The Coke Machine (35 page)

Already in 2001, however, Coke’s fortunes were beginning to change, first with a new strategy to divide the market into two separate parts. Sophisticated urbanites were sold an aspirational campaign invoking an upscale American way of life, with the tagline “life as it should be.” Meanwhile in the rural market, the company pushed the simpler slogan “Coke means cold” to appeal to a generic love of cold drinks in the steamy back-waters of the country. Akin to its strategy in Mexico, Coke also marketed a smaller bottle for half the price in rural areas. The gambit began to show promise. Volume grew by nearly 40 percent in 2002, with the company breaking even for the first time since reentry. Business, it seemed, had finally turned a corner. Then all hell broke loose.

 

 

 

The first rumblings
of what would grow into a national condemnation of Coca-Cola began not in Mehdiganj but in a sleepy village in the southern state of Kerala. Once known as the Malabar Coast, Kerala is a sliver of land in southwestern India, just seventy-five miles across at its widest, sandwiched between the ocean and a craggy mountain chain known as the Western Ghats.

Thanks to the wall of mountains, the state gets more rain than any other in India. Compared with the heat and frenzy of Varanasi, the air here is fresh and cool by late June after the monsoons have hit. Everything is lush and green, framed by picturesque mountain peaks with mist curling around their middles. As in Chiapas, however, all of the abundance can be misleading. Water is unevenly distributed in the state, with some areas in a “rain shadow” behind a mountain peak getting half of the rainfall of a village just a few miles away.

That is the case in Plachimada, where Hindustan Coca-Cola decided to build a bottling plant that began operation in March 2000. The company sank six bore wells to take advantage of the village’s seemingly ample groundwater. Excited by the possibility of jobs, both the state and the local village council, the Perumatty Panchayat, fast-tracked approval.

“When Coca-Cola first started, people were very happy,” says Ajayan, convener of the Plachimada Solidarity Committee, who grew up a few miles from here but now lives in the southern city of Trivandrum. (Like many Indians, he goes by only one name.) As in Mehdiganj, however, the villagers very quickly changed their tune, when their wells started drying up and their water started being polluted. Driving past palm trees and rice paddies, Ajayan slows the car slightly to point out the gates of the plant. Rising thirty feet above the green undergrowth, a twisted metal frame is now all that remains of the sign where Hindustan Coca-Cola once hung. “Many villages have boycotted Coca-Cola, [but] nowhere in the world has a Coca-Cola unit but Plachimada,” Ajayan says proudly.

The resistance that led to that closing started in earnest in 2002, led by a shrunken sexagenarian named Mailamma, who passed away a few years ago. Ajayan pulls off the road and leads the way down a path of red earth lined with brick walls to Mailamma’s home. In what is becoming a familiar ritual, he shows off the well in her front yard, empty except for a few feet of brackish water. Along with the lack of water, Mailamma and others started noticing a bitter taste to the water they did have. A teacher at a nearby school found that her students were increasingly absent because of stomach ailments and skin rashes, or late because they were sent farther and farther away to fetch drinkable water. Others discovered that the water turned rice brown when used for cooking, or that baths caused itching that lasted for days. As in Mehdiganj, the villagers also allege that the company distributed sludge for use as fertilizer, causing coconuts to shrink and turn yellow.

The problems with the water continue to this day—as evidenced by clusters of bright plastic jugs sitting by the roadside, which are filled every week by trucks the government has forced Coke to provide to bring in clean water. Even so, say residents, there is never enough water to get through the week, so they are forced to continue to use well water—when that is available. A well in the center of the village, just a few feet from the plant, is almost dry, despite the fact that the plant closed more than four years ago. The hand pumps nearby have only recently started to work again, but the water is still polluted. “You taste the water, you’ll see,” Ajayan urges, pumping the handle a dozen times before water comes out in a trickle. Sure enough, it tastes clean enough at first, but within a few seconds it leaves a bitter aftertaste difficult to describe—like lime with a slightly metallic or sulfurous undertone that clings to the back of the tongue for hours. According to Ajayan, this is a vast improvement from how the water used to taste, back when the community was spurred to action.

