Disaster Scripting in India’s Nuclear Energy Landscape”

Monamie Bhadra
Arizona State University
Monamie.Bhadra@asu.edu

Introduction

Following the historic US-India nuclear deal of 2008, and the tragedy of Fukushima three years later, India is now afire with protests against Prime Minister Singh’s decision to accelerate the development of its nuclear energy infrastructure through foreign investment (Visvanathan 2012). Protests echo age-old anxieties of livelihood protection, land tenure and distribution, sovereignty over resources, independence from foreign economic forces, the continuity of community and shared identity, as well as with the more prosaic concerns of risk and safety. To analytically hold still and make legible the perpetually shifting anti-nuclear landscape of India is challenging. Geographically, politically and institutionally decentralized and tenuously linked, Indians opposing nuclear energy operate on multiple political, cultural and epistemic registers. With contradictory motives for opposition, activists advance competing visions of what constitutes proper development, health, and the public good. Engagements with the Indian bureaucracy and the nuclear establishment occur at various levels and locales, including courts, academic seminars, public hearings of environmental impact assessments, marches, police stations, and encounters with scientists surveying the land and water. Even the nuclear reactor technologies activists oppose vary from place to place, with one kind of reactor purchased from the United States in Gujarat, another set of French European pressurised reactors for the nuclear park in Maharashtra, and the addition of yet more Russian reactors to an existing facility in Tamil Nadu.

With such complexity and dynamism in anti-nuclear activities, the conceptual frameworks of STS with which to understand the co-constitution of science and democracy in India—constructions of “civic epistemologies,” ideals of the public sphere, Western notions of deliberation and public reason, for example—are woefully inadequate to understand the bewildering milieu of anti-nuclear protests and government responses.[i] After completing 3 months of fieldwork, I draw from post-colonial theory, anthropology and STS to propose “disaster scripting” to help explain the dynamics I observe through an ethnographic exploration of the contestations within and between India’s heterogeneous anti-nuclear movement and India’s nuclear establishment.

Why think in terms of disaster when no nuclear disaster has occurred in India, and hopefully never will? A disaster lens allows exploration of two related phenomena. First, a disaster lens can help understand why primarily rural communities in India are mobilized in anticipation of technology induced-disasters, how they imagine future catastrophe, and what they are doing to avert it. Second, bringing disaster into conversation with democracy allows for a more nuanced theorization of democratic politics around technoscience in non-Western nations by focusing on both the contestation of facts as well as the messy and dirty world of power politics—two domains that become glaringly exposed during disasters. In STS several studies of democracy that focus on advisory committees, regulatory institutions and citizen science, the political machinations are bracketed off as crude politics. But in nations, like India, were dirty politics is the norm, and deliberations based on “facts” are absent even in highly technical domains, it is crucial to develop a culturally-attuned theorization of democracy, without simply dismissing India as a shallow, transitional democracy on its way to becoming more liberal like its Western counterparts.

Thus, to use the lens of disaster to understand India’s anti-nuclear activism means decoupling “liberal” and “democracy” and to think of democracy as simply “rule of the people,” as Jeffrey Witsoe (2011) proposes in his ethnographic work on postcolonial democracy in Bihar. Next, Kim Fortun’s (2011) notion of “enunciated communities” that form in moments of rupture helps illuminate the new kinds of contradictory alliances and identities forming in local anti-nuclear protests as they work to prevent future disaster. Finally, the works of Sheila Jasanoff and Yaron Ezrahi concerning the role of imagination in creating future technologies and democracies provide an intriguing foil in which to understand imaginaries of disaster “from below” (Ezrahi 2012; Jasanoff and Kim 2009).

Insights from these theories bear on disaster scripting: I argue that the period of time leading from one disaster to another is not necessarily one of quiescence or non-disaster. The intervening time from a disaster fixed in history to the uncertain future when another disaster may or may not occur, can be understood as a phase when communities form by creating numerous scripts in anticipation of the next disaster. Disaster scripts are not “deliberative” but produced through agonistic and contentious politics, to create a language of shared identity. Dominant disaster scripts create meaning, frame problems and possible solutions, and choose victims and villains long before the disaster ever takes place. Should disasters unfold, the scripts will invariably unravel, possibly along existing social fractures. Yet the cultural and political work being done prior to disasters provides a heuristic for contextualizing the narratives that unfold following a catastrophe.

