Listeners Peddling Narratives Of Violence

The Thoothukudi tragedy was reported through routine, cynical obscenities. Pollution is normal, while protests pollute the body politic.

- Shiv Visvanathan

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 cave­ ats. 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 ambivalence 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 alter­ natives. Shooting has a value neutrality which, however, unravels quickly. The word killing commands a different hearing, a different audience.