Check Kudankulam agitators’ foreign links
While it is not yet clear who is behind the blasts that rocked Idinthakarai village close to the Kudankulam nuclear power plant in Tamil Nadu, the incident's timing is too stark to be ignored. The nation was observing the fifth anniversary of the 26/11 terrorist attacks on Mumbai on Tuesday when a country-made bomb went off ‘accidentally' in a hut. Clearly, the miscreants were not experimenting for the sake of fun but were in the process of using the explosives at some early time against India’s interests. That the police have booked a few key persons involved in the recent protest against the nuclear power plant raises the apprehension that the protest movement had been infiltrated by people who were not only inimical to the success of the power project but were also determined to violently strike against the country's security and integrity. It may be that these people were not working alone but in tandem with others outside the country that have a vested interest in destabilising India. Keeping this possibility in mind, the investigating authorities must widen the scope of their probe to look into such connections. The sponsors (Could it have been Pakistan's Inter-Services Intelligence, among othersIJ) of these protesters must be identified and dealt with. It must be remembered that during the height of the protest movement some months ago, the movement's leaders such as SP Uthayakumar had come under the scanner of the Union Ministry of Home Affairs. The Centre had gone so far as to claim that the movement was being directed by certain persons from behind the curtains and that the People's Movement Against Nuclear Energy — the organisation which Uthayakumar led — had illegally received foreign funding and that certain outside elements had been involved with this non-Government organisation. The accusation had predictably drawn a sharp reaction from the movement's leaders, some of whom even decided to haul the Government in the courts for defamation. Even in those days of protest, it was evident that the movement's leaders had used covert and overt means to incite the crowd of villagers on the pretext that the nuclear power plant would soon be disastrous for them and they must, therefore, oppose it tooth and nail. Such was the level of rabble-rousing that protesters turned violent. The Tuesday incident is a wake-up call to the authorities that, while the street protests may have subsided, the leaders are very much active behind the scenes to revive the issue through violence and encash on the resulting mayhem.
It is not difficult to understand why extraneous agencies would want the Kudankulam project to fail. Once it is fully operational, the nuclear power project will supply large amount of electricity to power-starved Tamil Nadu and neighbouring Kerala. This in turn will lead to a flurry of economic activities in the region and enhance the lot of the people in and around the place, especially the villagers who lead a morose life for now, struggling to meet both ends. Once empowered, these people will not be easy fodder for the disruptionists in the country and their patrons abroad. This is the reason why the agitationists have raised the bogey of threat to the lives and livelihood of the villagers from the plant.