BITING BULLETS
Listeners Peddling Narratives Of Violence
The Thoothukudi tragedy was reported through routine , cynical obscenities . Pollution is normal , while protests pollute the body politic .
Photographs : PTI
WREATHED IN BLACK Smoke billows from the site of protests against the Sterlite unit in Thoothukudi
THE Thoothukudi violence is already part of folklore . On May 22 , the Tamil Nadu Police shot at a group of protestors at this coastal town , killing 13 people . The protestors demanded the closure of the Sterlite copper plant . The violence that followed convinced the UN Rapporteur General to condemn it . This essay is an attempt to see how people construct the event .
Enter the newspaper The newspaper reports inevitably begin the same way . They describe a key event as blandly as possible and then report the reactions of witnesses , government and victims . The response , even the anger , is formulated as a collection of cliches or caveats . Each fragment has a truth content , a poignancy and yet in all these ‘ first approximations ’, the whole is less than the sum of the parts . The newspaper report itself becomes a jigsaw puzzle tired of forced symmetries . It tries to raise issue of amb ivalence and ambiguity employing shades of language .
The official language of casualty is the word ‘ shooting ’. It has a clinical touch to it . Shooting almost appears as an official act , an imperative , a necessity of a police without alternatives . Shooting has a value neutrality which , however , unravels quickly . The word killing commands a different hearing , a different audience .
SHIV VISVANATHAN
The blandness of the newspaper report is subverted by pictures of police snipers without uniform . One then reads that four major activists were killed , and this sounds too random for comfort . What sounds like a sudden protest , one soon discovers , has been brewing for a hundred days . The corporation , Vedanta , which looked sanitised , suddenly appears suspect . The effort of the police and the administration look like hurried attempts to bring a sticky event under control . A hermeneutics of suspicion is inaugurated at the very beginning . Behind the blandness of official governmentality lies the lethal nature of government indecision and also indifference to the silent casualties of ecology , like poisoned water , contaminated soils . Ecological devastation is all too often presented as an act of god or the absentmindedness of man .
Truth in such a report is a battle of two emb edded rituals of suspicion . First , the automatism of government reactions ann ouncing doles , an enquiry commission as if government is an instant ATM of humanitarianism and the government attempts to label ‘ outsiders ’ as causes of trouble . The outsider is a very inclusive word . It embraces the NGO , the journalist , the activist — anyone showing concern for issues which need a variety of information . An outsider is by definition dirt , matter out of place , an instigator . Law and Science have an objectivity
20 OUTLOOK 9 July 2018