South Asian Cultures of the Bomb: Atomic Publics and the State in India and Pakistan

4. The Social Life of a Bomb:India and the Ontology of an “Overpopulated” Society

4 The Social Life of a Bomb: India and the Ontology of an “Overpopulated” Society Sankaran Krishna We want the Nobel Prize. This is our only goal. Professor Sanjay Dhande, Director, IIT-Kanpur We are a nation of nearly a billion people. In development terms, we rank No. 138 out of the 175 countries listed in the UNDP’s Human Development Index. More than 400 million of our people are illiterate and live in absolute poverty, over 600 million lack even basic sanitation and about 200 million have no safe drinking water. A nuclear bomb isn’t going to improve any of this. . . . India’s nuclear bomb is the final act of betrayal by a ruling class that has failed its people. However many garlands we heap on our scientists, however many medals we pin to their chests, the truth is that it’s far easier to make a bomb than to educate 400 million people. Arundhati Roy, “The End of Imagination” Sankaran Krishna · 69 In the literature about the Indian nuclear tests of 1974 and 1998, analyses that give priority to security threats, alliance politics, arms races, and related explanations from within the domains of security studies and international relations have jostled with others who accord primacy to the anxieties and insecurities of a postcolonial middle class that is tired of being ignored and belittled in the world comity of nations. One might describe this as a debate between security-centered explanations versus statuscentered explanations for the Indian decision to nuclearize. While the former genre of explanation often has a difficult time squaring up to the fact that there were no imminent security threats from familiar regional adversaries—China and Pakistan—nor was there any dramatic deterioration in a wider geopolitical sense to which either set of tests could be seen as a response, the latter explanations are inherently “soft,” making it difficult to establish with any finality the causal links between a perceived sense of ressentiment and the decision to test the bombs. The differing emphases in these two modes of explanation for Indian nuclearism will likely endure for some time, as they represent fairly divergent epistemologies in understanding social reality.1 This paper locates itself within the latter genre of explanations for Indian nuclearism. Its focus is trained on the distinctive evolution of a colonial middle class, its science and insecurities, as the primary factors in the emergence of India as a nuclear weapons state in contemporary times. A significant number of Indians—both within and outside the governing elites— see the bomb redressing a disjuncture between India’s actual status in the comity of the world’s nations and its desired or deserved status. Critical to this disjunction is the idea that India is an overpopulated society. Many middle-class Indians believe that they are not given due respect and appreciation for what they have accomplished, because their attainments are literally drowned in a sea of humanity. The bomb, therefore, is not only an entity within an economy of threats, security concerns, alliances, and arms races; it also inhabits another realm, one embedded in the desire for respect, status, attention, and appreciation. An analysis of the bomb thus demands a wider focus that extends beyond conventional security studies or international relations and looks at the multiple meanings of the bomb as well as the many anxieties it seeks to quell. I undertake this analysis through three overlapping but analytically distinct sections . I begin by outlining theoretical literatures on the social nature of things as a means to understand the global semiotic economy in which the Indian nuclear tests of 1974 and 1998 make sense. I next examine the special significance of science in a colonial context and its entailments for a postcolonial society, especially the need for spectacular state effects through science. I then turn to the distinctive characteristics of the Indian middle class and its relationship to both the political realm and the larger population that constitutes the “silent nation.” I show how the push for nuclearization has a complex and disturbing relationship to electoral democracy, the changing nature of access to political power in recent decades, and middle-class attitudes toward the people and their perceived superfluity in an era of economic liberalization. Overall, 70 · The Social Life of a Bomb I argue that the desire of the Indian middle class to occupy center stage in a world of nations is inseparable...