Nuclearism The Contours Of A Political Ecology

Mathur, Piyush.

Social Text, 66 (Volume 19, Number 1), Spring 2001, pp. 1-18 (Article)

Published by Duke University Press

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Nuclearism
THE CONTOURS OF A POLITICAL ECOLOGY

How are we to comprehend those events that muscle their way into shap- Piyush Mathur
ing the manner in which we understand them? On the assumption that the
May 1998 Indian nuclear tests constitute one such event, I attempt in this
essay to evince the means of such a comprehension. Toward this tantaliz-
ing objective, I find a useful start in the following witticism from Ashis
Nandy’s response to the tests: “The culture of nuclearism is one of the
true ‘universals’ of our time. Like Coca-Cola and blue jeans, it does not
permit cultural adaptation or edited versions. It is the same in Paris and
Pokharan, Lahore and Los Alamos.”1 There are several levels to Nandy’s
comment: It is about nuclear technology; it is about culture; but it also is
about technology and culture, technology as culture, and technologies of
culture. More generally, then, Nandy obliges us to pay attention to a certain
exemplary interfacing of technology and culture—“the culture of nuclearism”
— against its concomitant geopolitics, which disallows “cultural adaptation
or edited versions.”
Insofar as Nandy refers to this interface as an “-ism,” he points up
the need also to look at technology — nuclear technology — as a coherent
framework of ideas and actions with political and psychological under-
pinnings and ramifications. More specifically, Nandy’s characterization
captures well the paradox whereby an exact technology — invoking uni-
versality of application and effect — is localized as a homogenizing norm
across various cultures such that it constitutes a universal culture of its
own, an “-ism.” Accordingly, nuclear technology is not merely a defense
or energy infrastructure or a scientific force running against “culture,”
nor is it to be upheld simply as culture-free or value-neutral. In addition
to these sometimes conflicting ways, the nuclear technology should also
be viewed as the prime expression and producer of a treacherous uni-
versality.
Nandy, in fact, goes beyond the technology-culture interface at once
by pointing to the eerie idiomatic semblance between a technological
behavior (“nuclearism”) and a cultural behavior (symbolized by “Coca-
Cola and blue jeans”) that has evolved through globalization. Taken to
its conclusion, Nandy’s “nuclearism” implies a homologous relationship
between cultures of globalization and globalizing technologies, inducing us, in

Social Text 66, Vol. 19, No. 1, Spring 2001. Copyright © 2001 by Duke University Press.
ST 66.01 Mathur 4/9/01 11:46 AM Page 2

the end, to place nuclear technology in the cultural politics of the global
order.
Accordingly, to situate nuclear technology requires considering the
ways through which the global hierarchies of military and economic power
have come to create a larger cross-cultural psychological environment that
tacitly accepts the technology as the final arbitrator of power and prestige.
As countries attempt to respond to this global order by actively partici-
pating in nuclearism, as India and Pakistan have done, they inescapably
incur unprecedented costs to the local populations and commit violence
regionally. In other words, like most universals, nuclearism is a costly and
violent enterprise in regional terms, but it outclasses all other universals
both quantitatively and qualitatively. The material and psychological
contingencies of nuclearism have been powerful enough to generate an
environment of their own across geographies, which I shall refer to as
nuclearism’s “political ecology.”
What follows is my attempt at briefly characterizing the nature of this
political ecology in the context of the recent Indo-Pak nuclear tests. More
specifically, I shall try to explicate the kinds of relationships that played
themselves out through nuclearism between technology and society at the
behest of the Indian state and the Indian scientific establishment. Inso-
far as nuclearism is a technological universal specified as an unrelenting,
uncompromising cultural universal, the issue of democracy becomes cen-
tral to my consideration of its political ecology. Hence, I raise the question
— and attempt to unravel its theoretical complexities — as follows: What
may it mean for a nation-state or a national institution to be democratic
while the former goes (militarily) nuclear?
At this point, I am inclined to believe that perhaps it is more difficult
for a political and cultural theorist than it must be for a determined gov-
ernment to be able to identify a trait, event, or undertaking as genuinely
democratic given the lures, pitfalls, and pressures of multilateral forces
involved in a given political scenario. If anything, this essay acknowledges
the Indian nuclear tests to have been precisely such a scenario: one that
retains the potential to challenge any thinking person to ascertain, perhaps
for his or her own sanity, how the issue of democracy could be addressed
or even raised within the globalized rubric of nuclearism.
I began by saying that I would try to understand the Indian nuclear
event without succumbing to its own dictates regarding how it ought to be
understood. This presumes, on my part, that the nuclear event was able to
present itself in particular ways to the people at large owing to certain fac-
tors, including the technology, and that it was able to assume a strong
sense of “self,” so to speak, for the same reasons. I also maintain that the
event, through its span of immediate effectiveness, was able to “create” a

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people as its legitimate receptionists and representatives and that it

encouraged a certain range of questions and not others. To understand
the event despite itself, or despite its Self, means to retrieve itself from
Itself, and to retrieve ourselves from Itself as well as Ourselves as its occa-
sional contingencies. So I need to identify those factors that seem to have
contributed to the dubious coherence, legitimacy, and strength of the
event, while also hoping to mention those that did not.
As an inlet into the above problem of going beyond an event’s dic-
tates, and because a nation’s media is one of the best indicators of the
nation’s democratic practice, I decided to analyze the rather precarious
disposition of the Indian media, particularly the national print media,
through the “peak hours” of the nuclear episode. That analysis is pre-
sented in the section titled “Nuke Journalism” and forms the larger part of
this article. I expect that section to serve, at least partially, my objective of
raising and addressing the question of democracy in the context of nuclear-
ism: of recognizing or not recognizing certain institutional or public dis-
positions to be genuinely democratic under the circumstances.

