Cultures of Dissent

A lens on the people’s struggle around Kudankulam enables a focus on changes in Indian people’s movements over the last four decades in response to the continuing popularity of non-violence, growing environmental awareness and a culture of entitlement for project-affected people in what are called ‘right-to-lives’ movements. The movement against the plant in Kudankulam began in the late 1980s with fishing communities, activists and environmentalists who shared ideas and practices shared from earlier anti-nuclear campaigns in the neighbouring state of Kerala. Due to threats to water supplies and growing disillusion, the movement expanded to include farming and other communities by the 2000s. Whereas in the 1980s, those in the establishment might have taken nuclear concerns seriously and even be converted by them as happened over plans for a nuclear plant in Kerala, by the turn of the century, these anxieties were dismissed out of hand as matters of policy where consumptive rights took precedence over constitutional rights, and where electricity became a herald for the country’s development over and above other concerns.

An Unlikely Powerhouse

Chapter 8 hones in on political explosions around the village of Idinthakarai that, from 2011, became the nucleus of the anti-nuclear movement in south India. Living only about a kilometre from the plant, village lives, livelihoods, and environments were irrevocably marred by the prospect of radiation burdens. We consider peoples’ role in jettisoning the People’s Movement Against Nuclear Energy as a force to be reckoned with that reached national and transnational circuits. As they waged non-violence from this village, on the one hand, a ‘university without walls’ was created, and on the other, an ‘open-air jail’ for many of the inhabitants who could not venture out for fear of arrest. Through their fast-track learning at the blunt end of nuclear politics, women rose to the challenge as ‘organic intellectuals’. Despite patriarchal convention, they became expert analysts and spokespersons on several subjects that enabled them to pierce the smokescreens of the nuclear state.

The Plot Thickens

Chapter 6 concentrates on a ‘secret’ public hearing that was held on 6 October 2006 with the Nuclear Power Corporation of India Limited in order to swiftly pass the construction of four more reactors at the plant with as little publicity as possible. It provides an exemplary occasion with which to consider the clash of epistemologies between the nuclear state and local residents. For the authorities, the public hearing was no more than a matter of paper protocol. For members of the public, the occasion was loaded with expectations of genuine consultation, justice, and recompense as a matter of an overdue and urgent entitlement—it being the first ever public hearing on the Kudankulam Nuclear Power Plant. After a look at the sovereignty of the nuclear state through its reliance on science and law, the author casts a lens on the preparations, processes and the aftermath of the public hearing, noting some of the direct, creative, and nuanced challenges to the nuclear state.

Full Lives

After a preliminary discussion on how and where opinion, resilience and/or resistance against a nuclear power plant might emerge, Chapter 5 profiles three people—Josef, Savitri and Rajesh—from different walks of life who navigate competing challenges in their lives. It will be made evident that perceptions of risk were the main catalysts in altering the calculus of criticality, and that these risks need be viewed through a socially embedded lens rather than through a focus on the nuclear power plant alone or an abstracted theory of modernity. Nuclear risks did not emanate from the solar plexus of the reactor alone, but in a circuitous fashion, were rerouted through mundane practice—revisited in terms of changes and challenges to peoples’ health, diets, homes, livelihoods, the expense of living, the future of their children, marriage prospects, and worldviews. Significantly, a focus on their lives demonstrates how resistance was fermenting indigenously and not at the behest of outsiders such as non-governmental organisations (NGOs) and foreign funders or agencies as state officials were wont to say.

A Nuclear Paradise

Chapter 2 grounds the study in an exploration of the ecological, material, and social contours of the region. It focuses on the backstories of Kudankulam as the site for a nuclear plant and the spaces of criticality that were generated. The formidable presence of the nuclear plant, visual, material and discursive spawned a range of reactions that spanned from intrigue to ambivalence to resistance. With an overview of ‘hot spots’ in Kanyakumari and Tirunelveli Districts, the prospect of more radioactivity applies not just to the Kudankulam Nuclear Power Plant but also to high levels of background radiation in peninsular India, and the mining of sand for atomic minerals particularly for alternative sources of nuclear fuel by way of thorium. Along the way, we assess the repercussions of new hierarchies with the migrant middle class of nuclear employees and the entrenchment of old ones along caste-communal lines.

