MUMBAI: Indian workers plan days of protests and hunger strikes over France’s recall of the asbestos-lined warship Clemenceau amid claims the decision will kill off the country’s shipbreaking industry.
Workers will focus their anger on environmental group Greenpeace for its role in stopping the decommissioned aircraft carrier being broken up in the shipyards of Alang on India’s west coast, protest organisers said. The decision by French President Jacques Chirac would mean the end of one of the world’s largest shipbreaking areas, according to the company that was due to strip the warship.
“Without this ship, Alang’s revival is not possible and will totally die,” said Mukesh Patel, the head of the Shree Ram yard. “It’s bad for the yard, it’s bad for the wider industries.”
Alang’s fortunes have slumped from a high point in the late 1990s when tens of thousands of workers tore up 150 ships at a time, and the industry was hoping for a revival starting with the Clemenceau.
But Chirac’s decision marks a major victory for environmentalists, who argued that sending the ship to India for scrapping posed a serious environmental and health hazard.
The French government has been sorely embarrassed by the warship debacle, which threatened to overshadow Chirac’s state visit to India.
Kishore Bhatt, an organiser for the right-wing Hindu Shiv Sena movement, said demonstrations would be held in the city of Bhavnagar, an hour’s drive from the shipyard.
If that failed, Bhatt said workers would go on hunger strike in an industry where only 4,000 of them remain in Alang, struggling with less than six hours of work a day. He said 80,000 used to work at Alang.
“Any ship now that should come here will be broken elsewhere. It’s wrong not to let us do what we’re good at,” he said.
“We have steel workers who could have done a good job,” he said. “We are going back to a colonial era. We don’t need English environmentalists to tell us about the problems here.”
Bhatt was behind a protest last week by several hundred workers who burned an effigy representing Greenpeace during a visit to Alang by French ambassador Dominique Girard.—AFP