Strange Bedfellows: Technology and Fundamentalism

It is public knowledge that India has had nuclear capability since 1974, the
year the late prime minister Smt. Indira Gandhi allowed the first nuclear
test. Since then, India had maintained the status of a “threshold power”
until the second tests at Pokharan in May 1998. Meanwhile, India did not
have any immediate threat from either China or Pakistan, and there were
no other security emergencies either. Yet, all of a sudden, in May 1998 a
rickety ruling coalition of eighteen political parties made the major deci-
sion to conduct ground tests explicitly for military purposes on behalf of
a country of around 1 billion people. As a matter of fact, a handful of peo-
ple made the decision without informing even the military.2 It is in this
theatricality of affairs that we find an interesting link between technology
and society that the scientific establishment, in liaison with the govern-
ment in power, sought to establish and exploit to its own political ends
through nuclearism.3
Given the context, it is useful to reminisce about a research project on
Peace and Global Transformation that the United Nations University
sponsored more than a decade ago, in which the relationship between sci-
ence and violence figured prominently. In the first volume resulting from
that project, Science, Hegemony and Violence: A Requiem for Modernity,
Ashis Nandy, the volume’s editor, mentioned in his now classic “Intro-
duction: Science as a Reason of State” that “conspicuous technology has

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become gradually the official goal of science in India, as well as the main
source of legitimacy for science among the Indian middle classes.” Nandy
went on to “trace the idea of science as a reason of state to a speech made
by the American President John F. Kennedy in 1962,” concluding that

for the first time Kennedy’s speech showed that a wide enough political base
had been built in a major developed society for the successful use of science
as a goal of state and, perhaps, as a means of populist mobilization. Spec-
tacular science could now be used as a political plank within the United
States in the ideological battle against ungodly communism.4

Much in line, as it were, with this unholy harmony between techno-

science and the sharply polarized worldview that encourages and is
encouraged by the politics of the modern state, we find that at the heart of
this second stage of Indian nuclearization has been a Hindu nationalist
party, the Bhartiya Janata Party (BJP), which was the majority leader of
the minority government through the May 1998 tests. What the nuclear
tests did for the BJP, at least for the time being, was to unify the Indian
masses against the apparition of the evil Islamic Pakistan.5 Remarkably,
therefore, while the Indian government’s explanation to the G-8 and the
UN Security Council focused on its perceived threat from China, its
informal domestic political rhetoric almost entirely targeted Pakistan as
the reason for the hasty decision to go nuclear.6 In other words, the
supreme use of the nukes lay not exactly in the realm of India’s interna-
tional security or diplomacy but in the kind of Hindu nationalism the
fundamentalist majority within the ruling coalition was able to incite in the
social sphere of Indian polity literally in a matter of hours of the tests, and
in the way it was able to channel the societal dynamics toward fundamen-
talist concerns. As Aijaz Ahmad aptly noted, “These nuclear fireworks
help [the BJP] cut across the Hindu/secular divide and reach out to claim
the mantle of Indian nationalism as such.”7
Pakistan’s subsequent tests only corroborated this design insofar
as the average Pakistani called his “product” the “Islamic” bomb.8 The
domestic politics of both the countries consciously involved the implicit
nuances of this particular technology — with its capability to assert spec-
tacular destructive power, which remains a significant, unspoken parame-
ter of a nation’s status in the existing world order — to stretch the religious
polarization between Islam and Hinduism, on one hand, and Pakistan
and India, on the other.

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Scientism and Masculinism:

The Subtleties of the Nukes as a Technology

But the beauty of this nuke theatricality lay not so much in its rather obvi-
ous fundamentalist (or what South Asians call “communal”) agenda; it
lay, instead, in the way that the theatricality centralized a certain idea of a
“scientific temper.” The sudden, dramatic unification of the nation around
the nuclear tests had a great air of technical superiority, scientism, and
progress: of, in short, “techno-machoism.” Accordingly, while glorifying
the tests as a monumental achievement on the part of the Indian (atomic)
scientists at several public forums,9 Prime Minister Vajpayee shrewdly
added “Hail the Scientist!” to the popular Indian slogan “Hail the Soldier,
Hail the Farmer!,” originally given to the nation by late Prime Minister Lal
Bahadur Shastri.10 Aided by the Hindu communal forces, the otherwise
deliberately “insulated” or politically immune Indian nuclear establish-
ment pushed Indians into the latest phase of mass techno-scientific
“hyper-masculinization” that thinkers like Ashis Nandy and Vandana
Shiva have long blamed on imperialism, modernity, and globalization.11
While the charge of “hyper-masculinity” may sound essentialist, the
tone of the mass sentiment toward the tests only supports that charge as
we sift its underpinnings. One representation of the hyper-masculine sen-
timent lies in the numerous press photographs of the street celebrations of
the rival nuke events in India and Pakistan, respectively. In my post-
Pokharan survey of a number of major Indian newspapers, a few Ameri-
can newspapers, and the television coverage by the British Broadcasting
Corporation and the Cable News Network, I did not come across a single
picture of the celebratory crowds that included a woman. (Women were
present, however, in certain rallies protesting the tests.) The celebrations,
much like the entire operation of the nuclear tests, had a near-absolute
male constitution.
Perhaps the clearest tribute to this contrived posture of masculinity
— or hyper-masculinity — came in the form of the first public reaction to
the tests by Balasaheb K. Thackaray, the chauvinist leader of the militantly
Hindu political organization (and a close associate of the ruling BJP)
Shiva Sena, who strongly justified the tests as he exclaimed: “We have to
prove [to the world] that we are not eunuchs.”12 Meanwhile, celebratory
and self-laudatory press statements and public appearances by BJP lead-
ers, nuclear scientists, and top government officials continued to underline
the enhanced strength of India as a nation owing to its nuclearization.
Prime Minister Vajpayee summed it all up, as it were, in the following
answer to Prabhu Chawla’s potent question, “What does this explosion
mean for our country?”:

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Millions of Indians have viewed this occasion as the beginning of the rise of
a strong and self-confident India. I fully share this assessment and this
dream. . . . I would, therefore, say that the greatest meaning of the tests is
that they have given India shakti, they have given India strength, they have
given India self-confidence.13

It is significant to note here that in nuclearism one did not encounter

the usual ways in which engineering technologies tend to affect particular
societies first materially (let’s say the railways, or computers, affecting
people’s activities concretely), and then — by extension — corporeally and
psychologically. The nuke episode, as a technological event, was remark-
able for its capacity to generate among the masses psychological appari-
tions whose potency could not, at the same time, be questioned in the
least. In other words, the Indian celebration of the tests (just like their rival
Pakistan’s on the flip side) had a very limited material basis in that no
ordinary Indian gained anything from that episode except for the bit of the
news that the blasts took place in the desert. If there was a material
impact, it was to be realized in the form of the financial losses owing to the
international trade and monetary sanctions that several countries, includ-
ing the United States, subsequently imposed upon India.
The nationwide celebrations were, therefore, little more than an out-
burst of the hyper-masculine aggressive tendencies that the fundamental-
ist establishment was able to tap within the framework of scientific tem-
perament and techno-rationality, on one hand, and Hindu nationalism, on
the other. That the scientists were overzealous in their participation in the
event in precisely the fundamentalist way was also evident from their
enthusiastic celebration of the heroic status that the masses, the national
press, and the politicians accorded them publicly after the blasts.
Looking at the issue this way, we find that the near-transcendental
sophistication of nuclear technology and the well-nurtured elitism of
Indian nuclear physicists together served the current political establish-
ment’s purpose of unleashing a national heroism with little value for
women, the Muslim and other minorities, or any economically under-
privileged sections of the society. At the same time, however, one can
legitimately identify the nuclearism as one more desperate attempt, on the
part of the modern Indo-Pak establishments, to make themselves as well
as these sections of their societies “deserving” citizens of the global order.
As Vinay Lal notes: “By signaling its departure from the body of world
opinion, India has sought to arrive on the world stage. It is the one
resounding cruelty of our times that no nation-state which refuses to par-
take in realpolitik and zero-sum politics of our times can receive much of
a hearing.”14

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“Nuke Journalism”; or, the Media as Nuclearism’s

By-Product and Political Contingency

“Nuke journalism” is the name I give to the distinctive subgenre of jour-

nalism that developed in India (and Pakistan) in the wake of the nuclear
tests in May 1998. True to the sensationalism unleashed by the explo-
sions, nuke journalism was a short-term phenomenon that fizzled out
within four to five weeks. In retrospect, however, it testifies to the kind of
crisis that the tests created for the national media in terms of political val-
ues and loyalties.
In this section I discuss the media frenzy of nuke journalism as a con-
tingency of nuclearism. This approach allows us to examine the role of the
regional or national media in protecting the local interests in the face of
the national adoption of the nuclear “universal.” As a case in point, there-
fore, nuke journalism pushes us into thinking about the role and scope of
the media in relation to democratic values during such crises. That nuclear-
ism was also a crisis in the flow of information, insofar as the tests auto-
matically forced a suspension in the democratic norm of public-interest
informationalizing on the part of the mainstream media, is another issue
that nuke journalism makes us confront.
More theoretically, the crisis of nuke journalism can be explored as a
subset of nuclearism as a whole once we recognize that the notoriously
secretive Indian nuclear tests, which have enormous global and multilat-
eral political significations, caught the national media rather suddenly.
For, under such circumstances, it is hard to hold the media responsible
merely for how it reported the event to the public at large; it is no less dif-
ficult to judge the media entirely on the basis of how it sought to “con-
struct” or “package” the given event (as Timothy Luke does brilliantly,
nonetheless, in his analysis of the Chernobyl disaster).15 Indeed, at several
levels the media very likely fell vulnerable to the sheer force of the event
that had been thrust upon it, by the secretive compulsions of the nuclear
statehood, to “cover.” Therefore, apart from having to report and package
the event in so many ways, the media seemed to have confronted, thanks
to nuclearism, the unusual prospect of becoming a prime product of the
event itself for the effective time period.
Arguably, the prospect of this kind of “crisis” for a national media
must be peculiar to a democracy, since in other systems the media is not
expected to have a direct relationship to any event, especially not to sig-
nificant ones. In a nondemocratic state, the media is in a perpetual crisis
of an altogether different sort in that the state retains the right to represent
the event in its tailored but “absolute” existence through it. In nondemo-
cratic systems, therefore, the media is invariably a product of the state; it

