(Nation) building civic epistemologies around nuclear energy in India

ABSTRACT

Anti-nuclear activism demonstrates the significant challenges of uniting India under a shared ‘civic epistemology' – a modality of collective public reasoning that binds the state and polities together through institutionally mediated practices of vetting policy-relevant knowledge and expertise. This article argues that Indian nuclear politics is better understood through the lens of politico-epistemological upheaval instead of a shared civic epistemology, understood as a byproduct of hegemonic relations between the state and civil society. Civic epistemologies must account for the failures of the Indian bourgeoisie and state in achieving hegemony through nuclear nationalism, and contend with how coercive state power circumscribes consensual politics and is often directed towards subaltern groups ambivalently enrolled in India’s nation-building project. The ongoing political debilitation and sometimes death of activists who are deemed anti-state or anti-development underscore the need to construct socially robust processes of producing more just and inclusive civic epistemologies.

KEYWORDS:

• civic epistemologies
• anti-nuclear
• activism
• India

Introduction

The framework of civic epistemologies has been developed primarily from cases situated in Western liberal democracies to describe the highly institutionalized and patterned forms of contestation and deliberation through which publics and their representatives can make claims to the government about technological trajectories (Felt and Müller 2011; Miller 2008; Daemmrich 2004; Jasanoff 2005a). This body of work generally conceives of civic epistemologies as stable, socio-institutional forms of vetting policy-relevant knowledge that exist and persist in political cultures, and as such, has been successful in illuminating distinct national ‘styles’ of knowledge politics (Jasanoff 2005a). The dimensions along which variations of knowledge politics occur include: public accountability and the basis for trusting the state, how states demonstrate their legitimacy, how knowledge is represented as neutral and objective, what counts as authoritative expertise, and the visibility and openness of expert bodies to public scrutiny (Jasanoff 2005a). Yet, when civic epistemological criteria are transposed to explain controversies over contentious technologies in the low-middle income countries (LMICs), the framework does not always fit. Often, the markers of political culture and epistemological norms are not easily identifiable.

Anti-nuclear activism in India provides a productive case study to analyse the functioning, or not, of civic epistemologies in a postcolonial regulatory context. Over the past five odd decades, European and North American nuclear regulatory institutions have seen the development of culturally grounded civic epistemologies emerging from anti-nuclear activism (Haines 2019). The sometimes violent chains of actions and reactions between civil societies and nuclear states have evolved to a broader pattern of anchoring contestations into issues of risk and safety through technoscientific discourses, rather than talking about the fears of rising technocracy or internal colonization of rural areas to power urban cities (Haines 2019; Mehta 2005; Nelkin and Pollak 1980), nuclear experts and counterexperts began to privilege concerns over nuclear risk and safety that mobilized scientific expertise, at the expense of other forms of knowing (Wynne 2005; Wynne 1982). The focus on risk and safety has led to the rise of organizations like Greenpeace and the Union for Concerned Scientists (Nelkin and Pollak 1980), and practicing ‘biological citizenship’ by Ukranians in the aftermath of Chernobyl (Petryna 2002). Scientism in nuclear politics has also channelled concerns about the nuclear fallout in the American borderlands, where both weapons production and uranium mining existed side by side, into discourses of bodily and environmental risks as opposed to those mobilizing the injustices of longer histories of settler colonialism, inequality and cultural attachments to land (Masco 2006; Kuletz 1998). But what does anti-nuclear opposition look like in places where civil society challenges to nuclear power are not necessarily embedded in discourses of risk and safety, where scientific counterexperts are discredited, and where legitimate forms of making claims predominantly include mobilizing the logics of monetary compensation and livelihood rehabilitation?

The politics around nuclear energy in India illustrate that choreographing a civic epistemology between actors occupying different ontologies is a fraught, chaotic, and often coercive process, as mutual imaginaries of the states and citizens align and retreat. Through multi-sited ethnographies of sites of nuclear friction, including oral histories with veteran anti-nuclear activists, interviews with farmers, nuclear officials, activists and citizen scientists, as well as document collection and analysis, the aim of this article is to explore the different ontologies of anti- and pro-nuclear actors in India, with respect to their various knowledges, politics and identities, and how they are engaged in political-epistemological crossfire. The three major groups include subaltern groups invested in their compensation and rehabilitation for land being acquired for nuclear construction; elite Western-trained anti-nuclear activists focused on risk, safety and the erosion of democratic accountability; and the state concerned with geopolitical status and sustainable economic growth. Showing the various modes of evidencing and knowledge practices that are jockeying for recognition by and traction with the nuclear state lends credence to the argument that public reason in the Indian nuclear state is far too fractured to invoke a shared civic epistemology.

In showing the political-epistemological crossfire among these groups, I conclude that paying sole attention to the politics of scientific knowledge and expertise in technopolitical controversies involving regulatory contexts illuminates only a partial picture. As scientism constitutes the performative politics of liberal democratic states to exercise and maintain power on one hand (Foucault 1977), and to demonstrate public legitimacy on the other (Ezrahi 2012), science and scientism in governance have understandably shaped critique of the role of science in politics. STS and scholarship on Responsible Innovation boast a deep reservoir showing how science and technology are sites of politics, as well – whether showing the mutual constitution of science and democracy (Ezrahi 1990; Jasanoff 2005a), the existence of lay expertise (Wynne 1982), the machinations of creating objectivity in regulatory science (Hilgartner 2000), or showing the value of citizen participation in creating legitimate governance regimes (Sarewitz and Guston 2002). Still, the focus on science in this important work, such as unpacking the epistemological dimensions of controversies over emerging technologies (Parthasarathy 2007), diseases like AIDS (Epstein 1996), or the environment (Ottinger 2013), has led to perhaps a somewhat myopic view of the importance of science and scientific knowledge in governing technologies.

