Russian public policy and the scientific temper in nuclear India

• In Event: The Politics of Science and Technology in International Development 1

Abstract

Over the last decade, India has invested enormous political and economic capital to accelerate its nuclear energy transition by signing a series of bilateral agreements with nations to commence global nuclear trade for reactor technology and uranium fuel. While many scholars have concentrated on the role of the state and civil society in nuclear debates, what has been less studied is how transnational nuclear corporations address the challenges of grassroots mobilization against nuclear power in the Global South, widely seen as the cradle of the nuclear renaissance. In this talk, I interrogate how one major nuclear corporation, Russia's Rosatom, directly engages Indian citizens to disseminate a neoliberal permutation of the "scientific temper" as part of its larger public policy agenda, thus shaping India's political and epistemic landscape. Through newly inaugurated Russian Centers of Science and Culture in major Indian cities, Rosatom has partnered with local NGOs to create scientific literacy campaigns and opportunities for educational advancement. While Russia's efforts at exercising "soft power" are often excoriated as cynical and strategic moves to protect Russian interests while consolidating new forms of power and influence in Indian society, I analyze these efforts to examine the contours of public discourse, circulating moral economies, and forms of social practice and performance that enable them to do so credibly among Indian publics. In other words, I attend to Rosatom's attempts to constitute polities favorable to the development of new nuclear economies to better understand how Indian democracy and nuclear power are being configured.

Author

• Monamie Bhadra Haines, Nanyang Technological University