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is not a product or effect of the event (with which it is only indirectly

related), nor is it a genuine reporting mechanism or constructor of the
same. The absence of the media’s authentic existence in the nondemocra-
tic setting renders the question of its relationship to the “event” largely
irrelevant.
Nuke journalism, as a precondition to the peculiarities of nuclearism
as a modern political-cultural “universal,” invokes concerns related to
media and democratic values precisely for this reason. In the short period
of political sensationalism following the nuclear tests in India, we encoun-
tered a situation in which the otherwise “free” media of a democracy
found too little time and too narrow a range of choices in covering an
event that hit it with an unprecedented speed and without prior notice.
Additionally, the event carried with it an intrinsic patriotism for the
national media per the state’s deliberate invocation codified in the enact-
ment of the event itself — apart from the various statements promptly
served thereafter to the public by the state spokespersons. It won’t be too
much to claim, therefore, that nuke journalism was not much more than a
sheer consequence of the nukes themselves, much as the state wished it to
be. Given this situation, and given the utmost prior secrecy that the state
maintained as an understandable military necessity, can we consider nuke
journalism to have been a democratic exercise on the part of the Indian
media?
This question may appear too general to be legitimate in that one
could point out a number of articles in the Indian newspapers that openly
attacked the government for the tests. But it is important to understand
nuke journalism as a temporary formal preoccupation of the media with a
state event prior to accounting for (the variety of ) its content. That the
Indian media found itself with little choice other than to overwhelmingly
preoccupy itself for weeks with a surprise state announcement — at the
expense of other socially significant events — is on its own a pointer to a
temporary lapse in the democracy of news coverage implicitly engineered
by the state itself. There is reason to argue that the national media auto-
matically fell short of its reporting function in the strictly democratic sense
insofar as the state assumed that role in the main from the beginning.
In addition, I would contend that while a nation’s media may carry
news analyses and opinion articles critical of the ruling regime, one can
better judge its democratic outreach or role based on the “matter-of-fact”
reports and the editorials. It is the reports and editorials that best reflect a
newspaper’s normative notions regarding newsworthiness, just as they
affect the public most radically. News reports tend to be most valuable for
their implicit “objectivity” and sense of “direct public relevance,” editori-
als for their earnest “self-positioning” and value judgments.

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Keeping this criterion in mind, it becomes clearer upon surveying

Indian newspapers that the mainstream Indian media, both regional and
national, duped itself through nuke journalism by confusing populism
with democracy, techno-machoism with diplomacy, and physics with pol-
itics. To come up with a few examples: in its editorial the day after the first
series of explosions, the Indian Express exhorted the government to “seize
the moment,” maintaining that

the tests have . . . raised India to the level where it can look upon [the
nuclear five] as its peers, and to see that its point of view gets a decent hear-
ing. Now, at this turning point, the government must act with dispatch to
capitalise on the event, or lose the initiative forever.16

The Hindu, the newspaper (and publishing group) that should other-
wise be duly credited for a number of well-informed articles radically
challenging the logic behind conducting the nuclear tests, nonetheless
offered glowing praises to the nuclear scientists as it cast the event in
terms of nationalistic technological achievement and diplomacy:

There is no question that the stunning mastery of technological sophistica-

tion and the demonstration of the world class versatility that went into the
success of the three nuclear tests . . . are a matter of national pride. The ded-
icated group of atomic scientists . . . has won the gratitude of an entire
nation for a history-making achievement that places India in the exclusive
league of nuclear weapons powers. Yet amid the widespread celebration of
India’s daring act, it must be recognised that the diplomatic and strategic
implications of this new strategic gambit are far-reaching. The decision to
end decades of India’s nuclear ambiguity would acquire far greater moral
weight if it is consciously placed in a diplomatic context which categorically
emphasises a more constructive approach within the region, even as it sig-
nals a willingness to do business with a non-proliferation regime that is not
discriminatory.17

Perhaps the most blatant example of the crisis of nuke journalism,

however, was the Times of India, which lost no time in setting up on its
Internet site a catchy and colorful atom-shaped iconic link, titled “Nuclear
India,” dedicated exclusively to the coverage of the event. (Of course the
link was temporary, quite like the state-bound nuke journalism.) This
ephemeral celebratory mood was shared by the majority of the media,
flooded as it was with government announcements, interviews with
nuclear scientists and politicians, and the news related to the street cele-
brations that followed the event.