In what follows, I first sketch out India’s history as a pluralistic democracy and its particular challenges in crafting a common mode of public reason. To this end, I reflect upon Indian political theory that suggests the existence of two different groups—the ‘political society’ of the subaltern, and the ‘civil society’ of citizens and the elite (Chatterjee 2004). While I do not hold these demarcations to exist a priori, they are productive in thinking about the workings and failure of hegemony, where largely elite anti-nuclear activists seek to mobilize the predominantly rural subaltern groups who face nuclear infrastructure being built on their lands. In thinking of rural nuclear politics as politico-epistemic crossfire where public understandings of science are only tangential to securing consent and the legitimacy of the Indian state, I ask: What happens when the subaltern of the political society transgress their prescribed roles of negotiating monetary and livelihood compensation, and begin adopting rationalities of risk and safety that is the longstanding platform of urban, anti-nuclear activists of civil society? To answer this question, I draw from two discontiguous years of ethnographic field work, interviews and document analysis between 2010 and 2014 work in different discursive sites of India’s nuclear landscape, including anti-nuclear meetings and protests (Kolkata and Haripur [West Bengal], Ahmedabad [Gujarat], Madban [Maharashtra], Mithi Virdi [Gujarat], Idinthakarai [Tamil Nadu]); people’s science movement gatherings (Lucknow [Uttar Pradesh]; Chennai [Tamil Nadu]); pro-nuclear domestic meetings (Delhi), rural communities of nuclear power plant development including Haripur, Mithi Virdi, Madban, Idinthakarai, and uranium mining (Jadugoda, Meghalaya). Anti- and pro-nuclear experts, community members, scientists, activists, government officials and journalists were also interviewed leading to a total of over 40 individuals. Ethnographies and interviews were supplemented with archival news clippings from the Centre for Documentation and Education in Mumbai and Bangalore, parliamentary hearings, websites of various groups, policy documents, and gray literature. Subsequently, key themes and overarching narratives were elicited through interpretive discourse analysis. The next sections discuss the liberal democratic assumptions embedded into the concept of civic epistemologies, particularly the pre-eminence given to science as a mode of public reason.

Civic epistemologies and the public understanding of science

In an interview, Pravin Gawankar, a prosperous farmer and the late anti-nuclear leader of local protests in Madban, Maharashtra, recalling the police harassment and martial law his constituencies faced told me ‘To find democracy in India, you must use a flashlight’ (personal interview, March 2013). From Pravin Gawanker’s statement, it would be easy to conclude that India is emphatically not a democracy. In India’s nuclear politics, all protesting communities have been faced with various kinds of flagrant violations of human and civil rights (Haines 2019). People have been charged with waging war against the state, sedition and accused of being Naxalites during peaceful protests. Ration cards for milk, flour and oil have been taken away. Authorities have also confiscated passports of individuals who travel to the Middle East to work as laborers to send money back home (Haines 2019). Thus, to put it mildly, one problem for Indian democracy is that communities protesting nuclear energy are not thought of as citizens who possess rights, let alone policy-relevant knowledge.

While understanding forms of oppression and resistance have been the bread and butter of political science and sociology, scholars have intervened in theorizations of politics by unpacking the epistemic dimensions of such conflicts located in the generally off-limits area of scientific expertise and technology. In critiquing the relationship between politics and knowledge, these analyses have demonstrated the creative agency and knowledgability of diverse actors – not only experts – who have engaged, created and been shaped by the ideas, discourses and artifacts of science and technology. This is in opposition to the ‘cognitive deficit model’ grounded in narratives of the public understanding of science (PUS) (Wynne 1982). In PUS thinking, science is a unique kind of knowledge that gains its power and unassailability from ostensibly mirroring nature, and unmooring fact from the specificities of society and politics. The seeming universality of scientific knowledge, like religion, holds a unique status in its promises of providing people all over the world with the ability to view nature and reach the same conclusions about nature no matter a person’s subjectivity. Within the logic of PUS, there is a lay-experty binary, and a properly informed and knowledgeable citizenry should reach the same conclusions about science and technology, regardless of culture and national identity.

Civic epistemologies move away from the lay-expert binaries to show how cultural practices created those distinctions in the first place (Jasanoff 2005a; Collins and Evans 2007) and illuminates the situated nature of the production, evaluation, contestation and dissemination of scientific knowledge. The concept was developed through a comparative approach to explain why the publics and scientific experts of different nations, situated in their different political cultures reach different conclusions about the same technology, and as such, shifts attention away from the idea of universal objectivity, and towards the cultural contingency of expert, policy-relevant knowledge. Jasanoff (2005a) emphasizes the importance of nationally circulating political cultures that shape the modes of evidencing and trust that bind states and certain polities into a contract of mutual recognition and debate.

In liberal democratic nations where many of studies of science and democracy are situated, current scholarship on civic epistemologies is often predicated on the existence of arguably robust regulatory institutions (Felt, Fochler, and Winkler 2010; Bandhauer et al. 2007). While the recent years under the Trump presidency has tested the strength of American civic epistemology (Jasanoff and Simmet 2017), the following are considered to be the characteristics of the status quo: Relatively unblocked channels of knowledge flow – in culturally and politically structured ways – among different nodes of public engagement within the state, private sector, academia, media, non-profit organizations, and legal domains. Scholars value both consensus and opposition for democratic vibrancy, and advocate for the diversification of institutional sites of deliberation, representation, and participation (Dryzek 2010; Brown 2009; Kitcher 2011). Mature liberal democracies in North America and Europe that try to practice liberal ideas of individualistic citizenship and due process enjoy – at least, for non-marginalized and well-represented minority groups – relatively equal public spheres, and tend to have highly institutionalized forms of contestation, through which the public can make claims to the government about technological trajectories. Regulatory bodies, in turn, tend to respond to criticisms and concerns while attempting to maintain credibility with various publics through culturally appropriate registers of action (Hilgartner 2000; Jasanoff 1990; Ezrahi 1990). As such, the concept of civic epistemologies is a powerful framework for describing national variation in debating and implementing the same technologies in many Western liberal democracies (Miller 2008; Jasanoff 2005; Miller 2004). If civic epistemologies show national variations across cultural practices of evidencing shared by both citizens and regulatory bodies, it implies that the analyst views the relationships between science and politics are stable, at least for the time being.

