Tactics of coercion

Maharashtra Chief Minister Prithviraj Chavan's visit to Jaitapur failed to quell public misgivings about the nuclear power project.

WHAT was the purpose of Maharashtra Chief Minister Prithviraj Chavan's first-ever visit to the controversial Jaitapur nuclear project site on the Konkan coast on February 26? If it was to acquaint himself with the many criticisms, apprehensions and questions the area's residents have about the safety of the project with six 1,650 MW reactors, then Chavan did not succeed. He did not listen with patience and humility to its opponents to understand why they have fought the project for four years. Rather, he talked down to them, told them what was best for them, and admonished them not to be misled by outsiders and foreign powers that do not want to see India progress.

If Chavan's purpose was to reassure the public that his government would not ram the project down people's throats and would put it on hold until a consensus emerged in its favour, then he did not achieve that either. All he said was that he would set people's apprehensions at rest because these are based in the first place on false propaganda about nuclear power and the project's location-specific problems. He showed no sensitivity to the fact that only one person of the nearly 8,000 people who attended the meeting supported the project an absentee landlord and long-time Mumbai resident.

Chavan came across as a prejudiced man who did not want facts to come in the way of decision-making, said Praveen Gavankar of Madban, the largest village in the area, in a telephonic conversation with this writer. He treated us with total contempt, as ignoramuses. His attitude was profoundly intolerant. Why, he even insulted our intelligence by accusing us of buying into propaganda by outsiders' as if we cannot make independent judgments on issues of life-and-death importance.

Vaishali Patil of the Konkan Vinashkari Prakalp Virodhi Samiti concurred and underscored the strong-arm tactics used by Chavan's entourage, especially former Chief Minister Narayan Rane (who is now Minister for Industry, Port, Employment and Self-employment): The first thing Rane did on noticing my presence was to tell the police to evict me. They failed because all the women formed a protective ring around me. But I wasn't allowed to speak. When Dr Milind Desai made a brilliant intervention, Rane snatched the mike from him. This is no way to hold an interaction with people who are so determined to oppose the project that less than 5 per cent have accepted compensation offered for their land. These are mostly absentee landowners.

No takers for compensation

The government has raised the compensation from Rs.1.25-1.60 lakh an acre to Rs.4 lakh and, most recently, to Rs.10 lakh, with one guaranteed job per family. There are still no takers.

The people's opposition to the project is based on more fundamental grounds than compensation. Among other things, they are concerned about the inherent hazards of nuclear power; the safety problems associated with the French-origin company Areva's European Pressurised Reactor (EPR); the effects of reactor construction and operation, and the high temperature of the water to be discharged into the sea, on the ecosystem, agriculture and fisheries; routine emissions and effluents; long-acting hazardous wastes; and the potential of all commercial reactors for a catastrophic accident with huge radioactivity releases like Chernobyl.

Chavan dismissed all these as imaginary: Not even 1 per cent of the objections are valid. But he cited no evidence or arguments in support. Even more ludicrous was his charge that the protesters were inspired by the propaganda of foreign powers. Chavan went to the extent of claiming that a European man had gone around the area passing off videos of the Latur earthquake as visuals shot in Jaitapur. The people say no such thing ever happened.

It is a bit rich for Chavan to invoke a foreign hand. The Jaitapur project became possible only because a foreign power, the United States, made a unique exception for India in the global atomic commerce regime through the India-U.S. nuclear deal. It also piloted amendments through the International Atomic Energy Agency and the Nuclear Suppliers Group, which made reactor imports possible. France quickly seized the opportunity through the Jaitapur reactor deal.

The foreign hand is also evident in the 20 reactors that the Department of Atomic Energy (DAE) operates. They are all based on foreign designs American in the case of Tarapur and Canadian in the case of other plants. Even the indigenous plutonium used in India's first nuclear explosion of 1974 came from a reactor designed and built by the Canadians, for which the U.S. supplied heavy water. All that the DAE did was to reprocess its spent fuel using elementary chemistry.

Chavan might have appeared less unreasonable had he acknowledged that the project did pose problems: the EPR design has run into serious trouble in Finland, where the first reactor of this type is 42 months behind schedule and 90 per cent over budget. Finnish, British, French and American nuclear regulators have raised 3,000 safety issues about its design, resolving which will further raise its already sky-high costs (A nuclear Enron?, Frontline, February 11).

Conflict of interest

Chavan's is a case of conflict of interest. As the Chief Minister, he must protect the life and limb of the people of Jaitapur. But he continues to be a member of the Atomic Energy Commission, the DAE's policymaking principal. As such, he is committed to Jaitapur, no matter what its safety problems and costs. He recently certified Areva's EPR design as good.

But neither Chavan nor the DAE has the technological capacity to evaluate it. The DAE has evolved no detailed independent nuclear reactor safety standards.

By contrast, Western regulatory agencies have thousands of standards and specifications on matters as minute as the strength of welds and rivets, the quality of steel, instrumentation and control, reactor vessels, and emergency cooling systems.

Chavan might have cut a less sorry figure in Jaitapur had he not allowed Rane, with his bullying and targeting of individual activists, to set the stage for February 26. Rane, whose political base in the Konkan has greatly eroded, had made repeated visits to the area, which the local people boycotted in protest against his remarks against the project's opponents and his orders to the local police to file trumped-up charges against activists. Vaishali Patil has four bogus cases against her, and Praveen Gavankar has been charged with attempt to murder. In Jaitapur, journalists overheard Rane advising Chavan to have more cases filed against activists to immobilise them.

The instant result was the rounding up of a dozen activists on February 28 on charges of violent conduct during a vigorous protest on December 4 against French President Nicolas Sarkozy's visit to India, during which the final EPR agreement was signed.

The Maharashtra government has done its utmost to split the anti-Jaitapur project movement through inducements or outright coercion. Its efforts have borne no fruit so far. It will not be a surprise if it tries to divide the agitators along religious-communal lines. About 30 per cent of the area's population is Muslim, mainly fishermen.

The government's only attempt at a dialogue before February 26 was a public interaction in Mumbai, on January 18, held without adequate notice to the local activists while accusing them of harbouring misconceptions about nuclear power, thus demonising all critics. The people boycotted the event. The government tried to browbeat all those who raised critical questions about the EPR, including Frontline's Paris-based correspondent Vaiju Naravane.

This raises vitally important issues. Is it ethical to impose a hazardous project on a uniquely precious ecosystem without even cursorily examining its likely impact? Is it wise to ignore the warnings of reputed institutions such as the Bombay Natural History Society and the Western Ghats Ecology Expert Panel, headed by India's best-known ecologist Madhav Gadgil? Should the government dismiss the local people's concerns about livelihood destruction and dispossession of land on which they have lived for generations?

We pay lip service to panchayati raj as the third tier of governance. But do we not fail the litmus test on local democracy when we impose a potentially destructive project upon an unwilling population through the colonial Land Acquisition Act, widely recognised to be in dire need of radical reform? Have we learnt no lessons from the disastrous experience of uprooting over 35 million people since Independence for development projects without rehabilitating most of them?

Elementary norms of democracy require that those liable to be affected by a project are consulted and their informed and free consent is obtained. The principle of public participation in decision-making would become largely meaningless if it were only exercised indirectly through the majority decisions of legislatures. What appear to be minority and dissenting opinions from the national perspective but are held by vast numbers of people locally the sole operational level must also be respected if democracy is not to degenerate into crude majoritarianism.

The principle of minority rights must be extended to local communities when projects are drafted and implemented. The government must declare a moratorium on the Jaitapur reactors unless the local people want the project. That is a categorical democratic imperative.