Social Science Research Council

Amsterdam, May 9 - 11, 2005

Project Introduction

In the six years since India and Pakistan set off a total of 11 underground nuclear explosions, politico-military crises have followed with some regularity, leading many to consider this region the world’s most likely place for nuclear weapons to be used – whether in anger or by accident. In the 1999 and 2002-3 ‘compound crises’ (Cohen, Cheema and Chari 2003), political leaders in both countries resorted to crude threats suggesting their willingness to use nuclear weapons, leading to an immediate reaction from the international community, the US and UK in particular. Ironically, the closer one got to prospective ground zeros, the less the sense of crisis. The mood in Delhi and Islamabad was considerably less fraught than the acute sense of crisis in Washington and London, especially in 2002-3. South Asian elites were more confident of their ability to manage the crisis without resorting to nuclear weapons, their Western interlocutors less so. This could be seen as a complete turnaround from the hot days of the Cold War – when third world leaders pleaded for nuclear restraint from Moscow and Washington -- but common to both moments is the elite sense of confidence and invulnerability. Through all the banner headlines, shuttle diplomacy and hotline-use that marked the crises, however, the majority of the public remained largely silent or quiescent.

Facing the grave danger of nuclear weapons and a history of crises that have grown both more intense and frequent, we seek to understand why the elites and publics of Pakistan and India appear not to be worried. Faced with a similar situation in Europe during the Cold War, large numbers of citizen’s groups mobilized and protested, and eventually had a considerable impact on political leaders in the US and USSR. How do we understand the South Asian public’s relative indifference to the presence of nuclear weapons, and by extension, the possibility of nuclear devastation, in the region? Does the general public in South Asia not care about nuclear weapons? Are they indifferent, unaware, supportive, proud, upset, fearful?

Following the tests, a small number of concerned citizens in both countries did try to put pressure on their respective governments to roll back their programs and to make common cause across the border. These continuing efforts have been valiant, but by their very scale, have drawn attention to the larger indifference that surrounds them. The small number of opinion surveys that have been conducted, post-May 1998, (Cortright and Ahmed 2000, Cortright and Mattoo 1999, Nizamani 2002, Yadav, Heath and Saha, 1999) inform us that urban and rural opinions vary considerably, that urban males in both countries think having nuclear weapons is a good thing, and that a majority of poor, rural voters (in India) do not even know about the nuclear explosions. Views about nuclear weapons thus appear to vary along familiar socio-cultural fault lines – class, gender, region, in particular -- but we barely understand the reasons for public silence and/or indifference.

What we can be more sure about is that there is no large scale or mass movement against nuclear weapons in either country. This datum has to be set against the present and growing sense in both countries that ‘fifty years is enough’ and that conflict between India and Pakistan is driven by parochial elite interests. Witness for instance the over whelming display of popular affection and solidarity during the recent tour of the Indian cricket team in Pakistan. Clearly, at the popular level, Pakistanis and Indians share common interests, participate in the same public cultures, and appear willing to move beyond the official rhetoric of distrust and hatred coming from both governments. Why then do they not act collectively against a common source of threat and insecurity? Is a ‘relative lack of concern’ the correct way of describing social inaction in the face of potential collective disaster?

At the most general level, we might suggest that the public is ‘indifferent’ either because it doesn’t care, doesn’t know, has no means of expressing their views, are supportive of their national nuclear project, or some combination of these factors. Hoodbhoy and Mian (2002) propose that a largely rural and powerless population might feel fatalistic about things outside their control, and also that the public knows very little about the dangers of nuclear weapons. Further, they suggest, weak democratic institutions in Pakistan mean that public opinion is uninformed and state censorship prevents critical voices from being heard. But, they add, “it is harder to understand the absence of such critical debate in India.” Indeed. That we can see the same outcome in India with its more open political system suggests that something else is at work here. Perhaps the public appears indifferent to nuclear weapons because we are looking in the wrong place. For example, the middle classes have always seen modern technologies as a mark of achievement and national prowess on a global scale. Perhaps they don’t distinguish between nuclear weapons possession and the growth of an Indian IT sector, and consider both sources of national pride? In other words, have the specialists on nuclear weapons with their deeply internalized common sense that nuclear weapons are both important and dangerous narrowed the field of questions too soon?

Rather than starting from the postcolonial state and asking what policies vis-à-vis nuclear weapons thus follow, this project proposes to reverse that logic and ask: what do nuclear weapons tell us about the state and society in Pakistan and India. This project seeks, in other words, to position nuclear weapons within a larger ensemble of cultural, social, historical, and material factors, each in different ways constitutive of South Asian postcolonial modernity. This project suggests that it is by stepping back and seeing nuclear weapons as techno-political and socio-cultural artifacts within a particular context of meaning that we will get closer to understanding the ways in which nuclear weapons matter to Indians and Pakistanis today.

The Global Security and Cooperation program of the Social Science Research Council proposes to conduct a small, closed workshop to explore these questions further. The workshop will be structured around the following themes: (a) Expert knowledge, social distance, and political power; (b) Nuclear images, or, socio-cultural representations of the nuclear (c) Middle classes, social movements and the politics of technology.

The kinds of questions we would like to see explored include the relationship of the new middle classes to nationalism and patriotism through the lens of weapons of mass destruction, insights on the cult of personality, especially of scientist-warriors like AQ Khan and Abdul Kalam, the relationship of ‘national’ masculinity and globalization, of social weakness and military power, state practices of secrecy and expertise, science, public information and accountability, atypical views of nuclear plants, from the ground up and from outside the reactor walls, reflections on the ‘missing’ social movement, i.e., against nuclear weapons and for peace with Pakistan, the shifting bases of nationalism in India and Pakistan, the mass media and nuclear weapons, and so on. Through this approach and by asking these broad questions, we seek to uncover the reasons for a very discrete problem -- why there does not exist a mass movement against nuclear weapons in South Asia today.

Thanks to Zia Mian and M.V. Ramana for their comments on earlier drafts of this outline.