The Coke Machine - Michael Blanding [126]
Increasingly armed with countrywide data, the various campaigns against Coca-Cola began coordinating their activities. Ajayan and Nandlal met for the first time in January 2004, along with Srivastava and other international activists, at the World Social Forum, an annual progressive strategy session-cum-spring break for lefties that coincides with the meeting of the world’s political and financial masters at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland. Held in Mumbai, the forum featured a march of some five hundred people to protest Coke, led by Indian environmentalist Medha Patkar; SINALTRAINAL president Javier Correa was marching right alongside.
Immediately afterward, several dozen environmental activists came to Plachimada for a somewhat grandiosely named World Water Conference, a three-day who’s who of lefties, including Canadian water activists Tony Clarke and Maude Barlow, French antiglobalist farmer José Bové, and Bolivian peasant leader Oscar Olivera, who had organized a successful peasant movement against water privatization by Bechtel in Cochabamba. There the activists struck a militant tone, calling on Coke to “Quit India”—the same slogan Gandhi used in his long fight against British occupation.
Nandlal and his fellow activists evoked Gandhi’s spirit more confrontationally in Mehdiganj, where they began a hunger strike in front of the plant in January 2004. Coke obtained a restraining order prohibiting protests within three hundred meters (despite the fact that some of the protesters actually lived within that radius), which was violated in late 2004 with a ten-day march of some one thousand villagers, some carrying “Quit India” signs in a direct evocation of Gandhi’s March to the Sea.
By the time they arrived at the plant in Mehdiganj, a cordon of police was waiting, blocking the entrance. In a group, the villagers surged past the three-hundred-meter line, as police began striking them with batons. Even as the protesters dropped to the ground in pain, heads and arms bleeding, they say, they held to a vow of nonviolence (with one well-marked apparent exception of an elderly woman who took off her slipper and began hitting a policeman with it).
In all, says Nandlal, police arrested more than 350 people, including more than forty women. He himself spent fifteen days in jail, shaken by the violence—especially seeing police beating women from his village. “It was really painful,” he says. “I thought about giving up. But the community had not given up.” In fact, it was the women who pushed to continue the protests. “Women are most in need of water,” says Vishwakarma, “to clean, cook, bathe—their whole lives are dependent on water. Men have a limit, but when women are angry, they will never stop.” A few weeks after the violence, some five hundred marchers wearing black ribbons over their mouths marched up to the three-hundred-meter line, standing silently in protest. A year later, in 2005, police stood aside as eight hundred people marched right up to the gates.
At the same time, the battle lines had been drawn more metaphorically in Kerala, now with the state’s opposition political parties and the village council on one side, and the state government and Coca-Cola on the other. When the case to decide Coke’s fate finally went to court, Kerala’s high court returned two conflicting decisions—first declaring in December 2003 that the company’s groundwater extraction was “illegal” and the panchayat was justified in canceling the license; and then on appeal, saying the council had acted without sufficient