 

 

 

Coke hardly
could have picked a worse place in India to set up shop than Plachimada. Like Chiapas in Mexico, Kerala has long been a state apart in India, setting up a socialist government in the 1950s and now trading political power between two left-leaning coalitions. The state’s social consciousness has led to a literacy rate of over 90 percent, and health stats far above the national average. On the other hand, the antibusiness climate had led to high unemployment, and given Kerala a reputation of little more than a haven for restless trade unions and righteous NGOs.

Coinciding with Coke’s arrival, Kerala had also seen a surge in political consciousness of India’s indigenous people, the Adivasis, who had won a huge victory in October 2001, when the state returned a portion of their ancestral lands. Emboldened by their newfound political muscle, some Adivasis from Plachimada turned their attentions to the Coke plant. After the problems with water started emerging, some urged to shut the plant down by force. A leftist intellectual who had advised the community in the land campaign, however, urged patience, worried the village would face a backlash if it resorted to violence. “I told them their strength was in the local, but their weakness was in not being able to reach out of the local,” says C. R. Bijoy. “We had to make the local space a space of struggle.”

Under the leadership of Mailamma and an Adivasi tribal chief, Veloor Swaminathan, that is exactly what they did, constructing a forty-foot thatched-roof hut directly across from the plant, which still exists in perfect repair, hung with framed pictures of Gandhi at his spinning wheel among propaganda posters. There they settled in for an around-the-clock sit-in that eventually lasted more than four years and has since been used as a textbook study for how a small group of citizens with limited resources can take down a rich multinational.

At each stage of the protest, the villagers worked with what they had, to gather first evidence, and then support, and gradually expand locally, nationally, and even internationally. From the beginning they sought to legitimize their experience with hard evidence. Sending the water out to a local lab, they were validated to find levels of dissolved minerals so high it was “unfit for human consumption, domestic use (bathing and washing), and for irrigation.”

Armed with that science, the villagers demanded that the local council, the Perumatty Panchayat, cancel the plant’s license to operate. But the council dragged its feet in the face of Coke’s own tests contradicting the villagers’ claims of water depletion and pollution. “In the beginning we were not against the plant, because so many people were getting employment,” admits former village council president A. Krishnan. “We told them we cannot take any action without investigating.”

By now, protests in front of the plant attracted hundreds—and on some days, thousands—of people. As word spread, outside groups such as the Indian branch of Greenpeace used the situation to decry the liberalization of the Indian economy as a cautionary tale of the evils of globalization, adding their own foot soldiers to the protest. The village was fast becoming an activist carnival. For each outside group, villagers would show off their depleted wells, let them taste the water, show them the failed attempts to boil rice. Sympathetic stories in the media followed, emphasizing the David versus Goliath aspects of the story, and day by day political pressure grew.

Eventually, both of the state’s two communist parties declared their support for the villagers. Coke maintained the support of the mainstream Congress Party, which then controlled Kerala’s parliament, and the left-of-center Janata Dal (Secular) Party, which controlled the local village council. But the
panchayat
was wavering in the face of the activist occupation of the village—and Coke itself pushed it over the edge when they rebuffed the council’s request for information to dispute the activists’ claims. “They were just too arrogant,” says Krishnan. “They said we’ve already talked to the big guys, we don’t need to talk to you guys.”

Stung by the response, the
panchayat
reversed itself, revoking the plant’s operating license on April 9, 2003, a year after the protest had begun. The stage was set for a showdown with the state government, which still supported the company. Just at that moment, in July 2003, a BBC radio crew appeared on the scene and dramatically changed the game. Told by farmers that Coke had distributed solid waste as fertilizer, the crew took a sample back to analyze its nutrient content to see if it actually could be used to help grow crops.

