As Tamil Nadu Nuclear Plant Opening Nears, Protests Enter ‘Death Throes’
By MICHAEL EDISON HAYDEN
Adeel Halim/Bloomberg NewsNuclear Power Corporation’s Kudankulam Nuclear power plant is seen in the background from a beach in Idindakarai, Tamil Nadu in this Oct. 1, 2011 file photo.
Ostensibly short stories have an unfortunate way of mutating into epic tragedies here in India – and, occasionally, farces.
Take the $3 billion Kudankulam Nuclear Power Project (KNPP) and the current wave of protests that aim to block its implementation: The project originated from an inter-government pact between Rajiv Gandhi and the former Soviet President Mikhail S. Gorbachev back in November of 1988. By December of the same year, only two short years from the infamous meltdown at Chernobyl, protests in the rural fishing village first began. (To provide you an idea of how long ago this was, the tenured Bollywood star Shah Rukh Khan had just celebrated his 23rd birthday and was earning a bachelor’s degree in economics. )
Nearly a quarter century later, the horrors of Japan’s 2011 Fukushima meltdown nuclear disaster offered residents of this rural fishing community near the proposed KNPP site a fresh well of terror from which to draw their dissent. Spurred by Tamil Nadu Chief Minister J. Jayalalithaa’s about face on support for the project back in March (she had previously opposed it), a new rash of protests and arrests have erupted in what is beginning to feel to many observers like an endless cycle of advance on the part of the government and opposition on the part of activists. But a closer examination might indicate that the protests are entering a new phase: the death throes.
Earlier this month, a source in Russia’s Rosatom Nuclear Energy State Corporation Corp. reported that the first reactor of the plant passed a successful safety test and is now ready for fuel loading. And despite recent pleas directed at Prime Minister Manmohan Singh from British members of Parliament urging him to reconsider the project, news of the plant’s progress builds by the day.
Beyond the obvious matter of a 23 year struggle, the peripheral aspects of the KNPP story occasionally veer into the absurd: Just last week, a government sponsored team of psychiatrists from the National Institute of Mental Health and Neuro Sciences (NIMHANS) was dispatched to “counsel” allegedly benighted locals into seeing the benefits of a structure they fear will poison their health, and the health of the aquatic creatures on which so much of their local economy depends – as if an opposition to nuclear power somehow ran parallel to marital problems, or fears of sexual intimacy.
This most recent wave of protests is distinguished by a hunger strike, which was initiated on May 1st, 2012. According to the People’s Movement Against Nuclear Energy (PMANE), 302 women and 24 men are engaged in a “fast until death” hunger strike, but it remains difficult to ascertain with any degree of authority how many of these men and women are in fact supplementing their diet in some way for the preservation of health and safety and to what degree that might be the case. Given the excruciating timeline of the KNPP battle, such a choice might be deemed wise.
The protests are held primarily in Idinthakarai, located in Tirunelveli district of Tamil Nadu, just in front of the grounds of a Catholic church. The movement is lead by Dr. Udayakumar, who goes by one name, and M. Pushparayan, names that have become familiar to reporters due to their accessibility, and frequent email blasts, updating us on daily events – often using dramatic all-caps.
Associated PressIn this Nov. 1, 2011 file photo village women shout slogans during a protest against the Kudankulam Nuclear Power plant, as mock cradles hang as shrouds signifying the effect of the plant on future generations in Idinthakarai, Tamil Nadu.
Mr. Pushparayan put me in contact with two of the women currently on hunger strike, who answered my questions in writing.
The first came from a retired 61- year-old teacher named C. Lacticia. Ms. Lacticia said she has been actively protesting the plant since December of 1988. “We are a humble fishing village,” she writes. “We are so scared of what radiation can do to us.” Ms. Lacticia implies that she does receive very small amounts of food during the hunger strike but only enough to sustain her until the next day’s protest. She says said that protests pick up around 9 a.m. and end at 5, something akin to a regular job without weekends.
In addition to answering my questions, Lacticia added a personal message: “We want to inform [your readers] that the government is giving them false information and trying to use the media against us. ,” Lacticia writes. “We won’t stop until KNPP is closed. We love our land, our people, and our village.”
The complaint of false information is common from PMANE and other groups actively protesting KNPP. It should be noted, however, that many news outlets have covered the arrests of protestors, and articulated their demands in objective terms.
The second written message came from W. Sasi Kala, a 34 year-old housewife who claims to have also joined the protest movement back in 1988, when she was only 14. Ms. Sasi Kala expressed her fear that KNPP the nuclear project will make her home of Idinthakarai uninhabitable, eliminating the fishing industry altogether.
Sasi Kala’s answers mirror those of Lacticia’s in many ways: She’s not politically active outside of her desire to stop the creation of this plant. She arrives early in the morning, and then stays the remainder of the day, calling the other protesters “my family”. Likewise, she also said feels that the press is not giving ample coverage to the hunger strike but doesn’t insinuate whether this is necessarily an act of government collusion, or simply reader fatigue from a story that has long outlived its front-page sexiness.
“[The press] isn’t doing its job,” Sasi Kala contends. She remains optimistic, however, that her cause will win out. “We are positive we can stop this project because God will help us,” she writes.
I reached out to the Nuclear Power Corporation of India Limited for a reply to the protestors concern for safety, and after several transfers and deferments, I was ultimately referred to their website where images of pristine green fields are displayed with links titled “safety” and “environment”, bringing readers to more positive assessments of the environmental impacts of using nuclear energy.
The Kudankulam Nuclear Power Project appears set to begin commercial production this August. And with a quarter-century long story approaching its climax, Ms. Sasi Kala and her fellow protestors are likely to need all the help from God they can get.
Michael Edison Hayden is an American journalist currently living in Mumbai. You can follow him on twitter at @MichaelEHayden
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