A counterintuitive juxtaposition of news stories. First, in ostensibly democratic India, the country's newest and largest nuclear power plant has just gone on line—despite years of angry protests by local peasants in Tamil Nadu state. The first unit at the Russian-built Kudankulam [5] Nuclear Power Project (KNPP) and India's 21st reactor went critical July 14, the Nuclear Power Corporation of India Ltd (NPCIL [6]) announced. Earlier this year India's Supreme Court ruled against a challenge to the opening of the plant, saying the project was for the "people's welfare." Both the Communist Party of India-Marxist-Leninist (CPI-ML [7]) and the Tamil nationalist Marumalarchi Dravida Munnetra Kazhagam (MDMK [8]) have pledged a new round of protests to demand it be immediately shut down.
The CPI-ML also pledges stepped-up protests to halt the nuclear projects at Jaitapur [9] in Maharashtra and Chutka in Madhya Pradesh. But politicians are already blaming protesters for standing in the way of progress. Minister of State V Narayanaswamy says delays due to protests at the plant have resulted in a loss of over Rs 2000 crore ($350 million) for India. "The struggle committee is responsible for this as they had misled people with wrong information," he said. (PTI [10], July 19; AFP-JIJI [11], July 15; Zee News [12], July 14; BRICS Post [13], July 12; Zee News [14], July 2)
Simultaneously in totalitarian [15] China, the government has cancelled a nuclear project following a single rare protest by local residents, who carried banners saying, "We want children, not atoms." The local government in Heshan, Guangdong, confirmed its decision July 18 to cancel the planned project in Longwan Industrial Park, which was to be built by the China National Nuclear Corporation (CNNC [16]). Weeks earlier, some 1,000 people took what they called an "innocent stroll" at the project site, carrying signs against the plant and facing off with helmeted police. (Times of India [17], July 18)
There is a paradoxical unity in this seeming contradiction. The leaders of totalitarian China look at the unrest in India and see a threat to their closed system to be headed off—while in "democratic" India, the peasantry are sufficiently disenfranchised that the far more open system can afford the chaos of their protests. Ironically, in both cases there is an element of repressive tolerance [18] at work.
Please support our fund drive [19].
