This refers to the editorial, “Vested interests” (May 25). The cold-blooded carnage in Thoothukudi marked the culmination of the Government’s mishandling of the 100-day-old protest against the Sterlite plant and exemplified the terrible cost of political indifference to people’s struggles for protecting lives and livelihoods in death and suffering.
For crowd control or disbursement, the police neither issued warning nor used tear gas and rubber bullets. They opened fire indiscriminately on unarmed civilians. One school girl was reported to have been shot at in her mouth at close range for arguing with the police. The police action was nothing short of ‘state brutality’. It was an avoidable overreaction that no democracy could countenance.
By now, it is evident that the Government is siding with a rapacious corporate behemoth, Vedanta, the firm that runs the copper smelting plant. It refused to defer to the demand of the people and shut down the toxic plant for which there is a strong case. The harmful effects of pollution on health and the contamination of groundwater with arsenic have been amply documented. The right to clean air and water is an extension of the Constitutionally right to life. If the Government entails the closure of this life-threatening plant, it has to be done forthwith.