Coca Cola Takes a Hit
The left’s big victory a few weeks ago in the south western Indian state of Kerala has yielded swift fruit this week in the form of yet another vigorous rebuff to Coca-Cola. For several years the vast company’s Indian subsidiary has been trying to reopen its bottling plant in Plachimada, in Kerala. Locals in Plachimada initially shut it down in 2002, after seeing their wells run dry, as described here by Alexander Cockburn, after he visited Plachimada last year.
The Plachimada fight has become a rousing symbol of resistance across India to Coca Cola, a company welcomed in by India’s neoliberals, who see ‘modernity’ and ‘progress’ in the sordid business of privatizing a publicly owned asset (water), adding syrup to it and then selling it back to original users of the water at an extortionate price. Coca-Cola had been confident that its clout would soon bring the Plachimada protesters to heel, but resistance has been spirited and determined, in a decade when public consciousness of a world water crisis has been growing swiftly.
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