In exacavting the liberal democratic assumptions of civic epistemologies it is worth underscoring what this means for thinking about the imputed relationship between the muddy entity called civil society and the regulatory state. Civic epistemologies the existence of what Antonio Gramsci described as the ‘integral state’ constituted of both civil society and the state, which are coproduced together (Gramsci 1971). In this view, the sphere of civil society is not independent from the state, but intricately constituted through and productive of the state to create hegemonic social relations, of which patterned ways of knowing are visible (Fonesca 2016). Further, the mutual co-constitution of civil society and the state are interconnected in ‘a network of social relations for the production of consent, for the integration of the subaltern classes into the expansive state project of historical development of the leading social group (Thomas 2009, 143). In other words, the bourgeoisie who hold political and epistemic power create the ‘necessary political fiction’ (Ezrahi 2012) that modern conceptions of individual freedom are accessible to marginalized groups, thus producing a consensual hegemony that benefit those in power. Civic epistemology, as the political-cultural manifestations of the epistemic relationships between the bourgeoisie and the regulatory state, is then another example of the hegemony of the state and civil society, where these relationships are ‘protected by the armour of coercion’ that is often rendered invisible (Fonesca 2016).

The visibility of coercion means that hegemony is far from perfect, where the relationship between science and politics might justifiably be viewed as inherently unstable and undermining of the concept of civic epistemologies. How might scholars grapple with contexts, such as in contemporary United States and India, where what constitutes legitimate modes of evidencing and objectivity in science and politics are not shared within citizenry, or between citizens and the state, as when the Indian government decides to build large-scale industrial development projects in rural areas, inhabited by communities with differing understandings of risk, knowledge and evidence? Such questions underscore how analysis through the lens of civic epistemologies is contingent upon a common belief amongst those in power of the ontological stability of PUS, which itself is predicated on a shared understanding of science, or at least the power to enforce compliance into a unitary understanding of the adjudication of science.

Subaltern challenges to nation-building civic epistemologies

That technology is the path to better social and economic futures is a mantra chanted by most of the world’s leaders, but arguably the loudest and with most persistence by those in India. In the view of India's Western-educated political and scientific elites of India, like the nation's first prime minister Jawaharlal Nehru and his close confidant and widely credited founder of the nuclear program, Homi Jehangir Bhabha, the successful emergence of India in 1947 rested on their ability to craft a double narrative of scientific and social progress, where investments in science and technology, along with a commitment to democracy, would generate novel institutions for economic production and redistribution, and catapult the nation from backwardness, poverty and religious foment into a uniquely Indian modernity of rationality, wealth and secularism (Chatterjee 1986; Prakash 1999). In the last three decades, however, the ends and means of science, technology and democracy have come under heavy fire in India’s civil society. Although the narrative of a mutually beneficial ‘social contract’ between science and public welfare enjoys persistent resurrection within India’s leaders and affluent classes (Mawdsley 2004; Gadgil and Guha 1995), it is considered dog-eared and worn by many who view the state as a perpetrator of violence – usually against the poor – through (and for) science and technology in the name of the public good (Nandy 1988; Visvanathan 1997; Shiva 1997). Indian democracy, too, is regarded as a ‘sham’ by many Indians who see democratic institutions and the bureaucracy it engenders as a system of oppression and disenfranchisement. India’s paramilitary operations against its own tribals, the persistence of widespread poverty, gender violence and illiteracy, and the support of India’s new industrial elites are seen as a failure of democracy to effect long-lasting social change. A key question, then, for a profoundly pluralist nation like India is how effectively it is able to generate civic epistemologies, which are the social and political processes through which diverse, competing technological visions of the future get made, critiqued, assessed, deliberated, and chosen in ways that comport with idealized democratic sensibilities about freedom, equality, justice, and the rule of the law.

In the world’s largest democracy, progressive scholars and activists highlight how those institutionalized knowledge channels for the disadvantaged can be experienced as clogged at best or non-existent at worst. Instead of more formalized and sanitized debate in state institutions, politics around both social and technological issues illustrate the pre-eminence of party politics with its practices of nepotism, favoritism, and corruption (Witsoe 2013; Haines 2019; Shiva 2017). Scholars studying Indian democracy argue that ideas of liberal citizenship gain little traction in political arguments when cultural citizenship—where, in a land of 1,600 languages, a person makes claims to the state through her identification with a particular culture in – is cultivated at the expense of a rights-based conception of social citizenship (Jayal 2013). Early efforts at political decentralization have failed to better link people to decision-making bodies, creating a political culture of brokers and dealers who act as patrons to client's interests, or ‘patronage democracy’, where upper caste members and other elites become instruments of dominant interests (Chandra 2004). Such kinds of ‘clientelistic representation’ reinforces narrow group identities within specific castes and languages, while compromising broader civic identities because of political practices and channels that weaken the link from civil society to the state (Heller 2013; Jayal 2013; Mahajan 1999; Mamdani 1996; Fox 1994). Indian democracy, then, as it is being practiced, appears neither to be liberal, where individual rights are guaranteed, nor communitarian, with its focus on collective public good (Leach, Scoones, and Wynne 2005), making the constitution of the Indian civic space fraught with contestation over who belongs in it and why.

