The memories of Goa’s liberation remain vivid for 102-year-old Libia Lobo Sardesai. On December 19, 1961, as leaflets in Konkani and Portuguese rained over Goa, Sardesai, then a presenter at the underground Voice of Freedom radio station, proclaimed: “Rejoice, rejoice, Goa is now free.” Years of resistance had reached their political climax. In 2025, Sardesai was awarded the Padma Shri for her contribution to the liberation struggle, bringing her remarkable story to national attention.
For six years, from 1955 until Goa’s liberation in 1961, Sardesai, her husband Vaman Sardesai, who is also a Padma Shri awardee, and Nicolau Menezes ran Voice of Freedom—Goenche Sodvonecho Awaz in Konkani and Voz de Liberdade in Portuguese—from clandestine locations, first from Raja Sawant’s estate in Amboli, and later from a hidden hilltop in Castle Rock in Karnataka to hide from the Portuguese. The broadcasts pierced Portuguese censorship, reported atrocities and sustained the morale of a people living under the authoritarian rule of António de Oliveira Salazar.
The woman behind that radio voice was Sardesai, who calls herself an “ordinary girl”. Born in 1924 in Socorro, Porvorim, and raised in Bombay’s Crawford Market, Sardesai grew up watching India’s freedom struggle from her third-floor window. Gandhi’s processions passed nearby; thousands gathered shouting Jai Hind and Inquilab Zindabad; protesters were lathi-charged. The impressionable child did not fully understand what she was witnessing, but the images stayed. “I was an ordinary girl, but was not a sissy either,” she chuckles.
The idea for a clandestine radio station emerged after the liberation of Dadra and Nagar Haveli in 1954, when two Portuguese transmitters arrived in Bombay. Vaman, who had been imprisoned for distributing freedom literature and later worked with All India Radio’s External Services Division, asked: “If we can make these recordings and beam to the world, why can’t we do something for Goa?”
Sardesai, then working at AIR and studying for her LLB, was asked to join. She was 30, unmarried, and being sent into a forest with two men. “It needs to be done. I can do it,” she thought. They broadcast twice a day, constantly fearing discovery. “Station guards would leave food, other essentials, but we never saw them, and they never saw us.” The broadcast became such a threat to the Portuguese regime that the army commandant Major Felipe de Barros Rodrigues called the station “the only voice which has been hurting us at close range”, acknowledging that it had “assumed the command of the entire propaganda” against the regime. In December 1961, the Portuguese surrendered. “After six years of radio broadcasts, in isolation, it was time to rejoice,” Sardesai says.
Sardesai and Vaman eventually married in 1964. “While I didn’t want to get married, if I did, it would have to be on 19 December.” Of their partnership, she says, “There was no ‘you’ and ‘I’. We were like two rails of a train. If there is only one, you flounder.” Freedom, Sardesai believed, brought responsibility. As Goa, Daman and Diu’s first Director of Tourism, she worked on tourism, roads and infrastructure; as the state’s first woman advocate, she practised law and worked on tenancy issues. She also founded the Women’s Cooperative Bank. “We had to do something for Goa,” she says. Even now, she has little patience for the mythology that has grown around the struggle. Surrounded by citations and awards in her Panjim apartment, she dismisses suggestions that she write a memoir. “What is there to document? We played a role as did many others. Let’s not hum and haw about it.” Living alone in Panjim, she spends her time cooking, reading, and chanting Nam Myoho Renge Kyo. Once a formidable dancer who loved the tango, she now speaks more readily about service than sacrifice. “Live for others, not for yourself. We gave up our youth. Almost gave up our lives. Why,” she asks, “are people not willing to sacrifice more?”
Three decades ago, Sardesai became a Buddhist because the philosophy, she says, circles back to the principle that animated those years in the forest: “In the doing lies true awakening.”