[The Kudankulam movement unlike those in some other parts of India where plants were being set up was not of the “not in my backyard” type but represented a total rejection everywhere of the nuclear energy programme. Therefore it could not be bought off while its example was always more threatening to the nuclear elite. This book is a story of that struggle, its ups and downs, its successes and failures but also carries more general lessons not just for anti-nuclear movements elsewhere but for all struggles for justice whether related to energy, environment, health, civil liberties, political democratisation. There is an intrinsic connection between the civilian and military side of nuclearism especially in India. The review ends with some reflections on this count.]
Today, civilian nuclear energy is widely seen as the single greatest failure of the industrial era. From a global peak of 17% electricity production (mid-1990s) it is now 10% and shrinking further as more existing reactors complete their life spans (despite unwarranted extensions) than new reactors being commissioned. India began its civilian nuclear electricity generation programme in the 1960s but today produces a meagre 4300 MW. So why despite this dismal history is India still pushing civilian nuclear expansion? India’s weapons programme (the bomb tests of 1974 and 1998) came out of its dual-use civilian side. The Security Establishment’s hunger to now expand its nuclear weapons arsenal and delivery systems therefore has always required an alliance with the top scientific personnel of the Department of Atomic Energy (DAE) as well as with the Nuclear Power Corporation of India Limited (NPCIL) whose own self-validating ambitions also require energy expansion through collaborations with big foreign exporters and potential private Indian partners all aiming to make huge profits because no civilian nuclear programme anywhere functions without receiving massive direct/indirect cost subsidies from the public exchequer.
It is in this context that we now have in this book the single best study of a remarkable popular struggle against the Indo-Russian project of constructing and operating nuclear power plants at Kudankulam, South India that off and on stretched from 1988 (post-1986 Chernobyl) to its culmination between 2011 (post-Fukushima) and mid-2014 when it finally faded outFootnote1 What made this movement unique? Not only did it take place in a developing country lasting as long as it did but involved mass mobilization of the poorest sections (fisher folk, labourers and small farmers) with huge participation by women with their children. The author, in an amazing labour of love over several years and visits, has researched and put together all facets of this struggle duly revealing thereby the various duplicities of the atomic energy establishment and the state government of Tamil Nadu, both backed by the Centre. The authorities never set up a completely uninhabited sterilization zone (within a 5 km radius) or a further minimally populated penumbra (30 km radius) around the plants. Emergency evacuation plans were never shared or put into practice with the public. Safety, health and environmental worries and concerns were dismissed so citizens groups including experts were formed to dig out the facts and educate people on these fronts as well as on the effects of monazite sand mining nearby. All this helped create a mass movement led by local Gandhian-inspired social activists (not the only but the best known was S.P. Udaykumar) who by 2001 founded the broader Peoples Movement Against Nuclear Energy (PMANE). Civil disobedience tactics included hunger and relay fasts, processions including in September 2012 thousands marching to the sea shore to surround the plant walls and forming human chains up to the waist in the sea. There was for many months an occupation of the central square in Idinthikarai village, the epi-centre of the resistance. Repression by police and paramilitary caused a few deaths, many injuries and made Idinthikarai an open jail denying entry or exit and blocking outside supplies of essential foodstuffs and fuel. Overall, till the final ebbing of the movement in mid-2014, some 55,000 people were criminally charged, with over 9000 people accused of “sedition” and/or “waging or abetting war against the state”. Never in India’s independence history has any single event resulted in such a huge number of extreme charges carrying the death penalty or life imprisonment despite its completely peaceful character.
The text is all the richer for the author’s determination wherever possible to connect her narrative to wider, and yes, more academic discourses concerning “cultures of resistance”, the “anthropology of development”, matters of “governmentality”, “surveillance democracy” and of course “nuclear nationalism”. In regard to the last named, some independent reflections by this reviewer on the weapons dimension may not be amiss. India went openly nuclear in 1998, faced immediate sanctions from the US-led West and Japan but over time diplomatically reassured the United States that it was on its side. Hence the Indo-US Nuclear Deal negotiated between 2005 and 2008 removed sanctions and gave India de facto recognition as a nuclear weapons state (NWS). In return, India forged a continuing strategic partnership with the United States, promised big foreign companies in the field lucrative investment deals in different sites, and brought its civilian programme under international safeguards. Since India’s reserves of uranium are mostly low-grade, it needs this to make warheads while requiring imports of fissile materials and equipment for the civilian sector. This was made possible when US pressure in 2008 on recalcitrant New Zealand, Ireland, Austria, Switzerland enabled a “clean waiver” in the Nuclear Suppliers Group (NSG) for India to trade with its member countries thus freeing development of both Indian nuclear “wings”.
It bears remembering that the NSG was set up in 1975 precisely because in 1974 India made its first bomb test violating its commitments not to ever use Canadian and US aided civilian programme facilities. The Unites States accepts Pakistan as an NWS but compared to India it is not similarly favoured. North Korea and non-nuclear Iran are outlaws. But then isn’t hypocrisy central to sustaining the non-proliferation regime.
India’s two face-offs with Pakistan and China make South Asia the world’s most dangerous nuclear flashpoint as countries go in for more warheads and triadic delivery platforms. A strong Indian nuclear disarmament movement requires what it does not yet have – large sections of the middle classes that are anti-bomb rather than glorifying it for building a “Strong India”. The Kudankulam movement though primarily focused against energy always clearly stood against nuclear militarism. There is much that others in India and elsewhere can still learn from it.
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Achin Vanaik
Achin Vanaik is a Retired Professor of “International Relation and Global Politics”, University of Delhi. He is the author of several books ranging from studies of Indian foreign policy, on political economy, matters concerning religion, secularism and communalism as well as on nuclear politics, regional and global. Along with the late Praful Bidwai he was awarded the “Sean MacBride International Peace Prize” for the year 2000 given by the International Peace Bureau.
Notes
1 The 1988 proposal to set up two Russian VVER reactors in Kudankulam got stalled because of subsequent Soviet collapse and plans only reviving in 1998 after which construction started with one reactor about to go critical in 2011 and further agreements made to build six more such reactors..