By IANS
New Delhi : Activists of the Vishwa Hindu Parishad (VHP) Wednesday blocked roads, highways and disrupted train services in several parts of the country to protest the Sethusamudram canal project in Tamil Nadu that they say will destroy a ‘bridge’ held sacred in Hindu mythology.
In the capital, VHP activists started their protest at around 8 a.m., blocking bridges across the Yamuna river, major traffic signals, some arterial roads in west and central Delhi and at least 20 flyovers, leading to traffic snarls in the morning rush hour.
The blockade ended at around 11.30 a.m. as vehicular movement gradually limped back to normal. No violence was reported in the city.
“The traffic blockages have been eased now and a large number of police personnel deployed are making efforts to maintain the vehicular flow,” said Delhi Police spokesperson Rajan Bhagat. He added that around 1,000 people, including former MPs and legislators, had been detained.
But traffic jams that went on for more than three hours had Delhiites in a tizzy as around 20 areas including Shakti Nagar, Dwarka, Lajpat Nagar, Raja Garden, Green Park and Nizamuddin were affected.
The situation was grim at ITO, National Highway 8, which connects the city to Gurgaon in Haryana, and the Yamuna Bridge that connects east Delhi to other parts of the city.
“It took me at least three hours to reach my Connaught Place office. It usually takes me just 45 minutes. There was utter chaos and the roads were jam packed,” said Neeraj Thakur, a resident of Preet Vihar in east Delhi.
“I could not move my car an inch for two hours,” rued Vinod Gulati, who was stuck in a traffic jam in Dwarka, southwest Delhi.
The situation was equally bad in many other states.
In Haryana, National Highway 1 was blocked at Karnal, leading to a massive traffic jam on one of the busiest roads in the country.
The VHP activists also disrupted train services at Ambala in Haryana.
Police resorted to mild cane charge at Chandigarh and adjoining Panchkula town to disperse VHP activists. In Punjab’s industrial town of Phagwara, the Amritsar-Delhi highway was blocked and so also the rail track that connects to Delhi. Train services were disrupted in Jalandhar as well.
The blockade severely affected vehicular movement in Mumbai, Navi Mumbai, Agra, Jammu, Indore and Patna too.
Orissa too was badly hit as VHP activists stopped several trains in Jatani, Sambalpur and Bhubaneswar. Protests were staged in many parts of the state capital, causing traffic snarls.
While hundreds of activists led by MP Jual Oram staged protests at the steel city of Rourkela, state BJP president Suresh Pujari led protests at Bhubaneswar, Omprakash Mohanty, a BJP leader, told IANS.
The VHP claims that the canal project, that will cut shipping time in the southern tip of India, would damage the Adam’s Bridge or Ram Sethu, which many Hindus claim was built by the monkey brigade to enable Ram to reach then Lanka (now Sri Lanka) to rescue his wife Sita from the clutches of demon king Ravana.
Hindutva parties claim that US space agency NASA had the bridge in the Indian Ocean carbon dated as being 1.7 million years old.
However, Surface Transport Minister T.R. Baalu has pointed out that the NASA website had mentioned about “partially submerged giant tombolos forming Adam’s Bridge – connecting Sri Lanka to India … such tombolos usually indicate a constant sediment source and a strong unidirectional or bi-directional long shore current”.
Tombolo is a bar of sand connecting an island with another island of the mainland.
Baalu said, “None of the studies and investigations conducted so far has produced any tangible scientific evidence of any man-made structure in the area.”