No Jaya, no peace: Sterlite exposes everything that is wrong with Tamil Nadu right now

J Jayalalithaa did not win any awards for probity in public life. But she was widely perceived to be an able administrator, better than her bête noire M Karunanidhi. For Tamil Nadu’s voters, she was pretty much the party and they trusted in her ability to govern. Under her, the All India Anna Dravida Munnetra Kazhagam (AIADMK) retained power in the 2016 assembly polls, a first for an incumbent in the state in three decades.

But since her passing in December of that year, the party has been riven and its ineffective governance has been shown up repeatedly, most gravely in the deaths in police firing in the port city of Thoothukudi in southern Tamil Nadu earlier this week.



On May 22, the 100th day of protests against Sterlite Copper’s smelting plant, a rally turned violent and 13 people were killed in police firing and many more were injured. While the government has ordered an inquiry into the incident and transferred the district collector and police chief, comments by Chief Minister Edappadi K Palaniswami have not helped much. On Thursday, he tweeted, “When someone hits you, you naturally tend to defend yourselves. so on such situations, no one acts in a pre-planned manner (sic).” It was retweeted by his deputy O Panneerselvam.



Palaniswami also tweeted that “Antisocial elements intruded into the agitation” and that some political parties and leaders “misguided agitators against Sterlite”. Maalan V Narayanan, a senior journalist, says since the agitation did not get much coverage in the media in the past three months, the government did not bother. “What happened could have been averted. The government did not handle it wisely.”

TKS Elangovan, a spokesperson for the DMK, says the government should have held discussions with those opposing the project. “They do not care about the agitators.” But Palaniswami has said the district administration met them 14 times. One of his partymen has compared the incident to the 1919 Jallianwallah Bagh massacre. D Jayakumar, a minister in the Tamil Nadu government and an AIADMK spokesperson, did not respond to requests from ET Magazine for comment.

Copper Corrodes
There has been opposition to the project since it came up in the mid-1990s. The Centre for Science and Environment has pointed out that the project came to Tamil Nadu after being rejected by Gujarat, Maharashtra and Goa “because of its highly polluting nature”. The 4,00,000-tonne-per-annum copper smelter has faced closures in the past due to an alleged gas leak and toxic waste discharge. The Supreme Court in 2013 penalised the company Rs. 100 crore for polluting the environment.

The agitation gathered momentum earlier this year in response to the company’s plans to double its capacity at the plant. The Tamil Nadu Pollution Control Board in April rejected the company’s application to renew the “consent to operate” unit-I of the plant and a day after the police firing, the Madras High Court ordered that construction of unit-II be stopped. On May 24, power supply to the factory was stopped.

Sterlite is a unit of Vedanta Ltd, which is an associate company of London Stock Exchange-listed Vedanta Resources. Anil Agarwal, chairman of Vedanta Resources, on Thursday said the company strictly follows court and government orders.

A company spokesperson says the protest was unwarranted when the plant was already shut for want of consent to operate from the Pollution Control Board. “Like the right to life for a citizen, we believe a company also has a right to exist if it is abiding by the laws of the land and complying to all environment norms.”

The company denies allegations of the plant’s environmental and health effects. “A company should be given an equal opportunity to be heard and not simply be made victim of false propaganda,” says the spokesperson, adding that the company has no plans to shut the plant down and leave Thoothukudi.

Henri Tiphagne, executive director of People’s Watch, a non-governmental organisation (NGO), says the district administration invited a few representatives of the movement and asked them not to march toward the collectorate on May 22. “But that was not conveyed to the people. The only destination known to them was the collectorate.” He adds that the collector should have invited all groups that were part of the movement to the meeting.


The mismanagement of the issue by the Tamil Nadu government has made people wonder how Jayalalithaa would have responded. “She commanded not just the respect of the people but also their confidence,” says Narayanan. He points to her handling of the Kudankulam issue. Protests erupted in 2011 over an underconstruction nuclear power plant in Kudankulam, after the Fukushima nuclear disaster in Japan earlier that year. “She had a two-pronged approach: she tried to educate the locals about the project and at the same time, she was filing cases against the people in the movement.” The Supreme Court gave the go-ahead to the Kudankulam plant in May 2013, after it which it started operations.

