Koodankulam (or Kudankulam, in the official lexicon) Nuclear Power Plant is anchored in an Inter-Governmental Agreement (IGA) signed on 20 November 1988 between India and the then USSR.
This initial agreement provided for supply and construction of two nuclear reactors on the southern coast of Tamil Nadu, not too far away – around 35 kms., from the famed Kanyakumari, the southernmost tip of India.
It was a village inhabited by fisherpeople.
Sri Lanka is just across the Palk Strait, that separates Tamil Nadu from Sri Lanka.
The actual construction, of two VVER-1000 reactors – each of 1 GW rated capacity, began on March 31st 2002.
As against scheduled completion by December 2007, the first unit would be connected to the grid on October 22 2013.
The protests were being voiced against the project almost from the very outset.
It was in 2004 January, this writer got to meet Dr. S P Udayakumar, the main architect of the resistance and a resident of the nearby town of Nagercoil – just about 45 kms. away, in a workshop organised by him at the World Social Forum, held in Mumbai, meant to highlight the issues involved and draw national attention.
My senior colleague in the Coalition for Nuclear Disarmament and Peace (CNDP), which had come into being in November 2000 – in response to India going overtly nuclear (weaponised) in May 1998 and thereby prompting and facilitating neighbour Pakistan to immediately follow suit, Praful Bidwai was a main speaker.
The Chernobyl, a town in the then USSR and now in Ukraine, (nuclear) disaster (on April 26 1986), which till now has taken as many as one million lives worldwide – as per an estimate by Alexey Yablokov, a biologist with the Russian Academy of Sciences in Moscow, and Vassily Nesterenko, a biologist and ecologist, and Alexey Nesterenko, a physicist, both with the Institute of Radiation Safety in Minsk, Belarus that would be reprinted by the New York Academy of Sciences, that had happened on 26th April 1986 had formed the backdrop.
But the resistance gathered real momentum post-Fukushima, another (nuclear) disaster in a coastal city of Japan on March 11 2011, and assumed mammoth proportions.
Ms. Minnie Vaid, a veteran journalist, documentary film maker and writer (of non-fictions) has narrated, armed with her professional skill and empathy, the saga of huge peaceful mass resistance that emerged as a consequence, with the village Idinthakarai as the epicentre, for the benefit of all those who are concrned, or at least curious, about the issue of “nuclear power” and its implications.
Women, quite deservedly, figure prominently in her narration.
One cannot just help speculating that the consistently peaceful nature of the mass resistance, despite grave and repeated state provocations, and the fact of women being right in front are, somehow, organically linked.
The book, quite creatively captioned as ‘The Ant in the Ear of the Elephant’, picked up from one of the frontline woman fighters, is available with the Amazon: <https://www.amazon.in/Ant-Ear-Elephant-Minnie-Vaid/dp/9350643960>.
Reproduced below is the short intro provided by the Amazon, followed by one of the many reviews in the mainstream media.
I/II.
“An ant in the ear of an elephant can cause a lot of trouble, can’t it?” declares a woman protesting against the Koodankulam Nuclear Power Plant (KKNPP) in Tamil Nadu, describing the daily, peaceful, non-violent protest that she and other women from nearby villages have been carrying on in Idinthakarai since August 15, 2011. It is the proverbial fight between David and Goliath, with the villagers living in the vicinity of the KKNPP and most affected by it, pitted against the might and machinery of the Government of India.
For these villages along the coastal belt of Tamil Nadu’s Tirunelveli, Kanyakumari and Tuticorin districts–that have a nuclear plant almost in their backyard–radiation is a real fear that dominates their lives and dictates their choices; to protest, to fast, to demonstrate against the government, to face arrest and incarceration. These Project Affected People or PAP do not believe the government’s assurances that the plant is totally safe because they have not been consulted in any discussions about the KKNPP. Led by the Peoples’ Movement Against Nuclear Energy (PMANE) and its coordinator S P Udayakumar, the women who form the backbone of the Koodankulam struggle, are fiercely courageous, well informed and steadfast in their resolve to oppose the KKNPP and nuclear power and continue to protest…
II.