The long history of scholarship in India and other post-colonial nations on the politics of the subaltern go far to critique the potential for national civic epistemologies by speaking more directly to those groups who are not represented in civic spaces – and indeed, how communities emerge, or not, as public. Scholars have argued that the hegemony of the (elite) civil society-state complex failed to enroll subaltern political formations into the nationalist project, and indeed there was dominance without hegemony (Jaffrelot 2003; Chatterjee 1986; Guha 1997). Partha Chatterjee (2004) perceives a division between ‘political’ and ‘civil’ society, where members of the former are only tenuously rights-bearing citizens who are treated as populations to be cared for, instead of citizens with guaranteed freedoms with access to civil-institutional forms of engagement with the state. In this formulation, those in civil society are seen as forwarding a liberal democratic vision of citizenship and democratic governance. In this vein, elite, urban-based anti-nuclear activists have long attempted to shape – and thereby constitute the Indian state – as one that would recognize nuclear expertise within civil society, instead of only legitimizing nuclear knowledge produced within its own institutional walls (Haines 2019). Rather than comport to the shared rationality desired by the state, where citizens would not question its nuclear expertise, decision-making or military logics, anti-nuclear activists have attempted to cultivate different ‘credibility economies’ with the state to install themselves as credible nuclear counter experts in their own right, who are knowledgeable about human and environmental risks of nuclear power. Moreover, such attempts were, and continue to be, mediated through nationally recognizable institutions such as the court system, nationally-circulating newspapers and academic institutions (Haines 2019).

Yet the rationalities structuring the relationship between political society and the Indian state are not reflected in these institutionally mediated relationships. Political society has long been thought of as qualitatively ‘different’ from its civil society counterpart. Dipesh Chakrabarty (2000) writes about how the subaltern, particularly peasants, express themselves in protest, usually violently, by drawing on discourses on caste, religion, ethnicity and kinship, rather than recognized modes of ‘rationality’. Although peasant insurgencies were previously thought to be pre-political by British Marxists working on so-called histories from below, subaltern theorists view peasant protests as a realm of politics separate and apart from the elite politics of civil society that are generally confined to government institutions. Fraser (1990) discusses how the formation of ‘subaltern counterpublics’ can undermine dominant structures of power and privilege. In drawing attention to huge inequalities in political power, Chatterjee (1986), Chakrabarty (2000) and Fraser (1990) implicitly critique the nation-building project in terms of the state’s capacity to enroll and include its population and transform them into citizens. Indeed, the relationship the state has built with its subaltern, particularly in rural communities slated for nuclear development, has been one of welfare provision. In this case, the only relationship desired by the state, and often its political society citizens, is one of handsome compensation and rehabilitation for land being purchased for nuclear reactors (Haines 2019).

Still, in these kinds of projects where the Indian government builds large-scale energy projects in rural areas, the boundaries between the civil and political spheres can grow porous. Throughout India’s post-colonial history, epistemic and indeed, ontological, battle lines have been drawn and redrawn, usually between the state and citizens, around large-scale industrial projects like hydroelectric dams, to mete out, sometimes violently, constitutional questions. How will rights, responsibilities and resources be distributed? What public goods and whose ideas of public well-being will gain currency? Which constellations of power are stabilized? Whose identities are recognized? What does it mean to be a citizen, and who can practice citizenship and how? These questions are answered through political-economic and cultural processes of purification that delineate and re-inscribe who belongs where. Yet, the marginalized of political society and the privileged of the civil society are not primordial characters, but are created and interpellated into these sociopolitical domains. As I will show below, as elite anti-nuclear activists attempt to translate subaltern groups, who are traditionally focused on monetary compensation and rehabilitation, into full-fledged anti-nuclear activists who are focused on risk and safety, activists of all stripes can get caught in the middle of the epistemic crossfire that ensues, and suffer as a result.

The extent of cohesive national civic epistemologies, then, implicates the extent of institutional nation-building and the role of science in this project. Although nation-building is always a work in progress, always a ‘democracy to come’ (Derrida 2005), patterned forms of national civic epistemologies emerge along with the sedimentation of democratic institutions, its knowledge production practices and relationships to publics. In work that attempts to define the contours of civic epistemology in developmental states (e.g. Tironi, Salazar, and Valenzuela 2013; Jasanoff 2005b), the difficulty in categorizing the registers of the politics of knowledge – objectivity, demonstrations, practices, and modes of expertise – allude to the incompleteness of the nation-building project. But the national character of civic epistemologies has been sidestepped in recent literature, which focuses on local civic epistemologies within grassroots organizations (Mendez 2016), or the existence of hybrid epistemologies in nations (Tironi, Salazar, and Valenzuela 2013). Although the existence of local civic epistemologies cannot be denied, what is more intriguing is whether and how these local epistemologies filter up to the national level, and if they get lost along the way.

Civic epistemologies, then, are not naturally occurring phenomena but rather must be socially constructed and made to work across widely divergent domains ranging from conversations at roadside dhabas and coffee shops to public protests and the civic square to the media and national policy-making. Assembling such epistemologies over time is a complex, lengthy, and politically fraught process, even in advanced industrial democracies, let alone in places where democracy remains fragile as scholars such as Ezrahi (1990, 1996) and Jasanoff (1990) have demonstrated. Yet, they are absolutely critical to the possibility of democracy in today’s technological world (Miller 2004).

