Mumbai: “If we don’t stop the government right now, we will soon be turning our ancestral land into an unbreathable, unliveable space,” says Kashibai, a 60-year-old resident of Dhopeshwar Panchayat, as she participated in the ongoing protests at Maharashtra’s Barsu-Solgaon.
Locals are protesting against the setting up of the biggest petrochemical refinery in the country in this area.
The residents of Barsu-Solgaon and the adjoining eight villages in the Ratnagiri district of coastal Maharashtra intensified their protest as soon as the state government decided to go ahead with the land survey process for the proposed oil refinery in the area. The survey, the protesters feel, will give the state a ground to shove a “dangerous project” that they vehemently oppose.
The project – a joint venture between Indian Oil Corporation Ltd, Bharat Petroleum Corporation Ltd and Hindustan Petroleum Corporation Ltd, and Saudi Arabia-owned Aramco and UAE’s National Oil Company – was earlier planned in the neighbouring village of Nanar. It was scrapped in 2019 after locals protested against it. At the time, it was termed as detrimental to the environment of the Konkan region. However, it made a comeback two years later, only two kilometers away in the Barsu-Salgaon area. And this time, it came back as a “green project”.
“Nothing about the project has changed. Still, the government has suddenly classified the project as a green project,” said a young protester, who is pursuing an architecture degree in Mumbai and has been staying in his native place for the past month to participate in the protest.
Vinayak Raut, Lok Sabha MP from Ratnagiri-Sindhudurg constituency, and a senior leader of the Sena (Uddhav Bal Thackeray) faction visited the protest site early Friday, April 28. He, along with a few other party workers, have been detained by the police.
With Raut extending his support, more people turned up at the protest site. The police reportedly resorted to tear gas to disperse the protesters. A few protesters accused the police of using force, causing them injury.
बारसु रीफायनरी आंदोलनात मला व माझ्या सहकाऱ्यांना अटक करण्यात आली. pic.twitter.com/aBmzA7OvAg
— VinayakRaut_Official (@Vinayakrauts) April 28, 2023
On April 24, the protesters poured onto the street against the planned survey of the land. The state, too, upped its ante by increasing police deployment. The local administration invoked section 144 of the Criminal Procedure Code (CrPC), prohibiting people from gathering at the protest site. Undeterred, the protesters stayed put.
As the protesters univocally raised slogans against the state, the police used force. Over 100 protestors, mainly women, were roughed up and later detained for a day. Satyajit Chavan, a civil engineer, who has been leading the protest, was taken into police custody.
Chavan was taken into custody under multiple cases and released only three days later on bail. The police first took him into custody for participating in the protest. Then another case was slapped against him following his social media post asking people to gather for the protest. He was finally released on bail on April 27 afternoon.
Chavan, however, has been barred from entering the Ratnagiri district for 15 days. “The moment I was released from jail, the police escorted me and dropped me to Kolhapur,” he told The Wire on a phone call.
Satyajit Chavan, a civil engineer, who has been leading the protest, was taken into police custody.
While Chavan has been an active part of the protest, his friend Mangesh Chavan was also arrested and later barred from entering the district.
Mangesh, owing to his bad health, had not participated in the protest, Satyajit Chavan said. “I had only gone to his place to change clothes. The police implicated him, too. This was perhaps because of his part role in another movement against the Jaitapur nuclear power plant,” Mangesh said.
A ‘green’ project?
While the government insists it is a “green refinery project”, the locals say it will not just pollute their land but will also take away their ancestral land and temples. The affected villages largely comprise of communities like the Kunbi, Bhandari and Koli – all belonging to the Other Backward Classes.
The project has taken an interesting political turn. Ahead of the 2019 assembly polls, the Shiv Sena, then an alliance partner of the Bharatiya Janata Party, was willing to get into a pre-poll alliance only if the BJP agreed to scrap the project.
The then chief minister Devendra Fadnavis, buckling under pressure, had put a stay on the project. In 2022, however, when the Maha Vikas Aghadi was in power and Uddhav Thackeray was the chief minister, the Barsu-Solgaon project was passed. In his defence, Thackeray now says his plan was to go ahead with the project only after getting the villagers’ consent.
“Good projects like Vedanta-Foxconn, Tata-Airbus and Bulk Drug Park, which were coming to Maharashtra, were shifted by this government outside the state. And now, [the government is] sending the refinery project to Barsu. You are calling it a green refinery project. If it’s really a green refinery project and good for the locals, then why the government has to use force against the protesting villagers? You assaulted women and dragged them,” Thackeray said, at a separate event in Mumbai. Thackeray is scheduled to visit the protest site next week.
Meanwhile, leader of opposition and Nationalist Congress Party leader Ajit Pawar demanded the state to stop the project and take the villagers’ sentiments into consideration. “It is dictatorial of the government to arrest protesters and stop the media from telecasting the proceedings at Barsu-Solgaon. The government must respect the sentiments of the people and stop the survey process immediately,” said Pawar.
His uncle and NCP chief Sharad Pawar appealed to the government to take the villagers into confidence.
Interestingly, while Thackeray has supported the protesters, his party MLA Rajan Salvi, who represents the Rajapur region in the district, has supported the project. According to Salvi, the project will generate employment, something that the local youths are in dire need of, he claimed.
Chavan, who has been studying the land and the impact that this project would have on the region, found out that investors had been buying land from the local villagers even before the project was announced. Information procured under the Right to Information Act shows that many politicians and land brokers have bought land in the region. The new landowners don’t belong to coastal Maharashtra and their sudden interest in the land has raised suspicion. Among the new buyers include former suspended MLA of Congress party, Ashish Deshmukh. The records show Deshmukh purchased 18 acres of land in the village in 2022.
Ashish, who was in the BJP, defeated his uncle Anil Deshmukh in 2014 from the Katol constituency in Nagpur. He had subsequently joined the Congress. He later contested against Fadnavis and lost. Recently, he was suspended from the party for alleging that the state party president Nana Patole had accepted money from chief minister Eknath Shinde.