Antinuclear

In the same week that France decided to lower its appetite for nuclear energy and increase its reliance on renewable sources, the Indian home ministry started hounding Greenpeace for its role in “stalling India’s development”by opposing nuclear power and genetically modified organisms.

A crackdown on other anti-nuclear networks like the Coalition for Nuclear Disarmament and Peace (CNDP) and the People’s Movement Against Nuclear Energy (PMANE) is being widely anticipated.

The crackdown followed a confidential report by India’s premier internal intelligence agency, the Intelligence Bureau, titled ‘Concerning efforts by select foreign funded NGOs to ‘take down’ Indian development projects 

Stirring up a media frenzy

The 21-page report named a number of prominent anti-nuclear activists like Praful Bidwai, Achin Vanaik, Admiral Ramdas, and Surendra Gadekar as well as a number of organisations. Activists have raised questions about how the report made its way to the media before reaching the ministries and the Prime Minister’s office.

S. P. Udayakumar, a leading activist against the Kudankulam nuclear power plant in the South Indian state of Tamil Nadu, has taken the Indian government to court, highlighting the serious threat to his life posed by the media frenzy over the report. He fears for his life, stating in a recent interview:

“I am a threat to nuclear energy. I am a threat to the global nuclear industry. The governments of India, Russia, France and America are all together now.

“We are a threat to all of them. Their business interests are hurt. They are going to dump their outdated technology on the hapless people of India. We point out their faults and so we are being targeted……….

Criminalising dissent

The Intelligence Bureau report reduces the diverse political landscape of India – comprising Gandhians, leftists, tribal movements, funded NGOs and activists who despise them, spontaneous protests and organised groups, academics and independent researchers – to a homogenous block bent on putting roadblocks to the Indian growth dream.

Linking all aspirations for a safer and cleaner future for India to foreign instigation, the report seeks to criminalise dissent.

Raising the ‘foreign hand’ bogey against anti-nuclear activists is not new in India. In the course of the massive people’s resistance to the Kudankulam reactor, former Prime Minister Manmohan Singh blamed US-based NGOs for instigating protests against the Russian-imported reactors.

Soon, this malignment from the top political level translated into brutal police violence against the villagers:

•  Fisherfolk’s houses and boats were ransacked, two agitators were killed, hundreds were arrested (including women and teens),
• passports were confiscated from the youth in the area who used to work in the Arabian gulf countries, and
• outrageous British-era charges of sedition and ‘war against the Indian state’ were levelled against thousands of protesters.http://www.theecologist.org/News/news_analysis/2460076/india_now_nuclear_and_environmental_dissent_is_a_crime.html