If the already-complicated and frayed socio-political fabric is asked to accommodate an esoteric and shielded technology like nuclear power (Abraham 1998; Winner 1980) the political and cultural dynamics that ensue shed light on how civic and political spaces are being constituted (Nelkin and Pollak 1980). Nuclear power in India, as in many other nations, has been protected from public scrutiny since its inception on the heels of Independence under the aegis of the Department of Atomic Energy (DAE) formed in 1948. The minimal allowance of parliamentary scrutiny has been largely performative and has not translated to effective oversight (Ramana 2012). The amoebic civic space that expands and contracts around different publics and issues in India has been non-existent for nuclear energy. Even India’s 1998 nuclear weapons testing nucleated a small civic sphere of urban, elite activists around opposing nuclear power, such as the Coalition for Nuclear Disarmament and Peace (CNDP), which began creating transnational linkages to other anti-nuclear activists, such as in Pakistan, and became signatories to the South Asia Against Nukes and proponents of creating a South Asia nuclear weapons free zone (Vanaik 2013, personal interview). Yet most criticisms of the most prized and heavily invested symbol of hyper-modernity and energy and economic security (Abraham 1998; Anderson 2010) in the nuclear state largely fell on deaf ears, albeit leading to some efforts to perform public legitimacy by making a few pieces of information online (Kaur 2009). As political scientist and affiliate of CNDP, Achin Vanaik, wryly noted, ‘We are more like a mild irritant to the state’ (Vanaik 2013, personal interview).

India has seen a history of largely unsuccessful rural mobilization against nuclear development in the 1980s and 90s, with successes confined to the state of Kerala where agricultural land was not a point of contention, and scientific and political elites were able to mobilize both science and politics to put pressure on a pro-nuclear state government that was at risk of losing elections (Haines 2019). But times have changed after the US-India nuclear deal of 2008; the Central government’s aggressive nuclear expansion into productive farmlands in the countryside to site and build new nuclear reactors from the US, Russia and France; and the Fukushima nuclear disaster that followed three years later. New rural participants, from mostly lower-class/caste farming, fishing and mining communities have begun to oppose the Central government’s nuclear vision, and have begun to openly criticize nuclear energy for being destructive to land, livelihood and cultural cohesion, which are the timeless critiques against large-scale development projects such as big dams in India.

But through alternately sporadic and sustained engagements with urban-based elite activists, villagers have also begun to oppose nuclear power on environmental and human health grounds, and increasingly, have portrayed nuclear power as anathema to democracy. Whether and how both registers and content of criticism travel to the national public sphere, enroll a wider public, and impact nuclear policy remains to be seen, especially when most Indian social movements have failed to create substantive change at the national level, with some even beginning to shun engagement with the state altogether, favoring an ‘anarcho-communitarian’ turn (Heller 2009; Bardhan 1999). How might scholars show the limits of and even reconceptualize the notion of civic epistemologies as an analytical category where social groups are not well connected to the state, and moreover, occupy different ontological spaces in which there is hardly any collectively shared experience of reality, let alone knowledge about it? In these murky and politically turbulent waters, Indian democracy is not illuminated through the invocation of stable sociotechnical domains, but through an attention to the uneven constitution of public spaces and epistemic politics vis-à-vis the contestations over nuclear power between different polities and the Indian state—that is, how the Indian nation is being imagined and built, by whom, and through what kinds of politico-epistemic practices.

The lens of politici-epistemological crossfire undermines civic epistemology, as it exposes the heterogeneity of cultural understandings of science, and its relationship to the state. Wide variability in sense-making and knowledge production preclude the existence of a singual civic epistemology, or singular modes of how publics might understand science. The instability of science as a mode of politics and activism reveal other commitments and values that are hidden within science, such as differing ideas of whether democracy should be liberal or suffused with patronage politics, or whether or not national development should be at the expense of rural communities, and whether India should pursue nuclear development to begin, or whether simply giving monetary compensation to rural communities displaced by nuclear land grabs is enough to compensate for cultural values attached to land, or if religious-affiliation matters in who might benefit from the nuclear state. In short, politico-epistemological crossfire speaks not to frameworks that either valorize or discredit public understandings of science or PUS, but rather how the state deploys particular normative ideals about what the proper public understanding of democracy, development, lived experience, religion, as well as science should be.

Epistemological crossfire in India’s nuclear energy landscape

Despite its technical and technocratic nature, debates around nuclear power in India are not fought on scientific grounds, and little scientific knowledge is produced on either pro-, or anti-nuclear sides. Cultural, political and moral arguments that either criticize or support nuclear power are not hidden beneath a thick veneer of apolitical scientism—the exercise of power, or its absence, is readily visible. Yet, there are a handful of anti-nuclear citizen scientists who attempt to actively produce original studies in support of the anti-nuclear cause. Since the 1990s, a wife and husband scientist team, Drs. Sanghamitra and Surendra Gadekar, have conducted epidemiological surveys (Gadekar and Gadekar 2013, personal interview) of a nuclear power plant in Rawatbhata ¹ in Rajasthan in 1993, and an existing uranium mining colony in Jadugora in the state of Jharkhand (then Bihar) in 2004. Other citizen scientists such as V. T. Padmanabhan have performed epidemiological surveys of communities living in areas of naturally occurring high levels of background radiation on the Kerala coast (Padmanabhan et al. 2004). Dr. V. Pugalzenthi has performed epidemiological studies of the Kalpakkam nuclear reactor in Tamil Nadu (Amnesty International 2011). Both Padmanabhan and Pugalzenthi have ferreted out from Google-translated Russian documents that the Russian parts used for the Koodankulam nuclear power plant in Tamil Nadu was substandard. M. V. Ramana, a physicist now at Princeton, has delved into the economics of nuclear power production and nuclear waste storage, and wrote the book The Power of Promise: Examining Nuclear Energy in India (Ramana 2012). Yet none of these kinds of scientific and technical knowledge production travel very far from the point of origin.