No one expected the results they found. The tests from the University of Exeter revealed not only that the sludge was useless as fertilizer, but also that it contained dangerous levels of the toxic heavy metals lead and cadmium. Samples taken from a nearby well also found toxic levels of lead and cadmium, which is known to cause prostate and kidney cancer with prolonged exposure.

The news report rocked the country, from Plachimada to Mehdiganj. After years of anecdotal reports that the sludge was harmful to livestock and crop production, here at last was proof from an internationally respected news agency. India has long had a double standard about Western foreign countries. On one hand, the long shame of colonialism has created a fierce animosity toward foreign influences—evidenced by the early backlash against Coke. On the other hand, the long period of British rule has created an almost reflexive deference to foreigners. While the tests by the Indian company hadn’t resonated, the evidence from a respected British university couldn’t be ignored.

Shamed before the international press, the Kerala Pollution Control Board did its own tests, concluding within a week that Coke’s sludge contained levels of cadmium four times the tolerable limit of 50 milligrams per kilogram. The following day, the Janata Dal Party held a joint press conference with the
panchayat
. Not only did it support the local government in revoking the license, party officials said, but it also vowed to pursue legal action to close down the plant.

 

 

 

In the midst
of this controversy, Coke was blindsided by the release of another report that helped turn the growing local backlash into a national movement. A month after the BBC report, on August 5, 2003, a Delhi-based environmental group called the Centre for Science and Environment (CSE) called a press conference on a sweltering day in the nation’s capital to announce to a crowded room of journalists that soft drinks around the country contained dangerous levels of pesticides. Coca-Cola, it reported, contained residues of DDT and malathion forty-five times the European standards. (Pepsi, too, was called out, for containing pesticides at thirty-seven times the European standards.)

The issue struck directly at the heart of urban India, where the majority of soft drinks were consumed. No longer was this a question of stealing water from poor farmers, this was a company poisoning everyone. Indian consumers, the findings implied, were not worth the same care that companies lavished on consumers in the United States and Europe where Coke was pesticide-free. Coke’s famous promise that its products were the same everywhere in the world had been exposed as a lie.

The day after the announcement, national pride kicked in. India’s right-wing Parliament immediately banned the sale of soft drinks in its cafeteria, while protesters in Mumbai (Bombay) symbolically broke Coke bottles and trampled on logo-bearing cups. Elsewhere, angry Indians tore down posters of Bollywood film stars Aamir Khan and Kareena Kapoor, who’d just signed endorsement deals with the company. The reaction from the industry was swift, if cynical. “Within days, Coke’s men from the Hong Kong group office were in Delhi to personally assess the situation,” wrote Nantoo Banerjee, Coke’s former head of public relations, in a scathing tell-all about his former company. “The key message was: manage Parliament, manage ministers, and manage media. . . . To them, everything in India appeared to be ‘manageable’ with money and connections.” Led by Coca-Cola India, the soft drink industry published a full-page ad in India’s English-language newspapers stating on the basis of its own tests “we can safely assert that there is no contamination or toxicity whatsoever in our brand of beverages.” The facility CSE used to measure its own tests, the company went on to say, was not accredited highly enough, causing the tests to be hopelessly flawed.

The PR campaign did nothing to dim the public fury—sales of Coke plummeted more than 30 percent in just two weeks. The final blow came when a Joint Parliamentary Committee backed up CSE’s findings, saying its study was “correct on the presence of pesticide residues in . . . branded products of Coca-Cola.” The company changed courses to diffuse blame. Rather than claiming its drinks did not contain pesticides, it now argued it wasn’t their fault if they
did
, since hazardous chemicals were endemic to the Indian food and water supply. If the government didn’t enforce its environmental regulations, then how could the company be expected to abide by them? Coke, they argued, has just been singled out to further CSE’s own political agenda, exploiting the fact they were a foreign company to sway public opinion.