On a Sunday morning in April 2022, a hurried meeting was called at Our Lady of Miracles, a church on a small hillock in Badem village, a close-knit community of 45 houses in Assagao, in North Goa’s Bardez taluka. After Mass, the priest asked the parishioners to settle down. Christina Dias, 53, a lawyer and local resident, then laid bare an elaborate plot that had been quietly unfolding around them.

Badem was the target of a criminal conspiracy, she said, one of the many villages across North Goa where vast tracts of land had allegedly been grabbed by real-estate agents in connivance with government officials.…