Anti-Kudankulam protesters surrender voter ID cards

Some 24,000 people have surrendered their voter identity cards in protest against the Kudankulam Nuclear Power Project (KKNPP) in Tamil Nadu.

The ID cards were submitted by people from Idinthakarai and neighbouring villages, according to SP Udayakumar, coordinator of the People's Movement Against Nuclear Energy (PMANE).

The decision to surrender the voter cards was promoted by the government's silence on the indefinite fast undertaken by around 340 people at Idinthakarai for nine days.

According to sources, curfew orders have been promulgated after PMANE's meetings with youth, women, and community elders on May 8.

Thousands of police personnel are being posted in and around Kudankulam in haste.

"We get reliable tips that the authorities are planning to clamp down our protest and arrest all of us, possibly tonight. Such a pre-dawn operation that the government usually does could be bloody as thousands of men, women and children from several villages are sleeping around the Church at Idinthakarai," a PMANE official stated in a note.

"It is so strange and unfortunate that the central and state governments treat us, nonviolent and democratic Gandhian activists, as some kind of dangerous extremists."

"The hunger strikers are very weak and feeble but they refuse to give up without getting our demands fulfilled. Instead of talking to us, the Tamil Nadu government seems to be preparing for a highhanded behavior to put us all down," added the official.

The Nuclear Power Corporation of India Limited is constructing two nuclear reactors, each with 1000 MW of power, at Kudankulam with Russian collaboration.

The multi-crore project ran into trouble after protests from locals citing safety concerns in the wake of the nuclear disaster at Fukushima in Japan following an earthquake last year.

Tamil Nadu Chief Minister J Jayalalithaa last week informed reporters that the Kudankulam project would go on stream in the next ten days.