After meeting PMANE coordinator S P Udayakumar in an undisclosed location, Team Anna member Arvind Kejriwal said the anti-KKNPP protest should not be stopped. The issue should be discussed at the national level, he said.
PMANE (People’s Movement Against Nuclear Energy) has been spearheading the anti-KKNPP protest for a year now at Idinthakarai. Kejriwal, who reached Idinthakarai on Tuesday night, met the protestors and stayed with them.
Sources said that on Wednesday, he went in a boat and met Udayakumar in a secret location and returned to Idithakarai. Later, he went to the Tsunami Colony there and interacted with a couple of women, whose houses were allegedly ransacked. The women told him that police had taken away some persons, including a teenage boy.
To ascertain the condition of those who were picked up by police, Kejriwal went to the Koodankulam police station, but no senior officer was present there. Emerging from the station, Kejriwal told reporters that he had a two-hour long meeting with Udayakumar , during which, he requested him not to surrender. ”We are completely with the protestors. All of us want development and energy, but this is not the right way,” he said.
Roy supports villagers
Booker prize winning author and social activist, Arundhati Roy, has expressed solidarity with the villagers of Idinthakarai, who are resisting the fuel loading at the Koodankulam Nuclear reactor. In a statement, Roy said: “I happened to be in Japan in March 2011 when the earthquake damaged the Fukushima reactor. After the disaster almost every country that uses nuclear energy declared that it would change its policy. Every country except India.”
Stating that “what is being done in Koodankulam in the name of development is a crime,” Roy said: “Our government has shown itself incapable of even being able to dispose day to day garbage, leave alone industrial effluent or urban sewage. How does it dare to say that it knows how to deal with nuclear waste? And that nuclear reactors in India are safe? We know how the government has colluded with Union Carbide (now Dow Chemicals) to ensure that the victims of the Bhopal Gas leak will never get justice. But no amount of compensation can ever set right a nuclear disaster.”
Cop action condemned
Activist Aruna Roy and anti-nuclear campaigners condemned the police crackdown on protestors in Koodankulam and the charging of 7,000 villagers under sedition, saying the action threatened fundamental democracy of the country. Activists of Coalition for Nuclear Disarmament and Peace (CNDP) said the villagers were exercising their right to raise questions that pertained to their well-being.