A Cry From Koodankulam

S. P. Udayakumar, the leader of the movement against the Koodankulam nuclear power plant, has just sent out a letter asking for help and support. His points are excellent and deserve the attention of all Indians opposed to "development" that is not only iniquitous but enormously dangerous.

I present below several extracts from Udayakumar's letter, beginning with the famous quotation from theologian Martin Niemoller about the spread of terror in Nazi Germany:

"First they came for the communists, and I didn't speak out because I wasn't a communist.
Then they came for the trade unionists, and I didn't speak out because I wasn't a trade unionist.
Then they came for the Jews, and I didn't speak out because I wasn't a Jew.
Then they came for me and there was no one left to speak out for me."

A few years ago I would have considered it demagogic to quote Niemoller about events in India, but my own experience with censorship and surveillance, and the ugly trends evident all over the country have convinced me that a police State is hardening around us as the super-rich beneficiaries of corporate globalization seek to promote their interests at the expense of the country as a whole. Unless all of us speak out now, the future of democracy in India could be very dim. Other excerpts from the letter follow:

"Pushparayan, the other 12 friends and I have become weaker and tired; but we are still able to sit up and talk to people. Today is the seventh day of the indefinite hunger strike. Nobody from the State Government or the Central Government has bothered to come and see us or talk to us. A medical team came to check our health day before yesterday (March 23) but no public health officials came and offered any help even though some 10,000 people have been congregating here at Idinthakarai every day since March 19th.

"Our friends from Idinthakarai have been cooking some simple meals for all these people and most of the people are sleeping here as there is the prohibitory order of 144 still in effect. They are scared of going out of this foot-ball stadium sized space in front of the St. Lourdes church. The police are waiting for me and Pushparayan to collapse so that we would go to an hospital for treatment and they could arrest us there. How cruel and anti-people our governments could become!"

"In the meantime, the Tamil Nadu government has convened a meeting of some 13 Panchayat leaders to plan to distribute the 500-crore package the government has announced for the victims of nuclear development. ... The police go to some of the coastal villages and order them to go fishing in order to create a pictue of normalcy in the area. They also ask them not to carry any food by boat to Idinthakarai and threaten them with cases if they did. People defy this kind of intimidatory exercises."

India is a highly- and densely-populated country and even a small mishap at a nuclear facility will create such a havoc and meyham for millions of people and jeopardize the survival and well-being of millions and millions of our brothers and sisters. We are not against the progress of our country and state but we feel that such a progress should be longstanding and sustainable for our future generations also. We have no moral authority to poison the resources of our future generations in order to produce electricity for us for 40 years. ..."

The letter goes on to detail some of the oppressive police initiatives to intimidate the poor folk supporting the anti-nuclear movement. Udayakumar's appeal is likely to lose a good deal of support because he presents the face-off in terms of upper caste versus lower caste and minorities. Nevertheless, the opposition to unsustainable development merits broad all-India support.

Words, Words, Words

Last week I surfaced from a long-term writing project to go to a book reading: T.P. Sreenivasan, India's former Ambassador in Vienna, reading from his book "Words, Words, Words, Adventures in Diplomacy." Tunku Vardarajan, formerly of the Wall Street Journal, moderated the event at the Indian Consulate on East 64th street.

Getting there after the preliminary munch-time was over, I found T.P. (who I knew when he held the key post of Deputy Permanent Representative at the United Nations in the early 1990s), already at the lectern. He was saying nice things about Vardarajan, who had obviously just finished introducing him. The large and stately public room of the Consulate (which is in a palatial mansion steps from Fifth Avenue), was filled almost to capacity. With a plate of spicy chicken wings in hand I tip-toed into a seat at the far end of the room and spent the next hour or so listening to a very personal account of recent history.

The first chapter in the book, "My Story," tells of T.P.'s progress from a small village in Kerala, where his father was a school teacher, to the elite Indian Foreign Service, a process that included passing a competitive examination and immediately thereafter, fending off scores of marriage proposals. The other chapters recount, with a nice surfeit of interesting anecdotes, the highlights of a diplomatic career that took him, after the UN stint, to Washington at a time when the growing post-Cold War intimacy between India and the United States hit the speed-bump of the May 1998 nuclear tests, and then to Vienna, where he represented India in the Governing Board of the International Atomic Energy Agency.

Words, Words, Words is more than a memoir. It is an important book about Indian foreign policy, dealing with issues of central importance, served up lightly by a master raconteur. But perhaps the treatment (and the title) do a disservice to the substantive content of the book. T.P. is one of India's foremost experts on the Indo-US nuclear deal and he could have steered perceptions of the matter in a way that none of the various policy axe-grinders can. But then he might have moved on from his status of dispassionate retired diplomat by accepting the responsibility of chairing* an eminent panel on the future of the International Atomic Energy Agency. That panel, he told the audience at the Consulate, had agreed at its last meeting that nuclear energy would and should have a renaissance.

When it came time for audience participation, I asked T.P. to take a step back from that statement and consider the larger issue of whether India should follow the Western model of development. To do anything else, he said, would be too expensive.

This is a matter that cannot be so easily dismissed. Indians (and all of Africa, Asia and Latin America), must seriously consider if nuclear energy should have any role in their future, for it only makes sense in an economic model based on high and wasteful consumption of all resources; if we take that route, there is no way to avoid general environmental disaster.

The issue of nuclear energy is, of course, also inextricably tied in with that of nuclear weapons. If we reject nuclear energy, we are rejecting nuclear weapons; perhaps not right away, but eventually. The argument of nuclear hawks is that this would be suicidal; we must hang on to our nuclear weapons to avoid intimidation. Thus, we must have nuclear energy, even if it generates thousands of tons of deadly radioactive material we have no safe way of handling. The argument is impregnable in its circular rationale.

The trick of dealing with that argument is to sidestep it altogether. Nuclear weapons exemplify the peak of the raw violence that has given coherence to the Western model of development from its very beginning. Without violence that model cannot survive. It is no accident that it developed during the most brutal and bloody period of human history, that the rest of the world sank into great poverty at the same time, or that its impact on the natural environment has been so deadly that other species are now being driven to extinction at a rate not seen since the dinosaurs disappeared. The model is fundamentally untenable.

Of course, it will be expensive to escape this state of affairs. It will also be highly risky. The greed and fear that drive violence are without vision. But people are not. They can be stirred to look beyond personal advantage, as indeed, can nations and international agencies. No matter what the expense or risk we have to try. And in doing so it is good to remember that always, at the beginning, is the Word.
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* See Ambassador Sreenivasan's comment for correction