[Reader-list] Koodankulam Alert 3/22/2012 LETTER FROM DR SP UDAY KUMAR

[asit das]

  LETTER FROM DR SP UDAY KUMAR



Idinthakarai Update
March 22, 2012



The situation here is still grim. There are some 10,000 people from coastal
and interior villages. Most of them are women including pregnant women and
nursing women. I myself saw many nursing women feeding their babied
sweetened water as there was no milk coming to the village. More people are
coming by boats and on foot as the access roads are all blocked by police.
There is no bus service to this place. There is no sanitary complex and
women bear the brunt of it. No public health official has ever come to help
the people.

Some 15 of us have been on indefinite hunger strike and no medical doctor
has ever come here to check our health. The Dinamalam newspaper has
reported today that we have all been eating heartily and pretending to be
fasting. If this anti-Tamil newspaper can prove that there is a trace of
food in my or Pushparayan’s stomach, we are ready to leave this protest.
Otherwise, will they stop publishing this stupid paper? We are fighting for
a cause not prostituting our soul like the Dinamalam does.

On March 21, my mother had received a phone call from one advocate by the
name T. Udayakumar and he claimed he was calling from the DGP office in
Chennai. He asked my mother to ask me to leave the protest so that all the
cases against me would be dropped and I would get whatever I ask for. My
mother told him that I was not a man of that nature and ended the
conversation. That evening the Superintendent of Police of Tirunelveli
District called me on my mobile and asked me to surrender alone so that
people would not be affected. I told him that I was all ready for that but
the people here at Idinthakarai also wanted to get arrested along with me
and they would not let me go alone. I proposed to the SP to send enough
number of buses and two police officers so that there would not be any
stampede or tussle and we all would board the buses peacefully and go
wherever they wanted us to go. He would not accept that proposition and
said in anger: “This is the last time I talk to you.” There ended our
conversation.

That night the police officer who was on security duty at our SACCER
Matriculation School outside Nagercoil town had received a phone call from
the Kanyakumari District SP office to go away from the school. Then a group
of vandals, obviously with the blessings of the police, had entered the
school and destroyed it very badly. The compound wall was completely
demolished and the gate damaged. They ransacked the school bus after
tearing down the car shed’s iron shutters. They had entered the KG
classrooms and destroyed all the small little chairs which my children were
using to sit on. They had broken all the tables and chairs and I do not
understand why they punished my little children like this. The vandals had
entered our school library and destroyed all the 12 glass bookshelves and
tables and threw away the books. My 250 children are all avid readers and
have been using our library extensively. This reminds me of the burning of
the Public Library at Jaffna a few years ago.

The governments and the police treat and speak of me as if I were Osama bin
Laden and our people some mindless terrorists. We resent this inhuman and
brutal treatment . Electricity, water, milk and other essentials have been
cut for two days; people cannot go out of and come into Idinthakarai as
there is brutal police control. We are surrounded by police and I truly
feel like I am at Mullivaickal. We are a group of simple people who have
been fighting nonviolently and democratically against an untested foreign
reactor with all kinds of problems and hiccups. We have not done any harm
to anybody or anybody’s property in our eight-month long struggle. The
whole country is proud of our people.

The stalemate continues. There are protests happening all over the country
and the state of Tamil Nadu. Whoever is farsighted enough to worry about
the future of India’s “ordinary citizens,” our natural resources, the
well-being of our progeny, the possibility of losing our freedom to the New
Nuclear East India Companies and most importantly, the democratic fabric of
our country support us. We thank them and you for standing with us. We are
ready for any brutal police action but will not give up our nonviolent
noncooperation campaign.