Citizen science appears to be able to prompt government response when activists’ claims are legitimized by respectable, august institutions. For example, in 2013, Dr. V. Pugalzenthi inquired why the Atomic Energy Regulatory Board (AERB) had not conducted bathymetric surveys on India’s southeastern coast following the 2004 tsunami after the Smithsonian's Global Volcanism Program (GVP) released a document stating that there was an undersea volcano reported in 1757 (Janardhanan 2013), which was later used by the International Atomic Energy Agency (Jesudasan 2015). Arguably, the symbolic and epistemic capital of the Smithsonian compelled the AERB to commission a study by the National Geophysical Research Institute (NGRI) to perform bathymetric surveys off of the coast of Puducherry in southeastern India. When the NGRI found no evidence, they contacted the GVP, which keeps historical records of volcanoes in the Holocene, to remove it from its records. The GVP obliged (Jesudasan 2015).

All of the citizen scientists that were interviewed bemoan the absence of an audience for their scientific knowledge within either the nuclear establishment or the anti-nuclear movement. Dr. Surendra Gadekar has repeatedly complained that although his Gandhi ashram in Gujarat has extensive libraries full of research and writings on nuclear power, no one in the urban anti-nuclear movement has shown interest in scientific arguments, and would rather rely on moral and political criticisms (Gadekar and Gadekar 2013, personal interview). Similarly to how citizen scientists feel little engagement with civilians or ‘the people’, citizen scientists also gain little traction with the nuclear establishment. After the Gadekar’s epidemiological study of the uranium mining colony of Jadugoda, the Uranium Corporation of India, Limited, conducted their own study and said there were no statistical anomalies, and any diseases were related to excessive alcohol consumption and lack of hygiene. The Department of Atomic Energy (DAE) has closely monitored nuclear knowledge since its inception. Public universities have only recently allowed to study nuclear matters, but only in a symbolic and performative manner. In the area of activism, the Right to Information Act (RTI) of 2005 is an uneven aid in activists’ attempts to secure nuclear information; nuclear authorities have claimed immunity on the grounds of national security, and the RTI appellate has upheld their claims to secrecy. Indeed, Kaur (2009) writes about how activists’ access to information through the RTI is contingent on who happens to be the gatekeeper, where sometimes drips and drabs of otherwise tightly monitored information will be leaked out. This rigid patrol of knowledge borders persists in the DAE’s interactions with citizen scientists, with whom it is now compelled to engage following vocal criticism after Fukushima. The interviewed citizen scientists who participated in invited debates with the nuclear establishment report how the ‘debates’ are staged so that follow-up questions cannot be asked, or references of studies sought. These invited spaces resemble the rituals of rationality observed by Brian Wynne (1982) during the Windscale inquiry in Britain, and as such are performative structured encounters of deliberation, rather than mutually transformative engagement.

Very few of those rural communities who are clamoring to enter the public sphere are won over by scientific reasoning, as much as by moral claims based on lived experience of livelihood and environmental destruction, and cultural degradation. Public deliberations regarding environmental impact assessments (EIA) over slated nuclear power plants provide an example of the kinds of interactions—and dissonance – between nuclear officials and villagers. Political manipulations consist of publishing EIAs only in English, rather than the vernacular; of distributing 800-page documents only three days before the hearing, at least in the case of the EIA on the Jaitapur nuclear power plant in the state of Maharashtra as claimed by local activists (Praveen Gawankar 2013, personal interview); mandating that no ‘outsiders’, including activists from neighboring districts or Indian NGOs are allowed entry; and that the public hearing is only for the public to hear nuclear officials speak. Aside from overt orchestration, the proceedings themselves allude to epistemological, and even ontological, dissonance. Praveen Gawankar, a local anti-nuclear leader, recounted what transpired during the public hearing of the EIA (Gawankar, personal interview, 2013). He observed that when fishermen ask about the non-monetized value of their land and cultural identity, nuclear officials dismiss the question by claiming they already answered that question in the report. Yet, when one turns to the EIA, there is only a numerical table summarizing fishing hauls. When officials claim that the heated effluent water will not harm fish and show ‘glossy charts’ to prove this, fishermen respond with embodied knowledge stating that they can simply put their hands into the water to estimate the temperature and know whether the fish will be harmed (Gawankar 2013, personal interview). Even though nuclear officials proclaim their expertise, their demonstration practices are not legitimate in the eyes of villagers, who view the public hearing as a space for testimonials and generating empathy for their plight through moral arguments, as much as a deliberative space to debate the technicalities of whether or not the reactor should be built. As such, the EIA public hearings have become another regulatory ritual to perform, another box to check off, rather than substantive engagement. Increasingly, almost all EIA public hearings over nuclear development after 2012 are being boycotted by villagers and activists all over India who view the proceedings as farce in which they no longer wish to participate.

Nowhere is moral knowledge better deployed than during street protests, marches and rallies. The Tamil fishing village of Idinthakarai at the southernmost tip of India began protesting the nearly built Koodankulam nuclear power plant after Fukushima, and they continue their opposition to this day. The protesting villagers, mainly comprised of women, oppose the nuclear power plant on grounds that the heated effluent water from the reactor will destroy their livelihoods, that nearby thorium mining gives them high rates of cancer, and increasingly, that nuclear energy is anathema to democracy. Although they have become poster children of Gandhian activism, garnering support from intellectuals such as Noam Chomsky, Arundhati Roy and other international figures, their moral claims have little currency with the broader public, the nuclear establishment, and even within the anti-nuclear movement.

