The Truth Seekers Of Today
By Raminder Kaur
14 September, 2012
Countercurrents.org
‘They can broke our bones, but not our will.
We will fight for our right.’
(woman from Idinthikarai)
Anti-Koodankulam nuclear plant protesters have done nothing wrong. Yet the Police have increased their drive to issue summons, interrogate them, imprison them, and lay more First Information Reports on anybody they want to this week.
No one is beyond their unjust clampdown – women, the elderly, the disabled and now even children. They have picked up four youngsters aged between 15 and 16 and charged them with up to 14 offences including ‘sedition’ and ‘war against the state’.
They are using the age old tactic of harassing family members so as individuals who they cannot trace are emotionally hijacked into surrendering. And surrendering for what reason? For peaceful protest.
It is a warped world.
Unfortunately this is the only way the Indian authorities know to curtail a movement where solidarity has reached all corners of the nation and even globe, beyond their wildest imagination. All they know is the strategy of ‘teaching them a lesson’ when they have no lessons to impart, or casting wild allegations at them of being ‘foreign funded’ when the authorities behind the nuclear power plant are the most foreign funded of the lot.
People do not need foreign funds to inform themselves, to have a hunger strike or to have a satyagraha.
People - and this includes the average fisherman and woman - are intelligent enough to see through the empty rhetoric and token procedures that have come out with the Nuclear Power Corporation of India Limited, the Atomic Energy Regulatory Board, the central government, the Tamil Nadu state government, the Tirunelveli District Collector and the Tamil Nadu Pollution Control Board.
Tamil Nadu is part of the traditions of democratic India and not bandit-capitalist Russia who are also behind the construction of the plant.
Seeking truth, democracy and people’s rights are the values that people like Mahatma Gandhi and Pandit Nehru have fought for. And these are the values that the protesters are upholding.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ouqyo1qWhr8&feature=related
The Police conduct against anti-Koodankulam protesters with the ransacking and desecration of peoples’ possessions, homes and holy places has shown that they are no better than thugs in uniforms.
Intelligence quarters such as the Q-branch are panicking because they do not know what to do when a genuine protest gets larger than they can manage. So they go around making examples of people, spouting lies and twisting the facts, and subjecting others to a siege of terror.
Their actions will only lead to more anger and revolt.
People know that there are other cheaper and safer options for India’s development and energy generation.
The Police are breeding resentment and creating further problems for India’s safety. Their brutal actions have led a non-violent movement to further defend their cause, their rights and themselves.
‘You cannot ram a nuclear power plant down people’s throats!’
‘Back off and leave innocent people alone!’
Raminder Kaur is the author of Atomic Bombay: Living with the Radiance of a Thousand Suns, Performative Politics and the Cultures of Hinduism and co-author with Virinder Kalra and John Hutnyk of Diaspora and Hybridity.
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