In the following sections, I explore how the concepts of sociotechnical imaginaries (Jasanoff and Kim 2009), enunciated communities (Fortun 2001), and postcolonial democracy (Witsoe 2011) are helpful in thinking through disaster scripting. I then illustrate disaster scripting through the case of villagers opposing the proposed Jaitapur nuclear power plant (JNPP) in Maharashtra.

Sociotechnical Imaginaries

Described in the broadest terms as, “imagined forms of social life and social order that center on the development and fulfillment of innovative scientific and/or technological projects”, a  “sociotechnical imaginaries” (SI) prism reflects the processes of co-production and the kinds of technological, political, cultural and epistemic orders they create. As an elastic framework specifically designed for describing national political cultures and their technoscientific agendas, it also applies to global institutions and the “imaginaries from below.” SI calls attention to how visions of different sociotechnical futures actually do work to ensure their realization, and embeds normative notions of what a good society is and how it should be attained. The distribution and bearers of risks and benefits, the meaning and practice of democratizing technology, the shaping of rights and responsibility, and ideas of citizenship are part and parcel of sociotechnical imaginaries. Given the open-endedness of sociotechnical imaginaries, focusing on disasters is helpful in giving SI analytical traction. The ways in which site-specific protests imagine different kinds of disasters, how these imaginaries are historically grounded and experientially based, and how communities are actively working to prevent future catastrophe provide a unique lens to understand the visions of social life striven for by those who often do not have power.

Enunciated Communities

Kim Fortun (2001) describes how “enunciated communities” form in response to double binds—the impossible choices facing communities. She writes how the formation of this community “is not a matter of shared values, interests, or even culture, but a response to temporally specific paradox” (11). The temporally specific paradox, in this case, is the Indian government’s land grabs to build nuclear reactors in several coastal and inland communities, and Fukushima occurring shortly thereafter. Although a nuclear disaster has not happened yet, for villagers, disaster is a certainty if nuclear power plants are built. All roads lead to death of some kind, whether by infertility, cancer, nuclear explosion, losing economic stability, losing social safety nets and cultural cohesion. The political and cultural fissures along class, caste and religion are reworked, through disaster scripting, into a common identity of a shared imagination of disaster, even though variations of disaster imaginaries exist below the surface and old sociopolitical cleavages persist.

Postcolonial Democracy

Drawing from experiences in Bihar, Witsoe (2011) describes how the poor in rural areas do not recognize or practice democracy in its individualistic, liberal form, but rather as “postcolonial democracy” based on community identity and popular sovereignty. The idea that government institutions are purveyors of the rational, neutral and reasoned exercise of power is almost completely absent, and defies the experiences of the rural poor where high caste-dominated institutions make their biases obviously known in the kinds of projects and individuals they support or ignore. Thus electoral politics (and the social drama on that day) becomes the primary site whereby the different groups have an opportunity to supplant those in power with their representatives. The crisis of liberal democracy envisioned by Yaron Ezrahi (1990) is nowhere in sight in these highly local and rural contexts, even though, for better or worse, democracy as popular sovereignty and “rule of the people” is.

Thus, the character of democracy as electoral power politics is reinscribed into activism against nuclear energy, but no longer overtly along religious or caste lines. Instead, through disaster scripting, new affinities form around the common threat of nuclear energy. The terms of their opposition are not the science or technical rigor of a proposed plan. Although anti-nuclear activists from elite, urban groups, criticize nuclear energy in courts of law and public opinion, and try to anchor the debate in scientific facts, villagers invoke these facts to create a common identity. For the villages fighting JNPP, democratic institutions are systems of oppression. One villager said “If you want to torture us through this (nuclear) project, it is better you bomb Konkan and annihilate this land and its people once and for all. But while we are alive, we will not allow this project.” And they do so through marches, satyagraha, and fasting, and seeking political party alliances.

Jaitapur Nuclear Power Plant Maharashtra

The group of villages that will be affected by JNPP are Jaitapur, Madban, Mithgivane, Sakhre Nate and Nivelli. All differ in terms of dominant castes, religions, and political dynamics. Madban, for instance, is populated primarily by the Bhandari farming castes, now labeled constitutionally as “Other Backward Castes.” The Madban Bhandaris traditionally support the Hindu fundamentalist Shiv Sena party, largely responsible for the 2002 Muslim pogroms in Gujarat. Conversely, the neighboring village of Sakhre Nate is composed of Muslim fishermen who have historically supported the more liberal Congress party.

