This Fissured Democracy: Nation-Building, Civic Epistemologies, and Nuclear Politics in India

This dissertation examines how Indian polities have resisted and accommodated nuclear energy into their existing culture, politics and environment from the 1960s to the present. I document sites of friction between the nuclear establishment, urban activists, and local communities to trace how their engagements changed because of key ruptures in Indian nuclear history, namely Chernobyl, the US-India nuclear deal, and the Fukushima nuclear disaster. I interrogate the concept of ‘civic epistemologies,’ which was developed by comparative regulatory policy analysts in STS to explain how different national regulatory systems follow distinct cultural modes of evaluating the objectivity and credibility of policy-relevant scientific knowledge, evidence and expertise to arrive at different conclusions about similar technologies. By following how various actors are mobilizing cultures and institutions of knowledge production and deliberation to further political goals around nuclear power in India, as well as how these goals shape knowledge practices, I demonstrate that citizens’ desire to ‘scientize’ politics by creating a political culture of scientific debate around nuclear matters—thereby creating the forms of public reason as seen in Western nuclear debates—requires politicizing science to render it a publicly accessible rationality. As such, I argue that the creation of science- based, policy-relevant knowledge and politics should be seen as part and parcel of a particular variant of liberal democratic nation-building—albeit one that is inherently exclusionary, coercive and politically fraught. Using a mixed-methods approach of multi-sited ethnographies of five villages opposing nuclear energy, interviews with a wide range of actors, event ethnographies, oral histories and document collection and analysis, I discovered that urban and rural activists, politicians and regulatory officials articulate and enact different imaginaries of nuclear energy and democratic politics and participate in competing processes of knowledge-making and political formation. Democratic maneuvering and full access to the privileges of civil society are allowed actors who share the state's imaginary of nuclear power's role in achieving sovereignty and self-reliance, while others are not granted such affordances. Moreover, the state reproduces colonial sociopolitical categories in how it deals with the differential knowledge politics espoused by its rural, agrarian constituents and its urban elite citizens.