SP Udayakumar, a key figure in the Kudankulam agitation, says Jayalalithaa was responsive to their demands. “She called us (for a meeting) and then she took pains to send us to meet the PM.” He adds that while she was initially sympathetic to the protestors’ concerns since she had reservations about the project herself, she later changed her stance under pressure from the Union government. “In Thoothukudi, no one from the state or Central government met the activists,” says Udayakumar.

The Congress led United Progressive Alliance government attacked the Kudankulam protesters by saying they were being misled by foreign-funded NGOs, which Udayakumar has denied. Among the NGOs whose clearance to accept foreign contributions was revoked were Tuticorin Diocese Association and the Tuticorin Multipurpose Social Service Society. The Tamil Nadu government, too, has blamed NGOs for influencing the people in Thoothukudi.



“The government are convinced that people are idiots and can’t think for themselves. But people of Thoothukudi can articulate how their health is affected and their drinking water is polluted,” says Udayakumar. There have been unverified allegations that there has been a rise in people contracting different kinds of cancer because of the plant.

“Even if these protests are started by NGOs, it’s the people who are protesting in the streets. It is for the government to allay these fears,” says Elangovan.

Political Hand
While it is not clear which NGOs were involved in the agitation, some political parties like Vaiko’s Marumalarchi Dravida Munnetra Kazhagam (MDMK) has been long associated with the issue. Among the important local leaders is Fathima Babu, an academic-activist who has fought elections in the past as an MDMK candidate. She did not respond to ET Magazine's calls and messages.

The MDMK has also been leading an agitation against a Rs. 1,500 crore underground neutrino observatory in Theni district near the border with Kerala, citing ecological concerns. Neutrinos are subatomic particles similar to electrons but hard to detect. Among the other recent protests was one in a village called Neduvasal in Pudukottai district against a hydrocarbon exploration and extraction project. That, too, saw participation by opposition leaders like MK Stalin of the DMK.

Tamil nationalist outfits like Naam Tamilar Katchi and Leftist organisations like Makkal Adhikaram have also been part of the Thoothukudi agitation. While the projallikattu protests in Chennai in January 2017 did not give much space to mainstream parties, the opposition is trying to gain political capital in the Thoothukudi issue. Even newcomers like actors Kamal Haasan and Rajinikanth have condemned the police action.

S Anandhi, professor at the Madras Institute of Development Studies, says in the 1990s and 2000s, industry flourished in Tamil Nadu as the government convinced people it was in their interest. "There were several ways the state would carry out its propaganda to seek consensus from the people. There was no opposition to MNCs in Tamil Nadu." She adds that corporate funding was essential to both the DMK's and AIADMK's populist strategy of welfare schemes and handing out freebies like televisions and laptops. "This government has not been able to efficiently manoeuvre corporate and people's interests."


The political field in Tamil Nadu is wide open in the aftermath of Jayalalithaa's death and Karunanidhi being indisposed due to old age. His son Stalin does not have his charisma and appeal among the masses and the AIADMK has lost its identity without Jayalalithaa and could lose more lawmakers and members to TTK Dhinakaran, who won the fiercely contested byelection to Jayalalithaa's assembly constituency last year and has floated a new party.

The Bharatiya Janata Party, a minor player in Tamil Nadu, has been accused of ruling by proxy owing to its influence over the ruling AIADMK. Panneerselvam said he agreed to merge his faction of the AIADMK with the ruling faction on Prime Minister Narendra Modi's advice. The deputy CM recently got flak for congratulating BJP chief Amit Shah on the "BJP's significant victory" in Karnataka, "bellwethering (sic) a grand entry to south India" and calling it a "cheerful occasion".

Elangovan believes the Thoothukudi episode will likely deter potential investors from Tamil Nadu. Companies lay the blame on a combination of activists with vested interests and political parties looking for a cause to endear themselves to voters. But it is hard for opportunistic leaders to have their way against a project unless there is an undercurrent of sentiment against it among locals. Infractions by companies in land acquisition or pollution control certainly do not help. A missing piece of the puzzle in Tamil Nadu is a government willing to listen to both sides and act in the larger interest of the state.