The anti-nuclear movement has an ambivalent relationship to moral claims. The national face of the anti-nuclear movement, embodied in the CNDP, remained a fringe effort in the eyes of the Central government. The educated elites who fill the ranks of CNDP seek to convince the state and its supporters to abandon its quest for nuclear weapons by staging public marches, demonstrations, rallies, writing against the ‘nuclear option’ through a variety of English-media outlets, as well as convening and participating in national and international conferences and workshops. Only in 2010, with the attrition of Communist members who supported nuclear power’s civilian instantiation, did CNDP publish a resolution that it would oppose nuclear energy in addition to the bomb. Yet, the kinds of livelihood concerns introduced by villagers were slow to percolate through the primarily peace and environmental movement. Now, most urban activists view the villagers of Idinthakkarai, in the anti-Koodankulam struggle as a powerful symbol, but not necessarily as a knowledgable participant in nuclear debates.

For example, one activist, Anitha S, recorded unedited interviews with the women of Koodankulam about their ideas of nuclear energy, their hopes and fears, and published these interviews as a widely publicized book, No: Echoes Koodankulam (Anitha 2012). After speaking to several activists in confidence during interviews, one could surmise that several anti-nuclear scientists were privately embarrassed by this book and wished it had not been written, because it just proved ‘the people were not scientifically minded’ like the nuclear establishment already suspected (personal interview, anti-nuclear scientist). More telling is the example of the People’s Charter On Nuclear Energy Summit held in Ahmedabad, Gujarat, in July 2013, organized by CNDP, which I was able to attend, observe and participate in. As was conveyed to me by the organizer, Kumar Sundaram, the goal of the summit was to produce a ‘People’s Charter on Nuclear Energy’ (whether it should be ‘on’ nuclear energy or ‘against’ nuclear energy was one of the matters debated). There were representatives from numerous protests around India, and all had a chance to express their thoughts, which ranged about issues of livelihood destruction, to ecological devastation, to the dangers of foreign direct investment and the growth of Wal Mart in India. Although diverse opinions were raised, when it came to writing the charter, panel members produced a draft pre-written by one the leading, long-time anti-nuclear activists, Praful Bidwai. There was a chance to pose questions to the all-male panel comprised of urban, elite activists, but ultimately, behind closed doors (to which I had access), the charter was edited cosmetically, taking into greater consideration the opinions of the panel of men present. The next day, during the unveiling of the charter, which repeated the same narrow nuclear exceptionalistic framings, women from Idinthakarai were part of the panel, and their photographs were taken holding the charter, even though they only had a symbolic role in its creation.

In the legal domain of the constellation of nuclear-related knowledge, the Supreme and High Courts have consistently upheld the expertise of the nuclear establishment, in the handful of cases they have adjudicated. Two cases exemplify this stance: the case of Irish butter and the prosecution of Manoj Mishra. In the first case of Shivrao Shantaram Wagle (Dr.) v. Union of India (1988), Dr. Wagle and two others filed a public interest litigation (PIL) against India in the Bombay High Court alleging that India had imported 200 metric tons of butter from Ireland, and that is was contaminated from the radioactive nuclear fallout from the Chernobyl accident. The case advanced to the Supreme court, where the Court appointed an expert committee from the Department of Atomic Energy to assess the safety of the butter. The expert committee declared the butter safe and the case was dismissed. The Court stated:

We are satisfied that the best scientific brain available in the country has applied itself to the question … Having regard to the magnitude, complexity and technical nature of the enquiry involved in the matter and keeping in view the far-reaching implications of the total ban of certain medicines for which the petitioner has prayed, we must at the outset clearly indicate that a judicial proceeding of the nature initiated is not an appropriate one for determination of such matters.

The Court thus effectively recused itself from adjudicating nuclear matters because it was thought to be purely technical and the domain of the state’s nuclear experts who would be better able to determine the technoscientific merits of the case.

In the second case of Manoj H. Mishra vs Union Of India, the Department of Atomic Energy clearly defined their ideas of who could be a hero and a villain. On June 15–16 1994, heavy rains in southern parts of the state of Gujarat flooded the Kakrapar Atomic Power Plant. Workers had to swim in chest-high waters to get to work. Floodwaters had carried away canisters of radioactive waste and it is uncertain if they were ever recovered. The control room, as well as other parts of the reactor complex, was inaccessible due to flooding, and equipment in the turbine building, including the water pumps used to cool the reactor core, were submerged. Luckily, the reactor had already been shut down because of a major fire at a sister plant and was awaiting inspection of the turbine blades. The foreman of the plant, Manoj Mishra, recalled all of this during an interview of the near disaster, which was subsequently published in the regional newspapers, such as the Gujarat Samachar (Ramana 2012; Gadekar 1994). For this breach of trust, the Nuclear Power Corporation of India, Limited fired Mishra in 1996. Mishra has been fighting this wrongful termination in the courts, and it even reached the Supreme Court in 2007. I quote it here, which discusses the characteristics of an ‘ideal’ whistleblower and how Mishra does not fit that mold:

In our opinion, the aforesaid observations are of no avail to the appellant … the appellant is educated only up to 12th standard. He is neither an engineer, nor an expert on the functioning of the Atomic Energy Plants. Apart from being an insider, the appellant did not fulfill the criteria for being granted the status of a whistle blower.

