Nuclear Energy

forcing the government to cancel the project and de-notify the 16,000 acres of land earmarked for
the project. The Warkaris of Western Maharashtra rallied in thousands to force the Maharashtra
government to cancel permission given to the notorious Dow Chemicals to build a dangerous
research centre near Pune. The people of Uttarakhand have launched an intense agitation against the
mad scheme of the Uttarakhand government to build bumper-to-bumper dams all along the course
of the River Ganges, forcing the government to cancel many of these devastating projects. In
Gujarat, thousands of farmers from the Mahuva area in the Bhavnagar district of Gujarat have
repeatedly courted arrest to protest the government’s sanction for a Nirma factory and limestone
quarry in their area. In Andhra Pradesh, people fought hard against plans to build a 1000 km long
coastal industrial corridor by acquiring 50 lakh acres of land displacing about 2 crore people,
eventually forcing the state government to scrap the project; now, they are organising against
another such coastal corridor project in the Vishakhapatnam and East Godavari districts! Farmers'
organisations of 14 states fought a fierce struggle to force the Environment Minister to impose a
moratorium on the introduction of Bt Brinjal in the country. Amongst the most inspiring of all
these struggles has been the heroic struggle of the people of Nandigram, who battled the entire
might of West Bengal police and the goondaism of the ruling party and eventually forced the
government to back off from setting up a chemical SEZ on their fertile lands.
And of course, as we have mentioned in the Introduction to this book, powerful struggles by
the people of Meghalaya and Nalgonda (Andhra Pradesh) have forced the respective state
governments to put on hold proposals to start uranium mining in these areas. Local people are also
waging fantastic struggles against DAE plans to build nuclear power plants in Madban
(Maharashtra), Haripur (West Bengal), Fatehabad (Haryana), Mithivirdi (Gujarat) and Kudankulam
(Tamil Nadu).
Yes, people are beginning to stir all across the country...
Lot more needs to be done
However, these struggles have not prevented the ruling classes from going ahead with their
sordid agenda. For every struggle won and project cancelled, the ruling classes have been able to
implement ten other projects. Often, if a project is cancelled due to strong protests by the local
people, it is simply shifted to another region. Therefore, at the most, these struggles have slowed
down the pace of globalization of the Indian economy. We need to do a lot more.
Advance, to build a New World
We need to involve more people in our struggles. We need to unite our different struggles.
We need to deepen our struggles, and advance from opposing this or that project, to challenging the
entire project of capitalist globalisation being implemented by the ruling classes of the country at
the behest of the imperialists.
The ruling classes are claiming: there is no alternative to globalisation! In order to see
through their propaganda, in order to be able to understand their real agenda, we must read, think,
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