Much debate, acrimony and confusion has flourished around the Indo-US nuclear deal over the past few months. The UPA government has taken indefensible postures in favour of the deal, proclaiming it as the magic wand that will usher in a new era of power surplus — a claim entirely over the top if one goes by the record of the Indian Atomic Energy Agency over the past 60 years and the units of energy they have contributed to the national power grid, despite an investment of (at a conservative estimate) over Rs 100,00 crore since it began in 1948.
The BJP, miffed at not being the possible agents of the ‘Hindu Bomb’ of the future, have declared it a sellout and a dangerous compromise with national sovereignty.
The Left is apoplectic at Prime Minister Manmohan Singh’s “betrayal” in walking eyes wide shut into the American trap.
More consistent and serious critics like Praful Bidwai and Achin Vanaik have pointed out that contrary to the claim that the nuclear deal, will bring India into the global “non-proliferation mainstream” or promote nuclear restraint on India’s part, “it will actually allow India to expand its nuclear weapons arsenal and encourage a nuclear arms race in Asia, particularly in the volatile South Asian subcontinent”.
According to Vanaik, “India will only put 14 of its 22 operating or planned civilian nuclear reactors under IAEA safeguards... But the remaining eight reactors can be used to produce as much plutonium as it likes for its weapons programme.”
According to Bidwai, a report prepared by independent scientists and experts for the International Panel on Fissile Materials two years ago, these eight reactors alone can yield fuel for as many as 40 Nagasaki-type bombs every year.
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For me, it is one of those strange debates where the so-called ‘rational’ arguments from one flank are sought to be countered by equally ‘rational’ arguments from the other. This is a classic conundrum of Modernism in which rationality can be turned on its head for both construction and destruction. In the process, the more interesting moments of irrationality are hardly paid attention to.
Modernity’s claims to an exclusive, unified, rational present is fraught with inconsistencies and contradictions. It imagines some sort of a neat, surgical separation between the past and the present. It fails to comprehend that new events can be named within older terms of reference; that even the most shimmering example of rationalised high technology can get coated with a patina of ancient ‘magic’.
The contemporary havoc caused by this cognitive elision in popular imagination through, say, antibiotics being invested with the halo of magical ‘instant cures’ or fertilizers and pesticides becoming modern-day talismans of ‘fertility and fecundity’, needs no elaboration.
My own favourite example of this schizophrenia is from my visits to several nuclear plants. As a photojournalist, I have shot inside nuclear establishments, both in South and North India, always accompanied by escort scientists who would predictably drone on about the state-of-the-art safety features in the plants. While one did feel some trepidation in the maws of these temples to techno-logic, normal, rational restraints would be firmly in place.
But then you stepped inside the aseptic, innocent looking, control rooms in the nuclear plants, with their over 3,000 valves and knobs and meters and counters and switches and levers and buttons and gears — each with a defined rational purpose and well-thought out function. And a sheer sense of terror would overtake you.
For, right above the main control panel that starts up or shuts down the plant, there would invariably be a picture of Tirupati Balaji (in the South) or Pavanputra Hanuman (in the North). Every time I have felt my mouth dry, even as my palms went clammy with sweat at this comprehensive breakdown of reason in the very heart of high technology; at this easy overlay of vaunted rationality with rank superstition.
Having experienced this first hand, no account of India’s new nuclear status or its entry into the nuclear club or the recent waiver it got from the Nuclear Suppliers Group, reassures me of any positive outcome or bright future. I am perfectly willing to go along with a truck or bus driver who puts up pictures of a pantheon of gods invoking their protection during his trip, which anyway is ‘Ram bharose’, considering the state of the roads or the traffic and considering the fact that the driver makes no tall claims to rationality.
But the epidemic proportion of Sai Baba photos in the houses of the scientists who run our nuclear establishments and other divine icons inside the nuclear control rooms is the eruption of a kind of irrationality at the core of the Indian nuclear project, which nullifies any of its claims to a legitimate existence.