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Thread — what does freedom mean in the “world’s largest democracy” if its journalists are picked up for social media tweets and activists just disappear ?
: @nehadixit123 writes “Four journalists arrested over three days: Prashant Kanojia, Ishita Singh, Anuj Shukla, and Rupesh Kumar. What does it say about the world's largest democracy? #ReleasePrashantNow #PressFreedomInIndia”
But this is also a good time to ask “#WhereisMugilan” . @Red_Pastures asks some important questions about the silence and apathy that has gone hand in hand. You can read the entire essay here thepolisproject.com/where-is-mugil…
RS Mugilan, an environmental activist from the southern Indian state of Tamil Nadu, went missing on 15 February 2018 after he organised a press conference regarding the killing of 15 protestors at a demonstration in Thoothukudi against the UK-based mining corporation Vedanta.
The Anti-Sterlite Movement is a people’s movement that started in 1995 which opposed Vedanta’s copper smelter in the port town of Thoothukudi.
In February 2018, fresh protests broke out against the smelting plant and its proposed expansion. A hundred days of peaceful protests by locals ended brutally with the police opening fire at an unarmed crowd of about 20,000 protestors.
Fifteen people lost their lives and several dozens were severely wounded. Eyewitness accounts, press reports, and inquiries by human rights organizations all suggest that the police officials made little or no effort to avoid loss of life.
Instead, they used the violence strategically to clamp down on protestors, activists, and lawyers.
More than a year after the protests, the Central Bureau of Investigation (CBI), India’s premier investigating agency, has not charged any of the officers for their role in the massacre despite overwhelming evidence of complicity:
the shootings were recorded and broadcast by various news channels.
Dr. S.P. Udayakumar who was at the forefront of the Kudankulam movement and worked alongside Mugilan said that the government targets environmental campaigners because they mobilize the marginalized in Indian society—women, indigenous people, and Dalits.
He says, “There is widespread environmental awareness among the public because they directly experience the effects. They embrace our activism, organise and lead, which the government finds threatening.”
He added, “We are accused of acting against the interests of India for opposing so-called ‘development projects’. But these projects only serve the interests of the ‘corporate India’—Adani, Ambani, and Agarwal (prominent Indian industrialists).” As reported by @Red_Pastures
India has been witnessing a growing number of environmental movements over the past two decades and with it, an increase in the use of indiscriminate state and vigilante violence, threats, clamp down on dissent employed by the state, crony capitalists and their goons.
The countries capitalist and political elites have successfully seized the institutions to execute legally sanctioned plunder and exploitation of resources.
The BJP government’s proposed changes to the Indian Forests Act, that gives more powers to the police officials and opens the protected forest regions for commercial exploitation, should be seen as a part of the ongoing onslaught against the indigenous people, and their lands.
Arrest and intimidation of journalists covering these stories targeted killing of activists, and the imposition of draconian sedition laws against protestors have criminalized dissent and created a climate of fear.
For instance, twenty-two year old, student activist Valarmathi was charged under a preventive detention law for distributing pamphlets against potentially ecologically harmful methane and hydrocarbon extraction projects in 2017.
She spent several months in prison before a court quashed her detention. Since her release, she has been repeatedly targeted by the police.
Valarmathi was arrested again in 2018 when she arrived at Achankuttapatti village where its people were protesting the Salem 8-way project and was charged with sedition for protesting.
Just in the last year, authorities in Tamilnadu investigated three international journalists in two separate incidents. - @Red_Pastures
Union minister, Pon Radhakrishnan, accused the two French journalists who were in Kanyakumari, a district plagued by illegal sand mining, of being ‘spies who entered the country via boats’.
The local journalists who assisted the journalists were illegally detained and charged. A month later an independent American journalist who was in Thoothukudi to report on the killings was deported after being questioned for several hours.
The indiscriminate firing in Thoothukudi by the state police, against unarmed people, is a chilling reminder of the cost of protest in the world’s largest democracy.
Mugilan’s disappearance must be seen as a part of the overt and ongoing attacks against environmental mobilizations in India, often fought by some of the most marginalised communities.
Earlier this year the UN Human Rights Council adopted a resolution calling for an end to violence and repressive actions which are directed at environment defenders. Is India listening? If so, where is Mugilan?
Follow @Red_Pastures — as she reports on #mugilan’s disappearance, the aftermath of #thoothukudi violence and Vendanta’s ongoing state sanctioned plunder of resources.
