“Udaykumar and his associates, such as Pushparayan, Jesuraj, Milton, Jeyakumar, Sahaya Enitha and Jerold and others are staying at Idinthakarai and are instigating the innocent public to indulge in agitation,” said a senior police officer. According to him, the villagers had deployed 250 youth “armed” with whistles and torches along the village border to alert leaders if police enter the village. While all the roads leading out of the village are manned by police, agitators have used fishing boats to get supplies. The villagers are so much in the loop that when the police phoned Udaykumar and asked him to surrender, the whole interaction was public because he kept his phone next to the mike!
At the same time, there have been complaints that food and water was not being allowed in for the protestors, a charge that the police has denied. Tirunelveli collector R Selvaraj says, “If at all there was any disturbance in maintaining the supply it was only because of the cutting of roads and creation of road blockade by protesters.”
However, Udaykumar says, “There is unprecedented deployment of police around Koodankulam and it is highly condemnable that the police are harassing peaceful protesters to this extent. Some 15 of us (8 men and 7 women) are on indefinite hunger strike here demanding among things withdrawal of the cabinet resolution that led to the restarting of KKNPP.” He has also demanded a thorough probe by geologists, hydrologists and oceanographers into safety issues of the plant and release of the Inter-Governmental Agreement (IGA) signed “secretly” by the governments of India and Russia on liability in February 2008.
Siding with the Activists