From the above quote, Mishra could not possibly be a whistleblower because his education ended at 12th grade. Moreover, the Court does not recognize Mishra as an insider, a necessary characteristic of a whistleblower, even though Mishra worked for the nuclear authorities. That, in the eyes of the Court, he was an on-the-ground laborer, and not someone in the upper echelons of the nuclear knowledge economy performing intellectual and scientific work, someone like Mishra could not possibly know enough to blow the whistle on anything. Moreover, in the view of the Court, there were proper channels that Mishra could have pursued rather than seeking to make the case of ineptitude known to the external media. That Mishra’s liminal positionality foreclosed his option of following due process and reporting to senior officials, where he would not be taken seriously, was not admitted into the Court’s understanding of the hierarchy of a nuclear knowledge economy and how it intersects with procedures for establishing accountability.

The two cases of Irish butter and Manoj Mishra show how India’s legal apparatus has policed the boundaries of knowledge production and in doing so, who is considered a credible participant in the civic space and with what kinds of expertise. The Irish butter case illustrates that the Supreme Court thought that the legal domain was not a place to adjudicate scientific knowledge and left the nuclear establishment’s expertise intact. In the second case, the idea that Mishra, because of his limited education cannot be a whistleblower, shows how the Supreme Court protects civic spaces from interlopers, who, in their brief brush with civic society are once more obscured in subalterneity.

Conclusion: subaltern casualties of epistemological crossfire

For the Indian government, the ideal citizen is passive, only politically active during elections, does not meddle in scientific and technological matters, and moreover, subscribes to dominant interpretations of lived experience as gleaned from cost benefit analysis and probabilistic risk assessments (Haines 2019). And indeed, many middle-class Indians, who already enjoy representation in the civic space, share this techno-economic nationalism (Hansen 1999; Fernandes 2006) as they are already coproduced as part of Gramsci’s integral state (Chatterjee 2004). Thus, both the construction of the civic space of who is included and how one is represented is inextricably tied to the particulars of the politics of knowledge that make inclusion possible for some, but not others. But the painstaking and painful nation-building process the Indian state and polity have undertaken since Independence to include subaltern groups into a shared epistemology is still underway in their combined, often antagonistic, efforts to create the kinds of citizens, politics, and economy they desire. To put it mildly, the meaning and form of Indian democracy is still very much a work in progress, especially in light of recent events such as ratifying an amendment to the Citizenship Act of 1955 in Indian Constitution, which had allowed a path to citizenship for religious minorities (Haines and Sarkar 2020). The Citizenship Amendment Act (CAA) of 2019 now exclude Muslims, and has been prefigured by the creation of detention centres in northeast India, (already porous to its neighboring Muslim majority state, Bangladesh) and in Kashmir. The nonliberal, Hindu fundamentalist turn of Indian democracy, now avowedly nonsecular, with reports of violence and extrajudicial killings, demonstrates how democracy emphatically does not follow the linear, teleological path of progress, with liberal democracy, economic development and inequality reduction at the end. Rather, democracy in India travels aa jagged, circuitous trail of both epic and mundane battles being fought within the public sphere and between citizens and government officials, over whose and what kinds of knowledge should count in imagining and managing technological trajectories, and what responsibilities the government should have towards its citizens, and indeed, the meaning of citizenship, when individual rights are frequently flouted.

In India’s nuclear landscape subaltern groups attempt to pry open civic spaces and gain entry into highly technocratic and nationalistic domains. In these contests, the techno-economic rationale of the nuclear establishment against which the state measures all criticisms clashes with scientific argumentation of citizen scientists, as well as the moral and political registers of producing and validating knowledge made by villagers. Moreover, techno-economic rationales of the state often hide far-reaching political assumptions. The notion of civic epistemologies is premised on hidden and implicit values that have already been sedimented into national institutional structures, norms and discourses of science and technology. Yet in India, the stature of science has been self-evident to only a certain group of people, namely the elite and middle-classes, who have held on, time and time again, to political power. The practices, institutional forms and discourses of how to adjudicate science and technology are open and malleable to interpretation and politicization. In other words, whereas many American polities debate ‘good’ and ‘bad’ science and seek to restore science as a depoliticized grammer of adjudicating deeply political questions (Brown 2009; Kinchy and Kleinman 2005), Indian publics who are outside of the hegemony of the state and civil society do not necessarily see science as an apolitical tool, but rather an inherently political proxy for broader social and political concerns, as evidenced by the frustrations of subaltern communities trying to navigate state-sanctioned nuclear science and procedures through moral claims of being inordinately burdened with nuclear risks, even as they are thought of as scientifically illiterate.

Although epistemological crossfire is a manifestation of nation-building as communities imagine futures for themselves and India, and actively work towards making concrete their imaginaries, what is at stake is how the dust settles, and who the casualties are. Creating a more cohesive – and inclusive – national civic epistemology will entail reception of subaltern imaginaries into the broader public sphere through a more reflexive and humble politics of knowledge, where the diverse and contradictory suite of technical, economic, moral, humanitarian and political arguments for or against nuclear energy in India not only co-exist, but interact in mutually transformative ways. Achieving such a robust ecology of epistemologies means creating knowledges that can travel far from the source. No one needs to necessarily agree on the modes of argumentation; but everyone must agree to be open to surprise and mutual transformation, as scholars of responsible innovation have discussed (c.f. Blok 2014; Stilgoe, Owen, and Macnaghten 2013; Von Schomberg 2013). Yet, thus far, all evidence points toward the reality that the political economy of nuclear knowledge-making may foreclose these kinds of mutually transformative phenomenon from taking root at larger scales.

Acknowledgements

Thanks to Amita Bhaviskar, M. V. Ramana, Erik Fisher and Shannon Conley for their generous and helpful feedback

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes on contributor

Monamie Bhadra Haines is an assistant professor in global science and technology studies at Nanyang Technological University. Prior to this position she was an American Council of Learned Societies postdoctoral fellow in global science and technology studies at The Ohio State University.

Notes

1 Author photocopied and digitally scanned the epidemiological study document, which is available upon request.