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The penetrating interpretative impact of nuclearism is also evident in the

way the Indian media made its bid at defining democracy or democratic
afresh in the wake of the tests. The cherished ideal of “total nuclear dis-
armament”— first formally proposed to the world community by the late
prime minister Rajiv Gandhi in the late 1980s — had to be quickly
divorced from that of democracy as the Indian media asserted in as many
ways the democracy behind the state’s decision to challenge the elitism of
the global nuclear club by going nuclear itself. The nuclear “universal”
could not be edited, to put it in Nandy’s words; on the contrary, the
media had to tailor the long-cherished Indian norms of democracy and
peace in supporting a more democratic distribution of nuclear power that
the Indian tests had made possible. Such were apparently the costs of
domesticating a “true universal.”
On another level of the meaning of democratic, it is important to note
that after the government broke the news about the tests, the Indian
media, much like the masses in the streets, suddenly tended to speak in an
elevated idiom generally and to throw in its lot with a conspicuously glob-
alized view of the issues at hand. The editorial excerpts quoted above
reveal this tendency quite clearly, and it is only reinforced by the media
coverage of the tests at large. To use a pertinent analogy to illustrate this
aspect of nuke journalism: quite in contrast to the “more traditional
worm’s-eye view of life on the ground” recommended by renowned ecol-
ogists Madhav Gadgil and Ramachandra Guha, the Indian media found
itself taking “the modern bird’s-eye view of the satellite” while dealing
with the nuclear blasts.18 So the Indian Express crowed, “With the tests,
India has graduated to a larger sphere of debate. Its stand on the nuclear
issue should develop to a corresponding scale, beyond regional obses-
sion.”19
The Indian newspapers generally failed to focus on the particularly
local context of the entire test operation, which included a completely
unexpected, inconsiderate, and forcible evacuation by the Indian army of
ground-zero villagers barely three hours before the blasts. Villagers from
Khetolai, Dholiya, Loharki, Latmi, and Bhadriyo settlements were ordered
to move “for their own safety”— they were inaccurately informed —“as
the army was conducting artillery practice.”20 Evidently, the media did not
consider this short-notice, non-negotiable evacuation-under-false-pretext
to violate the human rights of the local villagers: it was invariably explained
away, on the margins of the event reports, as part of the greatly successful
secret operation pulled off by the government (apparently in defiance, and
by making a fool, of the world body, particularly the CIA!). The Indian
media certainly did not find the evacuation at all as newsworthy or worthy
of focused editorials as the atomic blasts themselves, which had, by the

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way, “caused a large mound of earth to rise into the air,” creating a “thick
blanket of dust [over] nearby villages.”21 Incidentally, opinion articles in
the various publications also did not address the plight of the villagers in
any focused manner.
Put in terms of Rajni Kothari’s masterly articulation of the “dispens-
ability thesis of democracy,” we are safe to conclude that the Indian
media, just like the state, inherently assumed the affected villagers to be
“dispensable” members of the global technological order.22 Hence,
nuclearism, as Nandy’s “cultural universal,” can appropriately be consid-
ered one of the most revealing mechanisms or moments of Kothari’s “dis-
pensability thesis of democracy,” epitomizing the vision that “seeks to
provide — to the total exclusion of all humanist considerations — for the
unhindered advance of technology that would integrate the world into a
single unified world political economy.”23
That nuke journalism retained quite a touch of the celebratory — and
certainly did not venture strongly enough on the local level to dampen the
spirits in the post-Pokharan scenario — shows that the mainstream Indian
media participated in nuclearism rather actively, falling short of its gen-
uine democratic responsibility to inform the public accurately and let it
share as passionately the sad social undercurrents behind this scientific-
technological celebration. Not to be outclassed in this respect, the inter-
national media too focused almost entirely on the diplomatic and defense-
related concerns that the Pokharan blasts generated, thereby ignoring
them as a social-environmental event with very local human repercussions.
The rural and ill-informed evacuees, irrespective of their own subsequent
participation in the post-test jubilation, remain “ecological refugees” (to
use a Gadgil and Guha coinage) who suffered neglect or had to undergo
a strange patriotic glorification at the hands of the Indian media.24 In
short, both national and international media inevitably became part of
the global dynamics of nuclearism as they weighed the Indian nuclear
tests predominantly for their military or strategic relevance.25
The media’s lack of interest in, or inability to engage with, the local
repercussions of the tests was also evident on a different level: that of sci-
ence. Only rarely did an Indian newspaper (or a foreign one for that mat-
ter) provide original, thorough probative coverage of the nuclear tests,
coverage that went deeper than the popular euphoria over the technolog-
ical achievement. In fact, the media made very little effort to develop a crit-
ical view of precisely the scientific aspect of the blasts at the local level of
ecology. From the scientific angle the coverage remained restricted to the
rather mundane information about the type and strength of the blasts —
information handed down, in most if not all cases, from the Indian nuclear
establishment itself. In other words, a very narrow scientific dimension of

