In the wake of police firing that killed one of the manyIndians protesting against the Kudankulam nuclear power plant in Tamil Nadu,activist Praful Bidwai lays it into the government that not long back washailed for its groundbreaking civilian nuclear agreement with George W. Bush.
"The repression, including lethal firing, unleashed onpeaceful protesters against the Kudankulam nuclear plant on Monday, on top ofFIRs over many months charging thousands with sedition, makes two things clear.Nuclear projects in India can only be thrust on unwilling citizens at gunpoint.[And] as the jalsatyagraha (water civil disobedience) shows, people will resistthem tenaciously, because they are aware of their hazards," Bidwai writesin India's Hindustan Times newspaper.
As GlobalPost reported last year, a massive nuclear projectplanned for Jaitapur, Maharashtra, has also faced large protests.
Casual readers and the government dismisses these protestsas the work of ignorant villagers and eco-radical agitators (as demonstrated bythe claim that the opposition can be traced to various"foreign-funded" NGOs).
But Bidwai points out that every single nuclear projectIndia has planned has spurred committed resistance:
"That's true of every nuclear project, whether Jaitapur(Maharashtra), Gorakhpur (Haryana), Mithi-Virdi (Gujarat), Kovvada (AndhraPradesh), Haripur (West Bengal), Chutka (Madhya Pradesh) or Banswada(Rajasthan). For instance, at Gorakhpur, there has been a daily dharna againstfour proposed reactors for two years, unbeknownst to Delhi, which lies in theirpotential radiation-fallout zone," he writes.
And when some 100 activists met in Delhi this August, nobodylistened to their reservations about the Kudankulam project, which Bidwai says"was cleared in violation of the recommendations of an official TaskForce, and without even the fig leaf of an Environmental Impact Assessment (EIA)report."
Now villagers, and, yes, more than a few"agitators" have walked into the sea near the reactor, in imitationof a protest against the flooding of villages in Gujarat earlier this month.
They might be wrong. The government says Kudankulam is safe. Coal isn't without its dangers. And the hugenumber of hydropower projects planned for Northeast India will destroy culturesand wildlife in one of the country's last remaining wilderness areas. (Personally, I was sold on nuclear aftervisiting Arunachal Pradesh for this series on dams--if the government canproceed responsibly).
But it is foolishness bordering on the criminal to undertakesuch projects on the assurances of company insiders and circumvent theenvironmental clearance regime, as Bidwai and others say has been done fornuclear plants, and other environmental activists say is routinely done for bigdams, coal mines, and every sort of industrial activity.
And it's bad politics simply to dismiss those claims becauseof some hidebound commitment to the ideology of economic growth.
