TN needs a creative political script
Environment has become a site for the renewal of civil society. The debate on livelihood and the future of the coastline has become an acute problem. Second, a rabid sense of communalism is being used as a cover up. Christians are being targeted as the church rises to back the fishing community.
The pollution at Ennore creek and at Kodaikanal, where a major corporation practised environmental racism were the other flash points. The groups responding to these issues are quilt-patch associations from civil society. The environment and its criti- cal links to livelihood have not yet found a place in the Dravidian emancipation.
Even more critical than all these issues is the slow and lethal decline of democracy in the state. State violence has become a way of life in Tamil Nadu.
The most devastating recent expression of this was the Thoothukudi firings where, to quote a former inspector general of police, “a most cynical use of Section 144 was made”. The firings, as the Peoples Watch report has so painstakingly chronicled, were sheer acts of State-sponsored excess. Praising the cops might add to their Rambolike image, but it destroys their accountability. The alleged use of the government departments of environment and law and order by Sterlite displays how low Tamil Nadu politics has sunk.
Agriculture and water are issues that need political articulation in Tamil Nadu. There was a banality of politics as farmers protested against the droughts. There has been a generational change in the political issues confronting Dravidian politics. The dream of equality needs to be balanced by guarantees of diversity and freedom and demands new forms of institutional building.
There has to be an effervescence around these issues. Politics is changing and if Dravidian politics has to survive beyond kneejerk support, it needs to reinvent itself in the post-karunanidhi era. Even culture and films have to create new myths for a Dravidian politics to invent a new generation of creative democracy.
Shiv Visvanathan is professor, Jindal Global Law School and director, Centre for Study of Knowledge Systems, OP Jindal Global University The views expressed are personal