One month on, what we can still learn from Thoothukudi protests
Thoothukudi exposed the halo around expert knowledge
Journalists in India become philosophers every week because the philosophers tend to turn away from the immediacy of events. Dirt, violence, pollution, cronyism are not the topics the latter likes to touch, except in an abstract way. Given these acts of omission, a journalist becomes both an anthropologist and a philosopher of the Indian drama.
This became more than obvious as one witnessed the events unfolding in the coastal town of Thoothukudi. The mayhem on May 22, where 13 people died, was deeply disturbing. One immediately realised that information is not enough. What one misses in India is the paucity of storytelling. One needs someone to capture the multiplicity of anecdotes, the little footnotes that goes to make history.
In fact, it is here that one must acknowledge that many young journalists and NGOs have become the finest chroniclers of our age. NGOs are not merely involved in the protests; they have become one of the adept archivists of all that is subaltern in contemporary life. History workshops would almost be poverty-stricken without the work of these people.
Small stories
One must realise that what they captured in Thoothukudi was not what we would call the great events, but the small stories. These narrators also had a wonderful sense of the community, something we rarely talk about today, in the age of organisations.
A community is a more diffused creation involving women and children, gossips and stories of every day. It is more a flow of events than a project. What made Thoothukudi come alive was that it was a protest by a community which got tired of its complaints and stories being ignored.
It was the deafness of the state that eventually led to the protests. It is interesting that the state almost predictably tried to attribute the violence to anti-socials and outsiders, turning even your neighbour into an alien. One thing Thoothukudi taught people is that environmental problems do not stop at a street, or retreat respectfully from a border.
Company town
The Thoothukudi firings brought out that the state has internalised the logic of the company town and treats a majority of its citizens as subjects or suspects.
Sterlite, in fact, exposed the cronyism between the state and a company town.
It is this company town of the mind which was corroding Thoothukudi that the people challenged. The violence that followed needs a separate ethnography, not out of any voyeuristic claims.
The violence has to be recorded because it warns us about the company towns of the future. Even a small list of facts should be enough to act as warning signals.
First, Thoothukudi represents a cynical use of Section 144, not to protect property but to undermine democracy.
Second, the violence was both systematic, as evident from the shooting of snipers, and excessive.
To hunt down a fisherwoman and shoot her point blank, miles away from the cordon laid down by Section 144, is frightening.
Entering houses and beating up women and children could hardly be called a reason of state. To beat up a polio-stricken protester repeatedly on his legs so he remembers that his place is at home is hardly the pedagogy we are expecting from the police.
To capture people and kick them, humiliate them and keep them without food shows that brutality has graduated to barbarity and bestiality. And then to let the police file FIR against non-violent protesters is carrying the hypocrisy, we call law and order, too far.
When the police play the provocateur and the perpetrators openly, the state requires a cynical edge which corrodes democracy. Then to finally contend that all this was done in the name of Sterlite’s contribution to industrial productivity is to belittle sustainability as an act of responsibility.
The violence of Thoothukudi needs to be detailed. One cannot do this by merely visiting a victim or two curiously.
Camera opportunities for politicians and VIPs do not quite add up to the systematic investigations. One has to capture the entire landscape of violence in terms of time and geography, if the idea of justice is to add any meaning to the current illiteracy of law and order.
Unless this is done, violence can pollute and destroy the very nature of communities as trustees of memory.
It is the creativity of the communities that was remarkable about Thoothukudi. One saw evidence of both a spontaneous and a conscious community. People responded to the pain of other people realising that those who suffered could not wallow in silence. The community realised that it had to bridge the old divisions of caste and religion and overcome the memory of the last communal riot.
The role of trader groups and professional associations was impressive. Legal associations worked to release arrested citizens. The NGOs that came to Thoothukudi’s aid created an open-ended sense of community, challenging the attempt of the police to create divisions by creating the myth of intruders and anti-socials. The company town mentality Sterlite tried to create was resisted by these groups.
Challenge to expert knowledge
Thoothukudi exposed the halo around expert knowledge, especially of the environmental science and the role of the Green Tribunals.
This shows, once again, that relying on an official version, which is contemptuous of local knowledge and people’s expertise, is something we will have to rethink.
One needs to create a dialogue between these two systems without getting either positivist or revivalist. Thoothukudi might be the beginning of a democratic imagination beyond electoralism, a way of life attempting to challenge the everyday violence of our time.
(Courtesy of Mail Today)