http://www.openthemagazine.com/article/books/a-radioactive-debate
A Radioactive Debate
The Ant in the Ear of the Elephant
Smriti Daniel
What the struggle in a Tamil Nadu village says about the other side of development
The Ant in the Ear of the Elephant | Minnie Vaid | Rajpal & Sons | Pages 288 | Rs 325
‘THE TAMIL WORD for radiation is kathirveechu,’ writes Minnie Vaid in her new book, ‘The Ant in the Ear of the Elephant’. For the people of Idinthakarai, a small fishing village in Tamil Nadu close to the Kudankulam Nuclear Power Plant (KNPP), the threat of exposure to kathirveechu inspires dread. They live in a post-Fukushima world and they know it well. Something they cannot touch, taste or smell could still drive them from their homes, poison the soil they farm and the fish they catch. Most terrifyingly it could harm their children, and their children’s children. This conviction that no nuclear plant can ever be completely safe has put the people of Idinthakarai at the forefront of what Vaid believes is Tamil Nadu’s longest running non- violent, civil rights movement.
Vaid named her book after the way one of the protestors described themselves to her—they are ‘the ants’, the state is ‘the elephant’. It is an uneven contest, and by writing about it, Vaid leaps headfirst into one of the great development debates of modern India.
The author finds on one side the voluble and determined community of villagers fighting against KNPP— they invite her to their homes, to their protests and introduce her to their (surprisingly) well-informed children. On the other side, the state stonewalls her, and the Nuclear Power Corporation of India Ltd refuses her an interview. This imbalance runs through the book, leaving some of the most disturbing allegations by the villagers unanswered by the authorities. As Vaid will tell you, this lack of transparency is in itself one of the biggest problems.
If any of the community’s concerns prove valid, their future is inescapably grim. The People’s Movement Against Nuclear Energy (PMANE) leadership claims that an accident at Kudankulam (also spelt Koodankulam) could affect 10 districts in South India, but as Vaid notes for the rest of the country—barring anti-nuke activists and some concerned citizens—‘Koodankulam would be hard to find on a map, harder to pronounce and hardest to relate to in any meaningful way.’
Vaid sets about changing this by introducing her readers to the unlikely activists occupying the Samara Pandal. The women of Idinthakarai watch over their families while the men go to sea. Some bring their work to the daily protest, rolling beedis while they wait. The only exception to their peaceable approach may have been two days in September 2012, when a group of villagers with PMANE tried to march to the plant and were met with batons and expired tear gas canisters hurled by the local police. A kind of siege followed. Their plight made national headlines and was broadcast all over the country.
Many of the protestors faced charges of sedition, which they could not comprehend, then or now, but that hasn’t diluted their faith. When Vaid asks the former leader of the group SP Uday Kumar why they put women in the forefront, his response is telling—“Because we knew they would not succumb to bribes with money or alcohol.” Vaid adds to that list pure determination; even as the leaders have moved on to bigger things, the women still continue their protest to this day.
As Vaid gets to know the community, she hears the same distressing list of complaints from concerns about faulty equipment provided by a corrupt Russian supplier to the absence of hospitals nearby that could treat the ravages of radiation on a large scale. Vaid even visits a tsunami colony built within the exclusion zone of the plant and examines the ways in which even a functioning plant can disrupt the lives of some 23,000 fishermen who set out to sea along the Tirunelveli district’s 48 km coastline. Over time, the anti-nuclear energy activists expand their focus to lobby for pro-greener sources of power like wind and solar as an alternate answer to the state’s energy crisis. They say at least an accident with the latter won’t leave the land unusable for centuries.
Vaid’s book is not meant for the libraries of activists and academics, but serves as a direct, unvarnished introduction to the ongoing struggle in Tamil Nadu. It raises questions that demand national attention, especially in the light of the Narendra Modi-led Government’s pledge that it would triple nuclear power generation in the country in the next decade. However, the most important issue remains how India handles dissent, and how democratic development can be. For the villagers of Idinthakarai, it begins with the demand that their voices be heard.
END