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the tests — basically that relevant to military analysis and, in that sense, to
the achievement of the involved nuclear physicists — found space in the
mainstream media.26 Worse, as the sampled excerpts from the Indian
newspaper editorials merely point to, the scientific information so received
got couched in the rhetoric of nationalism, progress, security, and cele-
bration through the journalistic enterprise. Such were the political demands
placed upon the national media by nuclearism.
Accordingly, the Indian media, instead of probing, ended up airing
the heroic proclamations of the nuclear scientists associated with the proj-
ect, showing little concern for the average citizen, whose knowledge of
nuclear physics is generally confined to the marvelous and the spectacular.
Through the pressing compulsion of showing commitment to the foreign
policy of its home state, nuke journalism automatically and inherently
marginalized several other significant scientific aspects. On one level, the
media marginalized information regarding the impact of the nuclear tests
on the health — both mental and physical — of the local population around
the site of the blasts. A survey of Indian newspapers’ coverage of the
event would normally reveal only brief incidental references to the odd
health problems that villagers living close to ground zero and their cattle
suffered after the first Indian nuclear tests at Pokharan in 1974. Such ref-
erences are not only eclipsed by the news related to the celebration of the
recent blasts by residents of the very same rural settlements; they are also
at best collected and presented almost as retrospective “heresy.” They
occur as part of casual interviewing of the festive villagers that a few jour-
nalists did for their newspapers’ third or fourth page. (The nuclear estab-
lishment, for its part, has of course flatly denied any radiation leakage
owing to the May 1998 tests.)
More generally, nuke journalism’s crisis is perceptible in its passive
acceptance and representation of the dominant and the visible since, far
from attempting to seek women’s “off-the-street” opinions nationwide, it
projected the all-male street demonstrations welcoming the tests to be
reflective of the people’s reception of the event at large. Under such cir-
cumstances, it is not surprising that the national media ignored almost
entirely the shocking news of a second brutal gang rape of one young
woman in Rajasthan — ironically, the same state where the nukes were
tested — and the subsequent large mass protests by women activists that
took place within days of the nuclear tests.

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Conclusion?

To be brought to a point where one feels that a strong “media activity”

needs to be understood and analyzed as a contingency of a technological
event is, in my view, fairly significant. For one, it tells us about the certain
peculiarities of nuclear technology that lend it to particular political uses
and status in the public sphere at the hands of powerful establishments
even when the technology is not quite in use. At the same time, the very
same peculiarities remain strong enough across the globe to significantly
affect a number of elements and human forces in their surroundings in a
fairly uniform way just by the sheer fact of the technology’s (inactive)
existence. This point of eerie contact between (a) technology’s universal-
ity and its societal determinism is something I have attempted to explore
in this essay. Within the context of this exploration, I also evolved a cer-
tain psychological view of (nuclear) technology which, I believe, will have
applications for future analyses.
It is important to mention here that instead of calling it an issue in
political economy and dealing with it accordingly, I chose to write about
nuclearism as a political ecology. For the most part, this was intended to
retain the sense of geography and environment that nuclear technology
necessarily affects, both psychologically and materially. In addition, I felt
that a typical political economy approach may run the risk of framing
issues related to nuclear technology or nuclearism in terms of military,
diplomacy, and economics — which is pretty much what I have accused
the Indian media of doing. But to speak in terms of political ecology is to
lay particular emphasis on the local communities and geographies affected
in so many ways and to see them as well as the overarching technology
and politics as part of an interconnected human-natural ecology. This is
relevant also because the ecological movement has come to command a
particularly broad base in India’s non-establishment politics and, I am
inclined to believe, in politics globally. We were alerted to this fact early on
by Rajni Kothari, who, while eloquently articulating the quest for “a com-
prehensive democratic order,” wrote:

The concern of the more creative and imaginative voices in the ecological
movement is not simply to arrest the degradation of environment, but
equally with issues like restoration of community life and dignity of women.
It converges with the new thinking in the feminist movement which seeks to
go beyond mere catching-up and making it to the level of the masculine
world.27

Given this orientation, I have attempted to show how the case at

hand, although about a very particular technology in a given context,

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points to much larger issues in cultural politics under the thrust of global
hierarchies and modernity. Even a cursory glance over the critical litera-
ture on nuclear issues is enough to suggest that secrecy, control, misin-
formation, aggression, and pervasive fear are the terms associated with
nuclear establishments, especially with those serving military purposes.
Unfortunately, what has not received enough attention is that nuclearism
is also one conclusive extremity of the idea of technological superiority
that carries sufficient weight in the modern worldview of industrialism,
development, and scientism. The nuclear arms race in South Asia has a
lot to do with the confluence of these broader universalistic ideologies — to
which certain forces in the region have sold themselves rather hastily.
While I have presented and analyzed nuke journalism as a by-product
and political contingency of nuclearism, the phenomenon also points to
the Indian media’s complicity with the broad political vision and interests
of the Indian state and other Indian elite as well as the bourgeoisie. To any
alert media watcher or news analyst, it should be clear that the Indian
media, especially at the national level, has invested remarkably little in
rural journalism, community-oriented urban reporting, environmental
news, and the coverage of domestic science and technology issues — espe-
cially from a critical and participatory people’s perspective. The media’s
lack of interest and specialization in these areas puts it quite in harmony
generally with the paternalistic, centripetal, and self-legitimating “devel-
opment” project of the state.
The English-language media, housed in the metropolitan centers,
tends to traffic the flows of information — both from within and outside
India — toward the upper-crust state machinery and other educated urban
elites located in those centers. The media does the above both by making
the information intelligible and relevant to those sections of the society
and by making those sections intelligible and relevant to themselves,
thereby generating exclusionary discourses overall. The non-English-
language regional media, lacking the resources and well-trained personnel,
often depends heavily, on one hand, on local political patronage and local
elites; on the other hand, it must rely on government news agencies, the
English-language Indian media, and international news agencies. The end
result is that the structure of information flows caters much more signifi-
cantly to the ruling needs of the ruling (un)official powers, instead of
holding them accountable to the concerns of the larger population. What
we have, then, is a persistent toning-up of information and newsworthiness
and a public discourse complacent with the spectacular and the belliger-
ent: in short, an info-sphere that is ultimately not very enterprising.
Specifically in terms of science and technology news, much of the
news covered by the national dailies is not only not related to domestic

