By IANS
New Delhi : Cities across the country witnessed major traffic snarls Wednesday as activists of the Vishwa Hindu Parishad (VHP) blocked roads and disrupted train services to protest the Sethusamudram sea channel project off the Tamil Nadu coast that they say will destroy a ‘bridge’ held sacred in Hindu mythology.
In the national capital, VHP activists started their protest around 8 a.m., blocking bridges across the Yamuna river, at traffic signals, some major arterial roads in west and central Delhi and at least 20 flyovers, leading to massive traffic jams in the rush hour.
The blockade ended around 11.30 a.m. but took vehicular movement hours to limp back to normal. No violence was reported in the city. Delhi Police spokesperson Rajan Bhagat said around 1,000 people, including former MPs and legislators, were detained.
But VHP activists’ traffic blockades that lasted over three hours frazzled thousands of motorists and office-goers as some 20 city areas, including Shakti Nagar, Dwarka, Lajpat Nagar and Nizamuddin, were severely affected.
The situation was grim on National Highway 8, which connects the city to Gurgaon in Haryana, and two bridges that connect east Delhi to other parts of the city across the Yamuna.
“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.
The situation was equally bad in other major cities.
Many busy intersections in India’s financial capital Mumbai, including S.V. Road, Saki Naka and Thurbe Naka, were completely blocked. Around 10 people were taken into custody in the city, police said.
Some 300 members of the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) and VHP blocked the Chennai-Mysore Shatabdi Express train in Bangalore for an hour, activists said. Office-goers had a tough time as traffic was held up on six busy roads, including Tumkur Road and Mysore Road.
Chennai’s arterial Anna Salai Road was blocked around noon, and so were many intersections. About 300 protestors were arrested in the Tamil Nadu capital and a few hundred more in other cities and towns of Tamil Nadu.
About a thousand people were arrested in Coimbatore and surrounding areas.
In Haryana, National Highway 1 was blocked at Karnal, leading to a massive traffic jam, stretching several kilometres long. Activists also disrupted train services at Ambala.
Police resorted to a 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 was the rail track that connects to Delhi. Train services were disrupted in Jalandhar as well.
In Patna, a woman was forced to deliver a baby on the road due to traffic jam. She and her husband were on their way to a hospital in an auto rickshaw.
Nearly 200 VHP activists led by BJP legislator Nitin Navin were detained for disrupting train services at Patna’s main railway station.
The strike paralysed traffic to and from the Taj Mahal city of Agra for several hours. The Agra-Jaipur highway was blocked near Fatehpur Sikri and vehicles from Delhi were also held up at Mathura.
The Bajrang Dal, another right-wing group, used a truck to block a railway track at Agra, resulting in many trains being delayed.
Orissa too was badly hit as VHP activists stopped several trains in Jatani, Sambalpur and Bhubaneswar. 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 party leader, told IANS.
The blockade affected Jaipur also with schools and offices recording thin attendance. Minor scuffles were reported from some areas as activists tried to puncture tyres of vehicles.
Clashes broke out in two localities of Indore in Madhya Pradesh during the road blockade. “The police had to cane charge the rioters and use tear gas shells to take control of the situation. All shops and markets in both the localities have been closed and Section 144 prohibiting movement or gathering of more than four people at a place has been imposed in both sensitive areas,” Manoj Srivastava, additional superintendent of police (Indore), told IANS.
The VHP claims that the canal project, that will cut shipping time around 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.”