The space for politics has traditionally been relegated to elections, party politics, and the gram panchayat (village governance). The initial opposition to nuclear energy was located in these domains. First, news of the land acquisition first came in 2002, when the village head of Madban was asked by the District Collector to draft a letter stating that she welcomed a nuclear power plant in the village. She called a vote and the gram panchayat unanimously rejected the project, despite being promised bungalows and cars.  In the domain of party politics, the Sakhre Nate fisherman, long supporters of the Congress party, have started backing the Shiv Sena who oppose JNPP because the Congress government support it.

Yet these strategies have produced mixed results. In 2006, under the pretense of promising a discussion of the project at the District Collector’s office, the DAE ordered 55 of the protesters to be jailed and have First Information Reports (FIRs) filed against them. Similarly, the Sakhre Nate alliance with the Shiv Sena may be undermined by the fishing community leader, himself, who is trying to maintain friendly relations with the Congress party, while looking after the interests of his constituents. The Madban villagers, in turn, lament the rare appearances of Mumbai-based Shiv Sena leaders and the party’s lukewarm agitation against JNPP. Recently, the police have started picking up young men in the middle of night, jailing them, and filing FIRs, for which they have to make repeated court appearances in another village, only to have them wait for hours and not have the superintendent of police appear. The round trip of Rs. 200 is unaffordable for most, especially daily wage laborers, on top of court fees. Villagers even speak of assassination attempts on the leader of the local protest.

Visiting anti-nuclear activists, Surendra and Sanghamitra Gadekar, opened another political space for the villagers. In 2008, the protest leader and one of the wealthier landowners in Madban sought out government scientists to explain the risks and benefits of nuclear energy. The nuclear scientists showed “glossy charts” about how effluent water would affect marine life. He countered that fisherman already know how hot the water is by touch. He then contacted the Gadekars, who came to Madban and started a series of workshops and circulating CDs about the kinds of health risks uranium miners faced in Northeast India, Chernobyl, the effects of low-level radiation, and other dangers of nuclear energy. When the villagers were told by the DAE that the project-affected communities of Tarapur benefited from nuclear energy, village leaders from Madban and Sakhre Nate visited Tarapur themselves to verify the DAE’s claims. They came back with stories of villagers dying from cancer, a debilitated fishing industry, and dangerous jobs at the plant. As the police intimidation continued, they created heroes and martyrs for their disaster scripts—two men were killed by the police, one man refused compensation money for his land to pay for cancer treatment, and one man working as a DAE guard refused to police his own village and was exiled to a Naxalite region.

Disaster scripting and democratic practices occur most powerfully during their protests. In a sit-in protest, a hundred or so will sit under the tent, usually near the fences of the JNPP. Leading figures from the community will give speeches all through out the day. Even the police sitting near by will laugh at jokes. In this space, differing viewpoints will be aired. The Shiv Sena leaders, for instance, called for beating anyone who works for or supports JNPP in an aggressive speech. From Sakhre Nate, differing views were aired over how to proceed, with some calling for increased militancy, others for moderation and criticizing JNPP on purely scientific terms, and yet others for complete peaceful protests. The second day, a consensus among leaders was achieved that all protests would be peaceful, and the grounds of protest, with the moral concerns of livelihood and safety holding equal weight.

Both invisible and real hazards anchor a new emergent identity through which villagers hope to collectively resist nuclear energy. When the public hearing finally occurred in 2010, the villagers came armed with questions about earthquake zones, tsunami risks, radioactive waste storage, dangers of terrorist attacks, scientific predictions versus long-term experience, the effects of heated effluent water, and the devastation of Chernobyl. The villagers already knew the “right” answers, and knew that the Department of Atomic Energy (DAE) would not answer their questions. This performance of calling out the nuclear establishment helped stabilize a new identity as nuclear energy project-affected people, who would never part with their lands at any cost. For them, the right answers were mantras. The “lessons” of past disasters became condensed, mythologized, naturalized, decontextualized, and distilled into handfuls of aphorisms and nuggets of knowledge for the present: “We will grow a sixth finger.” “Our children will be deformed.” “There will be an earthquake.” “Our wombs will become barren.” “The radiation will give us cancer.” These mantras are not “risks” so much as certainties that would inevitably end in death if JNPP arrives. Now, even the existing incidences of cancer are chalked up to environmental pollution from the nearby Fenolix plant. But, health and safety disasters do not override the fear of losing land and fishing access. Indeed, they remain the dominant imagined disasters, as none can imagine life after losing livelihoods and communities. With the government’s use of the colonial Land Acquisition Act of 1894 to acquire land, the constant police intimidation —repeated visits for hearings, jail time, losing income, being beaten up, the killing of two villagers—the hatred towards the government is visceral and bind them together. Villagers say they will resort to violence in desperation.