Radiation Burdens

Chapter 1 introduces the terrain with a focus on how people resist the radiation burdens that they have been subjected to in and around the Kudankulam Nuclear Power Plant in the peninsular region of Tamil Nadu. These burdens ranged from the biomedical, ecological, economic, socio-psychological, and political in terms of the authoritative mechanisms, severe policing and surveillance to which campaigners were subjected. After a discussion on national development and democracy, the chapter elaborates on how people reacted to the weight of the burdens by drawing upon India’s non-violent freedom struggle, and by mobilizing a Tamil and modernized version of Gandhian self-reliance and alternative proposals for the nation’s energy agenda. The chapter ends with a focus on a conceptual understanding of criticality—a multi-layered and multi-situated space to appreciate the ever-changing encounters, ruptures, and tensions of socio-political conduct from the everyday to the extraordinary, the ambivalent to the more outspoken and resistive.

The Sparks That Hover

Chapter 11 reviews the history and legacy of the people’s movement around Kudankulam while providing a summary of the book’s contents. It ends with a focus on People’s Movement Against Nuclear Energy (PMANE) convenors’ entry into electoral politics in 2014. S.P. Udayakumar, Michael Pushparayan and Father Michael Pandian Jesuraj made a reluctant decision to partake in state elections as single-issue candidates for the Aam Aadmi Party (AAP) in the Lok Sabha polls. AAP was an emergent power with the main aim to eradicate corruption in Indian politics, and was pitched against the mighty weight of Congress and the Bharatiya Janata Party. Key AAP figures Arvind Kejriwal and Prashant Bhushan had earlier visited PMANE in Idinthakarai in 2012 to show their solidarity as well as enlist their support. The chapter considers why the electoral route was adopted, then exited, the risks the protagonists undertook once outside of Idinthakarai, and what remains of eco-friendly and demos-centric movements today.

Discipline and Deviance

Chapter 7 focuses on the attempt to collate data and create an evidence base to inform an anti-nuclear movement through a survey on radiation readings and proximal health problems. Such endeavours signal a tactic that emerged around the turn of the new millennium in the region—one that draws upon the relevance of data and calls upon a politics of transparency for all public authorities even while nuclear agencies see themselves as off-limits. We learn about what may be described as an ‘indigenous survey’, a statistical methodology that was pursued by local residents to produce data that might challenge state-sanctioned information regarding public health, radiation, and the environment in a region of high background radiation and atomic mineral sandmining. The survey organizers aimed to embolden a space of criticality with supportive facts so as to present themselves as knowledgeable and rational, and thereby enter more forcefully into debate with state officials.

The World of the In/visibles

As we explore the anti-Kudankulam movement, we do not confine our focus solely to the most visible manifestations of anti-nuclear resistance even though this remains important. Chapter 4 therefore takes the focus to discourses of risk, radiation, and the (re)production of knowledge and ignorance as a necessary prologue to nuclear developments. While activists presented radioactivity as a pathological life invader, nuclear authorities channelled it through five somewhat contradictory registers: first, to do with denial and dismissal of any dangers; second, to do with domestication or normalization when it is held to be present everywhere on the planet; third, with respect to the high levels of technical manageability; fourth, in view of radioactivity’s many virtues in modern life; and fifth, aggrandizing it so as that ionizing radiation is actually ‘good’. We then consider how this radiation regime compared with views circulating around nuclear employees and the controversy over safe radiation levels.

Do We Exist?

Chapter 10 concentrates on the ways the people’s movement was contained and crushed by ‘political (re)actions from above’. Subaltern communities and their allies against the Kudankulam Nuclear Power Plant were subjected to ‘death conditions’ by way of three overlapping modalities—silent and encroaching, quick and punitive, and dismissive, deflective and demonizing. Victims, suspects, and/or targets were somatically, socially, and politically created as a consequence. The modalities of death conditions demonstrate varying syncretic subjugations to do with ‘let die’ and ‘make die’ These modalities include ecological toxicity entrenched in social hierarchies that are compounded by the neglect of low caste-class casual labourers working for the nuclear industries; more punitive and direct intentions to suppress and extinguish dissent though the actions of particular agents or agencies; and more covert, demonizing and snowballing strategies to outcaste victims of political abuse as anti-national or seditious suspects so that they can become socially tabooed and targets of further intimidation.