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By Root 545 0

of red earth lined with brick walls to Mailamma’s home. In what is becoming a familiar ritual, he shows off the well in her front yard, empty except for a few feet of brackish water. Along with the lack of water, Mailamma and others started noticing a bitter taste to the water they did have. A teacher at a nearby school found that her students were increasingly absent because of stomach ailments and skin rashes, or late because they were sent farther and farther away to fetch drinkable water. Others discovered that the water turned rice brown when used for cooking, or that baths caused itching that lasted for days. As in Mehdiganj, the villagers also allege that the company distributed sludge for use as fertilizer, causing coconuts to shrink and turn yellow.

The problems with the water continue to this day—as evidenced by clusters of bright plastic jugs sitting by the roadside, which are filled every week by trucks the government has forced Coke to provide to bring in clean water. Even so, say residents, there is never enough water to get through the week, so they are forced to continue to use well water—when that is available. A well in the center of the village, just a few feet from the plant, is almost dry, despite the fact that the plant closed more than four years ago. The hand pumps nearby have only recently started to work again, but the water is still polluted. “You taste the water, you’ll see,” Ajayan urges, pumping the handle a dozen times before water comes out in a trickle. Sure enough, it tastes clean enough at first, but within a few seconds it leaves a bitter aftertaste difficult to describe—like lime with a slightly metallic or sulfurous undertone that clings to the back of the tongue for hours. According to Ajayan, this is a vast improvement from how the water used to taste, back when the community was spurred to action.

Coke hardly could have picked a worse place in India to set up shop than Plachimada. Like Chiapas in Mexico, Kerala has long been a state apart in India, setting up a socialist government in the 1950s and now trading political power between two left-leaning coalitions. The state’s social consciousness has led to a literacy rate of over 90 percent, and health stats far above the national average. On the other hand, the antibusiness climate had led to high unemployment, and given Kerala a reputation of little more than a haven for restless trade unions and righteous NGOs.

Coinciding with Coke’s arrival, Kerala had also seen a surge in political consciousness of India’s indigenous people, the Adivasis, who had won a huge victory in October 2001, when the state returned a portion of their ancestral lands. Emboldened by their newfound political muscle, some Adivasis from Plachimada turned their attentions to the Coke plant. After the problems with water started emerging, some urged to shut the plant down by force. A leftist intellectual who had advised the community in the land campaign, however, urged patience, worried the village would face a backlash if it resorted to violence. “I told them their strength was in the local, but their weakness was in not being able to reach out of the local,” says C. R. Bijoy. “We had to make the local space a space of struggle.”

Under the leadership of Mailamma and an Adivasi tribal chief, Veloor Swaminathan, that is exactly what they did, constructing a forty-foot thatched-roof hut directly across from the plant, which still exists in perfect repair, hung with framed pictures of Gandhi at his spinning wheel among propaganda posters. There they settled in for an around-the-clock sit-in that eventually lasted more than four years and has since been used as a textbook study for how a small group of citizens with limited resources can take down a rich multinational.

At each stage of the protest, the villagers worked with what they had, to gather first evidence, and then support, and gradually expand locally, nationally, and even internationally. From the beginning they sought to legitimize their experience with hard evidence. Sending the water out to