be police trying to find out whether they were fermenting something.”
But juxtaposed against these harsh memories are also fond ones.
Libia shares, “We’d spend most of our vacations in Goa. We would arrive by ship; there were hundreds of us, and we’d come with all our provisions.” To Libia and the other young people, Goa was home — and all they wanted was to see it free. Driven by that longing, the youth did everything they could to spur action within the liberation movement.
In 1954, they planned a satyagraha; people flocked to the borders of Goa demanding freedom from Portuguese rule. But they were fired upon. Following this, a blockade was imposed on the borders. “No one could come into the state, and no one could leave. Goa was completely cut off from India. The boycott led to starvation within the state, but the Portuguese brought in food from Karachi,” Libia explains.
Then, in 1955, the people of Bombay once again decided to oppose the dictatorship.
“We decided to go in larger numbers. Around 3,000 people registered themselves for the chain satyagraha, but this group was shot down as well,” she shares. The patriots were stumped. Hope arrived in the form of Vaman Sardesai, who’d spent nine months in jail for propagating anti-colonial literature and was stripped of his civic and political rights for five years.
Arrested during his second year of medical school, he found himself unable to continue his studies or rebuild his life easily in Goa. Eventually, he went to Sevagram Ashram in Maharashtra, where he stayed for four years. Later, he was given a job at All India Radio by the Government of India, where Libia also worked. He was tasked with recording the views of Goans in Bombay, which were then sent to the External Services Division in Delhi and broadcast to the world so that an international audience could learn about what was happening in Goa.
An idea soon began to take shape among the patriots: what if radio — the very medium through which information was controlled — could instead be used to reach the people of Goa and reconnect them with the rest of India?
From that vision was born the ‘Voice of Freedom’ radio station. Its first broadcast was scheduled for 25 November 1955, a date deliberately chosen because it marked exactly 445 years since the Portuguese conquest of Goa.
‘We shed our blood for India’
As Libia and I speak, our conversation meanders through many things: Goa, her story, my story, the music playing outside in the public square, and of course, her love story with Vaman.
She begins by describing their bond as a result of their shared passion for their homeland.
While the two married much later in 1964, they were each other's companions and confidantes for years before that. Much of their bond was shaped by the six years they spent together, from 1955 to 1961, in forested areas, broadcasting through their radio station incognito and undercover so they wouldn’t be detected.
Was it an easy ‘yes’? Libia laughs, “I told my family I had been transferred for six months to Belgaum.”
The couple was initially joined by another patriot, Nicolau Menezes, while they set up base on the Maharashtra border, close to Sawantwadi. However, in a bid to move somewhere more discreet, they shifted to Castlerock Hill, closer to Karnataka.
At a height of 2,000 metres, in the midst of three tin sheets (which the team used for installation and habitation), they broadcast. The electricity for the transmission was obtained from the Western India Portuguese Railway Station.
The years that followed were filled with insurmountable odds. “There were reptiles and leeches everywhere,” Libia recalls. “We used to wear gumboots, but the leeches would still crawl inside them. Our blood would drip constantly; we shed so much blood. Though we were never shot by a gun, we shed so much blood over those six years.”
One day, on 16 December 1961, Libia and Vaman were driven in a military jeep to Belgaum, where they were asked to broadcast from a new location. The next day, at one-hour intervals, the couple broadcast a direct message from India's defence minister addressed to the Portuguese governor general, asking him to surrender.
They were met with silence. Operation Vijay was given the go-ahead. Naval warships, the Indian Air Force, and the Indian Army joined forces to launch a full-scale assault on Portuguese strongholds across Goa. The Portuguese forces finally surrendered.
When Libia and Vaman were given this news by the Chief of Army Staff, General J M Chaudhary, Libia recalls taking a flower from the garden and giving it to him. He asked her, ‘Now, Kumari Lobo, what next? What do you want to do?’ Libia replied, “There are no people left to listen to me because the radio depends on waves. I must go to the skies and tell them.”
“The next morning, we got a call from the Army asking us to come at 6:30 am. They said, ‘You wanted to go to the skies and tell people, didn’t you? So we are going to send you by plane.’ But they warned us that the plane was at risk of being shot down. We said, ‘That’s alright. At least we will fall on free Goa.’.”
And so, a plan flew across Goa carrying the brave duo who’d weathered innumerable challenges to ensure the people of Goa were not cut off from India.
Lobo and Vaman married exactly three years later, on Liberation Day.
Vaman became Goa’s first director of panchayats, and later an IAS officer, the co-convenor of the Indian National Trust for Art and Cultural Heritage (INTACH), and the ambassador of India to Angola. Libia rose to the ranks of Goa’s first director of tourism, and then later gave up the job to start her law practice, blazing a trail as one of the state’s first women lawyers.
As we come to the end of our chat, Libia tells me about coming across Portuguese army commandant Major Filipe de Barros Rodrigues's report about the Voice of Freedom. The report states that the Voice of Freedom had “assumed the command of the entire propaganda and has maintained its aggressiveness and militancy” and that the station “threatens, criticises, persuades, explains, changes colours, alters perspectives, but in everything it says, it carries a sharp stiletto”, and was “the only voice which was hurting us (Portuguese) at close range”.
As Libia finishes reading, I also realise that I never asked any questions.
Just the one at the start: “So, tell me how it all began.”
Source: The Better India
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