14 Piyush Mathur
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research, it also is lifted from international news agencies’ dispatches or

various Western sources, often without regard to its local relevance or
even its intelligibility or application. When the Indian media does bring
domestic science and technology news to the fore, it rarely approaches it
from the non-expert “local” viewpoints, or on the basis of its (lack of ) rel-
evance to the communities at large, or in consideration of whether the sci-
entific or technological activity included any genuine a priori public input.
So nuke journalism uncovers not only the Indian media’s lack of pre-
paredness for the powerful state-engineered nuke event but also its
entrenched practice of automatically excluding the usual “receiving ends”
of such science and technology adventures — Gadgil and Guha’s “ecosys-
tem people” and “ecological refugees”— from its critical purview. There-
fore, while the Indian media may be “free,” and the Indian state may well
be a representative government, neither can be said to nurture much of a
vision of a bottom-up participatory democracy and decision making.
Although I have critiqued and set aside the Indian nuclear tests as a
step toward a genuine democracy, it is not too difficult to see connections
between “democracy” and a poor nation’s attempt at this radical form of
technological display. The Indian nuclear display has been about asserting
the country’s strength not only militarily but also scientifically and techno-
logically, just as it has been about gate-crashing into the privileged nuclear
club, purportedly, though dubiously, to widen the global base of democ-
racy. But there seems to be a more profound connection here: in terms of
India’s crude attempt to be a modern democracy in its strongly legitimated
global-liberal form despite the continued and strong presence of its tradi-
tional cultural, religious, and ethnic plurality.
The democracy so sought is not a matter of gradual evolution from
India’s own pluralistic cultural and political traditions, or of resolutely
working on a contemporaneous participatory model, but — to put it in
the words of D. L. Sheth and Ashis Nandy — by abruptly connecting the
nation’s “present with the political vision of a future which is the present
of the Western societies.”28 With the time and passage necessary to arrive
at mature indigenous forms of democracy denied by colonization and by
vulgar Westernization and modernization, India’s nuclearization also
offers itself to be understood as a national regime’s imposition of a strong
modern territorial integrity upon its traditional plurality. So it is interest-
ing to note that even as the “mass” impact of the blasts upon the Hindu-
majority Indian public was to unify it against the evil Islamic Pakistan, the
very same public also sought solace, and took particular pride, in the fact
that the architect of the nuclear operation was a Muslim, A. P. J. Abdul
Kalam.
Under these circumstances of multilateral pressures, global hierar-

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chies, and will-to-modernity, elite “natural” science, it seems, would con-

tinue to evade itself as a reason of state, while the fundamentalist state
would continue to evade its craving for control by taking recourse to irra-
tional and undemocratic scientism. Both ways, nuclearism ends up being
the “true universal” at the enormous expense of the common person any-
where in the world.

Notes

I presented an earlier version of the section on “Nuke Journalism” at the Fifth

Biennial Conference on Communication and Environment (24 – 27 July 1999),
organized by the School of Communication, Northern Arizona University, Flag-
staff. Thanks are due to Reneé Lertzman for her insightful comments on the
paper at that conference; to Ashis Nandy for going through an earlier draft of
“Nuke Journalism” and for his kind words; and to Leonard H. Hatfield for pro-
viding me with the space to do the research and typing at Virginia Tech.

1. Ashis Nandy, “The Epidemic of Nuclearism: Clinical Profile of the Geno-

cidal Mentality,” in The Nuclear Debate: Ironies and Immoralities, ed. Zia Mian and
Ashis Nandy (Colombo, Sri Lanka: Regional Centre for Strategic Studies,
1998), 1.
2. See “Armed Forces Not Consulted before Pokharan N-tests,” Hindustan
Times, 24 October 1999. The report quotes retired lieutenant general Eric A. Vas
as saying: “This momentous decision was taken solely on the advice of clever sci-
entists and bureaucrats who lacked constitutional responsibility or accountability.
The military chiefs had not been consulted about a matter which had far-
reaching security consequences.” Plans for the test are believed to have been
known only to the prime minister; Defense Minister George Fernandes; the prin-
cipal secretary to the prime minister, Brajesh Mishra; political adviser Pramod
Mahajan; the scientific adviser to the prime minister, A. P. J. Abdul Kalam; and
Atomic Energy Commission chief R. Chidambaram.
3. As former prime minister H. D. Deve Gowda’s 15 May 1998 letter to
Prime Minister Atal Behari Vajpayee states: “[The] scientists had approached
two previous governments to continue the tests, once in 1995 and then in 1997.
. . . I was requested to make a decision to conduct fresh nuclear tests. I convinced
the scientists that the time was not ripe.” Quoted by T. Jayaram in “Of Science
and Nuclear Weapons: A Scientist’s Perspective,” presented at the Delhi Con-
vention against Nuclear Weapons, 9 June 1998.
4. Ashis Nandy, “Introduction: Science as a Reason of State,” in Science,
Hegemony and Violence: A Requiem for Modernity, ed. Nandy (Delhi: Oxford Uni-
versity Press, 1988), 1– 23. Please see Chandra Mukerji’s A Fragile Power: Scien-
tists and the State (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1989) for the rela-
tionship between science and the modern state in the U.S. context.
5. A national poll conducted by the Times of India right after the blasts found
that 91 percent of respondents approved of the tests. Quoted in Madhusree Muk-
erjee’s “Blast Fallout: The Antinuclear Movement Takes Off in South Asia,” Sci-
entific American, February 1999. The communal connotations of the tests are too