Fissures remain. Despite the bonhomie of Sakhre Nate and Madban villagers, old prejudices are alive. I was told, for instance, that the Muslims keep their homes “dirty” and it would not be safe for a single woman. Madban villagers resent the Muslims for having a certain immunity to the kinds of arrests and harassment they are subjected to by the police, because the Congress party fears losing its vote bank. Villagers, in private, question their unity, pointing to the police informants among them. One of the higher land-owning caste leaders in the neighboring village of Mithigivane took the draconian action of commissioning a “beating” against one of the villagers (another high caste man) who sold his land. Yet this man is well-liked for his generosity in lending money, and they did not begrudge him his decision. Leaders are worried that if the compensation increases (currently it is 12 lakhs per hectare) then poor farmers will start selling land. Already, women who have been married off to distant villages have willingly sold their lands to the government. The leader of the protests also has lung cancer, and people fear the resistance may die with him.

Conclusion

The villagers are bitter about broken promises of help from law, media, NGOs and academia, all institutions of democracy. In their eyes, lawyers want fees paid, and will present weak cases, otherwise. The Supreme and High Courts do the Prime Minister’s bidding when it comes to nuclear energy. The media are only after sound bytes. Activists get arrested as soon as they come to the village. Academics are only interested in writing articles to advance their own careers. Villagers feel they are ultimately alone in this struggle. Yet their unity produced through disaster scripting through agonistic politics does shed light on how they understand and practice democracy, even though they either do not know what “democracy” is, or think of it as a dirty word and the root of their oppression.

Although I have documented the disaster scripting of villagers faced with a nuclear power plant, there are other scripting as well on different levels and with different actors. Although most villagers did not know of Bhopal, urban, educated anti-nuclear activists certainly do, and do not hesitate to make connections between Bhopal, Fukushima and the impending nuclear disaster in India. Similarly, other groups like the Communist Party of India pitch the disaster of nuclear energy as capitulation to foreign interests. To further explore science and democracy through disaster scripting in India, I intend to look at how nuclear power was thwarted in West Bengal, is how a partially built nuclear power plant is being opposed in Tamil Nadu, and how the Bhopal disaster was instrumental in passing the Nuclear Liability Bill in the Lok Sabha, against the wishes of the Central Government.

References

Beck, U. (1992). Risk Society: Towards a New Modernity. London: Sage Publications.

Ezrahi, Y. (1990). The Descent of Icarus: Science and the Transformation of Contemporary
Democracy. Cambridge: Harvard University Press.

Fortun, K. (2001). Advocacy After Bhopal: Environmentalism, Disaster. New Global Orders.
Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

Jasanoff, S. (2005). Designs on Nature: Science and Democracy in Europe and in the United
States. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.

Jasanoff, S. and S. Kim (2009). Containing the Atom: Sociotechnical Imaginaries and Nuclear
Power in the United States and South Korea. Minerva. 47 (2): 119-146.

Visvanathan, S. (2012). Nuclear energy: No longer a sacred cow, Firstpost.Ideas. Available at
http://www.firstpost.com/ideas/nuclear-energy-no-longer-a-sacred-cow-112249.html

Witsoe, J. (2011). Rethinking Postcolonial Democracy: An Examination of the Politics of
Lower-Caste Empowerment in North India. American Anthropologist. 113 (4): 619-631.

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[1] See, for example: Mark Brown (2009) Science in Democracy: Expertise, Institutions, and Representations; John Dryzek (2010) Foundations and Frontiers of Deliberative Governance; Clark Miller (2004) “Interrogating the Civic Epistemology of American Democracy: Stability and Instability in the 2000 U.S. Presidential Election” in Social Studies of Science;  Philip Kitcher (2003) Science, Truth and Democracy;  Steven Turner (2003) Liberal Democracy 3.0: Civil Society in an Age of Experts

Monamie Bhadra is a PhD Candidate in the Human and Social Dimensions of Science and Technology Program at Arizona State University (USA). Her dissertation explores the evolving relationship between science and democracy in India around nuclear energy, and has a forthcoming, invited article in Science as Culture, called “Fighting nuclear energy, fighting for India’s democracy.”