Protests against Ram Setu gripped all over India

Shri Ram Setu

Chennai: Scientists, greens and politicians are coming together to spearhead a new wave of protests against the Sethusamudram shipping canal in the south of India, claiming dangers to environment and Hindu religious symbols.

The Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) and its allies are planning demonstrations across Tamil Nadu against the dredging of the coral reef in the waters near the temple town of Rameswaram. The protest campaign has won unexpected supporters, all ganged up against a project that is a dream come true for the state’s ruling DMK and its partners.

When completed, the canal will cut travel time for ships navigating between the west and east coasts of India. They will not have to circle Sri Lanka any more. Some scientists say the coral reef between India and Sri Lanka’s north, bound to be destroyed by the dredging, are proof of temperature variations the world has witnessed for thousands of years. Environmentalists like S. Badrinarayanan, a former director of the Geological Survey of India and a teacher at the National Institute of Ocean Technology in Chennai, says the layers of the reef show how the Indian Ocean waters receded and came up during several millennia. ‘It was one land mass. Reef geology proves that when the temperatures of the oceans rose at the end of the last ice age (the last glacial), a new generation of polyps and other life forms came to inhabit the reef,’ Badrinarayanan told IANS.

Dredging and destroying the hard reef would be destroying this ‘valuable evidence’ of the climate change story, he said. Former Supreme Court judge and rights activist V.K. Krishna Iyer has shot off a strongly-worded letter to Prime Minister Manmohan Singh asking him to stop the dredging south of Tamil Nadu.Two days ago, Janata Party president Subramanian Swamy sought to meet Tamil Nadu Chief Minister M. Karunanidhi to urge him to stop the Sethu project – as it is widely known.

Swamy was refused an audience, and he promptly called Karunanidhi ‘anti-Hindu’. The Janata Party leader says the ‘Ramar Sethu’ – the land bridge apparently built by an army of monkeys to link India with Sri Lanka – was in use as recently as 1480 and he would take the authorities to court over the dredging. The Indian government and its ministry of shipping, led by DMK minister T.R. Baalu, is digging a 83-km canal linking the Palk Strait, which divides India and Sri Lanka, with the Gulf of Mannar at a present cost of Rs.25 billion.

The canal is expected to save 402 nautical miles of travel between India’s west and east coasts but does not allow passage of ships of more than 10 m draught. Justice Krishna Iyer’s letter to the prime minister is accompanied by a number of research papers and expert comments on the reef and its heritage value. The project would be detrimental to India’s territorial interests, his letter says. ‘Our nation will be weaker and may suffer new dangers with American presence in the Sethusamudram waters by doing what for centuries has never been considered necessary or feasible or in any manner advantageous to us,’ Iyer has said.

A 1747 map made in the Netherlands and known as the Malabar-Bowen Map shows the land connection between Rameswaram and Sri Lanka. A 1788 edition of the map called Map of Hindoostan or the Mughal Empire, available in the Saraswati Mahal Library in Thanjavur and made by James Rennell, the first surveyor general of East India Company, also shows a land route between Rameswaram and Talaimannar tagged ‘Ramar Bridge’. The Akhil Bharat Hindu Mahasabha has drafted Shankaracharya Jayendra Saraswathi as its mentor in the protests. This will pit the controversial pontiff against the powerful DMK. The demand for the reef to be declared a UNESCO protected heritage site is only growing.

The Gulf of Mannar is one of the world’s unique bio-reserves, containing 3,600 species of life forms, some of them on the verge of extinction. Coastal Action Network, a coalition of fishing communities and environmentalists, has been protesting against the dredging since 2004. Their legal challenge is in the apex court.

(Congratulation of Hindus for protesting against destruction of Ram Setu ! – Editor)

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