Koodankulam: It’s about what citizenship actually means

[nityanand jayaraman]

Shiv Visvanathan on the Koodankulam protests

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<http://www.dianuke.org/?author=1> Koodankulam: It’s about what
citizenship actually
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*Shiv Vishwanathan | Ahmedabad
Mirror<http://www.ahmedabadmirror.com/article/62/20120522201205220237132683d211666/Big-fight-over-atomic-energy.html>
*
Big fight over atomic energy

As the protest at Kudankulan becomes critical, the activists realise that
the state has failed to provide safety assessments to public

<http://www.dianuke.org/wp-content/uploads/2012/05/koodankulam-children.jpg>

As the protest at Kudankulan becomes critical, the activists realise that
the state has failed to provide safety assessments to public. (Picture
courtesy: Ahmedabad Mirror)

Politics is not just an act of production, it is a process of consumption
and one consumes political protest as a spectator. Spectatorship cannot be
an act of indifference. Even a TV spectator has to become a witness. He has
to remember and as a living mnemonic, he has to act. When bored with one
form of suffering, one story of pain, TV viewing can become a form of
channel surfing between varieties of pain. However, it can also create a
new sense of citizenship, of awareness, of conscience which does not allow
a state to be silent or jingoistic. Nothing makes this clearer than the
emerging silence over Kudankulam.

There is often a life cycle to a TV story. The sense of visuality, the
public nature of the event, the drama of controversy heats up an event as a
spectacle. Then as a regime strikes back marginalising protest, throttling
dissent, the event fades becoming a distant backdrop. The battle of
Kudankulam, the struggle over the nuclear reactor in Chennai is precisely
at this stage.

Kudankulam is a great drama not just because of the location of a reactor
but because of manner of protest and its suppression.

Think of the following. It is a battle over what citizenship actually means
in India. Here are nine fishing communities telling the world that
citizenship is meaningless without decisions about livelihood. If
citizenship is a right to life and livelihood, then these villagers are
arguing that they must be allowed to debate nuclear energy. They are
arguing that nuclear energy is not the entitlement of a state and its
umbilical experts. It is in this context that 23,000 villagers surrendered
their voting identity cards. They were suggesting that the vote has to be
life giving.

There is a lesson in civics that the protesters bring out beautifully. They
argue that theirs is a kind of Swadesi Movement, a Swadesism that argues
that there is a connection between livelihoods, citizenship, natural
resources and concern with the future. They are arguing that the poor are
more concerned about the future than the scientist as official expert. As
the protest becomes critical, the activists realise that the state had not
followed the rituals of science and democracy. It has failed to provide
safety assessments to a public.

The entire nature of protest has been moving. TV has captured it diligently
but occasional idealism of TV gets blunted by the cynicism of the state and
the politician. The nuclear state becomes an East India Company of Energy
seeking to divide and rule. The first “Nawab” it subverted to its side was
the Tamil Nadu Chief Minister Jayalalitha. After promising enquiry during
elections, Jayalalitha did an about face with alacrity. Her police are now
cordoning off the protesters, delegitimising them as foreign instigated
NGOs. Both the Indian state and Jayalalitha are convinced that Indians
cannot think for themselves. There is a cynicism here that is worrying.

All the people have is their body, their courage and their story.
Storytelling thus becomes important. Media has to keep telling their
stories because Kudankulam is a fragment of real time India, a social fable
that we must keep alive. There is an ethics of memory which accompanies an
ethics of protest. As TV spectators, as newspaper readers we must demand
this story be told. It is not just a story about technical issues to be
swept aside under the security carpet. It is a debate about whether atomic
energy is open to democracy, to public debate, to open accounting, to
scientific dissent.

A nation state that decides against its own people is a frightening
possibility. One wishes that Aamir Khan would pick it as an issue. But we
don’t have to wait for Aamir; as citizens, as parents, as Indians, as
people concerned about India, the protest at Kudankulam must be sustained.
I would put it into every NCERT book so our children as future legislators
can debate it. Kudankulam is the Dandi march against nuclear energy. We
cannot hypothecate our future to the illiteracy and indifference of the
ATOM STAAT.







*DiaNuke.org <http://www.dianuke.org/?author=1>* | May 22, 2012 at 8:51 am
| Tags: Antinuclear Protest<http://www.dianuke.org/?tag=antinuclear-protest>,
Koodankulam <http://www.dianuke.org/?tag=koodankulam>, nuclear
energy<http://www.dianuke.org/?tag=nuclear-energy>| Categories:
Movements
and Social Change <http://www.dianuke.org/?cat=78046230> | URL:
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