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well known for me to regurgitate; to the curious reader the following sources,
among several others, will be useful: Aijaz Ahmad, “The Hindutva Weapon,”
Frontline 15, no. 11 (23 May– 5 June 1998); Vinay Lal, “Coming Out from
Gandhi’s Shadow,” Los Angeles Times, 19 May 1998; Gail Omvedt, “The Hin-
dutva Bomb,” The Hindu, 20 June 1998; and Kalpana Sharma, “The Hindu
Bomb,” The Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists 54, no. 4 (July/August 1998).
6. See especially Ajay Suri’s news report “High on Tests, Govt. Warns Pak-
istan,” The Indian Express, 19 May 1998.
7. Ahmad, “The Hindutva Weapon.”
8. See especially Ibn Warraq, “The Islamic Bomb,” Secular Humanist Bul-
letin 14, no. 3 (fall 1998); http://www.SecularHumanism.org/library/shb/war-
raq143.html.
9. In his interview with Prabhu Chawla, Prime Minister Vajpayee remarked:
“Our nuclear scientists and engineers have done a splendid job and, naturally, the
entire nation has risen to salute their professional excellence, discipline and patri-
otism. They have had the benefit of having been led in the past by great men like
Homi Bhabha and Vikram Sarabhai. Also, we should not forget that a visionary
like Pandit Jawaharlal Nehru understood the importance of nuclear science and
gave full personal support to the founding of a world-class nuclear establish-
ment. All the prime ministers who followed him have continued to support
India’s indigenous research and development in the nuclear field. What we are
doing today is to build the superstructure on that solid foundation.” See “We
Have Shown Them We Mean Business,” India Today, 25 May 1998.
10. Quoted in Partha S. Ghosh, “Bomb, Science, and the State,” The Hindu,
9 June 1998.
11. See Ashis Nandy, The Intimate Enemy: Loss and Recovery of Self under
Colonialism (Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1983), and Traditions, Tyranny and
Utopias: Essays in the Politics of Awareness (Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1987);
Vandana Shiva, Staying Alive: Women, Ecology and Development (New Delhi: Kali
for Women, 1988), and “Reductionist Science as Epistemological Violence,” in
Nandy, Science, Hegemony and Violence.
12. Also quoted in Lal, “Coming Out from Gandhi’s Shadow.”
13. India Today, 25 May 1998.
14. Lal, “Coming Out from Gandhi’s Shadow.”
15. Timothy W. Luke, “ ‘Packaging’ Chernobyl: The Manufacture of Mean-
ing from a Transnational Ecological Disaster,” in Screens of Power: Ideology, Dom-
ination, and Resistance in Informational Society (Urbana and Chicago: University
of Illinois Press, 1989), 181– 204.
16. “Seize the Day,” The Indian Express, 13 May 1998.
17. “A High Stakes Gambit (Nuclear Test),” The Hindu, 13 May 1998.
18. Madhav Gadgil and Ramachandra Guha, Ecology and Equity: The Use
and Abuse of Nature in Contemporary India (London: Routledge, 1995), 1– 3.
19. “Seize the Day.”
20. Christopher Kremmer, “Ground Zero Villagers Evacuated Just Three
Hours before Tests,” Sydney Morning Herald, 14 May 1998.
21. Ibid.
22. Rajni Kothari, State against Democracy: In Search of a Humane Gover-
nance (New York: New Horizons Press, 1989), 4 – 5, 139 – 41.
23. Ibid., 5.

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24. Gadgil and Guha, Ecology and Equity, 4.

25. The reelected Indian government has attempted to underline the global
relevance of the tests. External Affairs Minister Jaswant Singh recently said that
the 1998 tests were aimed at acquiring “strategic space and strategic autonomy”
in the new world situation that had emerged after the end of the Cold War. See
“Jaswant Singh Promises to Refer Rajiv Issue to PM,” Deccan Herald, 29 October
1999.
26. There was attention paid to broader dimensions of the tests by non-
mainstream Indian press, such as by the environmental magazine Down to Earth.
See “The Aftermath,” Down to Earth 7, no. 2 (15 June 1998).
27. Kothari, State against Democracy, 7.
28. D. L. Sheth and Ashis Nandy, introduction to The Multiverse of Democ-
racy: Essays in Honor of Rajni Kothari, ed. Sheth and Nandy (New Delhi, Thou-
sand Oaks, Calif., and London: Sage Publications, 1996), 14. See also Itty Abra-
ham, “Postcolonial Modernity: Building Atomic Reactors in India,” in The
Making of the Indian Atomic Bomb: Science, Secrecy, and the Postcolonial State
(London: Zed Books, 1998), 69 –112; Gyan Prakash, Another Reason: Science and
the Imagination of Modern India (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press,
1999). For an exquisite characterization of the modern state see Bhikhu Parekh,
“The Nature of the Modern State,” in Sheth and Nandy, The Multiverse of
Democracy, 27– 49.

18 Piyush Mathur