By M K George
Rome, Dec 8, 2022: A Malayalam saying goes like this: “Even when a son beats up his mother, there will be two factions – one that supports the son and the other, the Mother.”
That seems to be the case with the ending of the 140-day Vizhinjam Port protests. Some believe that it was a giveaway under pressure and others thnik that the protesters did win most of their demands.
The Indian Express reported on December 8: “The protest council did not gain anything during its 140-day-long agitation,” said V- MAC president Elias John….However, the Latin Archdiocese claimed that through the 138-day-long agitation they had created awareness among the public. In a video, Latin Church Vicar General Father Eugene Pereira also claimed that the decision to end the agitation was not taken by the government alone.”
Only history will tell us the truth. Whether the arguments of the pro-port activists or the agitators will stand the test of time, however, is not merely a matter of academic interest. It is a life and death question particularly for the fisherfolk who live on the coast of Thiruvananthapuram district in Kerala and victims of development projects elsewhere in the world.
The real winner is…
However, look closely and critically, the real winners are Post-Truth and the politician-corporate nexus.
Just to revise what post truth is , the dictionary says, it is ‘relating to or denoting circumstances in which objective facts are less influential in shaping public opinion than appeals to emotion and personal belief.’
Now look at the whole discourse in India or elsewhere in the world, it is all about emotional appeal and personal preferences, not real facts. Let us look at two concrete examples. Can anyone with some sense of truth, believe that Trump in the US can come back as a presidential candidate? But, he is trying to and according to reports, 47 percent of the registered voters in U S support his candidacy.
Or to come back home, Indians seem to blindly believe in the slogan ‘subka saath, subka vikas’ (with everyone for everyone’s prosperity). Elections are being won with these and similar slogans. Facts speak exactly the opposite and they do not seem to bother most people. The corporates have found a free playground in today’s India.
Critical comments like the following get no acknowledgment. “Elite groups benefited from the Modi regime in many different ways. The upper castes regained their hegemony in the government and the rich became richer, partly because of a socially unjust fiscal policy. By contrast, peasants were affected by the post-2014 dispensation which displayed an urban bias.” (Christopher Jafferlot, 2022).
Vizhinjam evidences
In the Vizhinjam case, anyone with a sense of history would have been sceptical about an outright victory for the protestors. No protests against huge developmental projects with dreadful impact for the poor have found success in full. Think of the Narmada Project.
A recent report says, ‘We have been fighting for our land rights. The first concern is that there is a political concern. For 27 years the BJP has ruled the state, the Congress has failed to raise our voices, the protests and the acquisition for the Statue of Unity meant that too many of our tribals have lost their lands. More importantly, the model of natural systems recharging water have failed in other countries. So essentially, people will be losing their lands. The protest is against the dams as well as the canal and pipeline networks because of which people are set to lose approximately 10,000 hectares of land…tribals across the belt are continuing their ongoing struggle to seek compensation and rehabilitation after the construction of Sardar Patel’s ‘Statue of Unity’ in the region.”(Isha Tyagi in the Wire, 2020)
In Vizhinjam, we saw clearly the alignment of the Corporates, the Right wing government at the Centre and the leftist government in Kerala. The police and district authorities allegedly played a very anti-protestors role. False cases were registered over thousands of innocents, including Catholic bishops.
Some young men who were waiting to go abroad for jobs had to escape. In short, the authorities ensured that the protesters could not go forward. Appeals for a judicial enquiry into who really caused the police station violence have been rejected. The facts will remain hidden. Meanwhile, the misery of the fishworkers will continue. Now, they have the added burden of being called ‘antinational.’
So long as debates on development do not become ‘biased in terms of the poor,’ following the Antyodaya (“rise of the last person”) principle of Mahatma, the question whether any project will primarily help the ‘Daridranarayan’ (poorest of the poor) becomes prominent, the struggles will continue. The number of suffering humanity will increase.
Unfortunately, today is the day of Adanis and Ambanis. The poor are invisible.
(Rome-based Father M K George is a former provincial of the Kerala Jesuit province who has worked closely among the fisherpeople of Thiruvananthapuram.)
