Coal news and updates

It was just after 7 a.m. on Thursday, September 4 when the first marchers—men, women, youth, children—streamed down the street, into view.

 

They wielded Oriya and English placards mounted atop young, green bamboos harvested from their lands for this overcast morning. (Turned upside down, these could double up as a counter to police batons, a villager had explained to me the previous afternoon: “We won’t hit them first. But if they hit us, let them not expect us to take it lying down.)

 

As dawn’s drizzle turned into pouring rain, the slogans rose to a crescendo through a canopy of black umbrellas.

 

“Adani Company (sic) Down Down. Down Down, Down Down.”

“We Can Die, But Not Give Up Our Land!”

 

Chief Minister Naveen Patnaik, and Prime Minister Narendra Modi were targeted too.

 

“Modi used to sell tea, now he wants to sell us to Adani”, one man hollered.

“Give us land, if you want to take our land,” chanted a gaggle of women farmers in bright sarees and rubber slippers.

 

As your correspondent took photographs, she was periodically asked: “Are you with us, or with the company?” It was a reflection of deep mistrust of the media among villagers, who alleged local journalists were routinely bribed by industry and did not report their side of the story.

 

The mutinous crowd turned into the open ground, framed against distant, blue hills. This was the bucolic site of an environmental hearing for a proposed coal mine, called by the administration in Chhendipada town, in the forested, mineral-rich Angul district of central Odisha.

 

More than 600 tense, but unusually restrained, police personnel and home guards—deployed at the ground since dawn with rifles, batons, tear gas and protective gear—looked on. The protestors started taking apart the rickety stage that the security forces were protecting. Some wrecked the loudspeakers, then the blue and red plastic chairs. Others dismantled the bamboo boundaries, erected to separate the officials from the locals during the hearing. Men and boys carted off these poles through the mud and slush.

 

This done, the crowd turned its attention to district officials and individuals, rumoured to be company representatives, who were attempting to leave, escorted by a tight ring of police.

 

Raucous protestors sat down on the winding lane leading out of the ground, insisting the officials could go only after formally calling off the hearing. Say it is cancelled because of people’s strong opposition, they demanded. A fire tender had pulled up minutes ago, followed by a truck marked ‘Riot Control Vehicle.’

 

Faced with this unyielding crowd, the district official weakly declared that the hearing was cancelled because the villagers were opposed to it. Loud cheers broke out.

 

It was now 8.54 a.m., more than 90 minutes before the hearing was to officially begin.

 

 

Source: http://www.indiaspend.com/