Questions relating to nuclearization fall squarely within the ambit of traditional disciplinary International Relations (IR). South Asia remains no exception. Particularly since the overt weaponization of the region in 1998, there have been spates of scholarly assessments within the field of IR that seek to pivot attention on the current historical moment. Itty Abraham's recently edited book consciously tries to steer clear of this trend. It is not fixated on 1998. On the contrary, it seeks to historicize what happened in 1998 by relating it explicitly to histories of postcolonial state formation of both India and Pakistan that date back to 1947.
Abraham's introduction to the collection begins with a lament. It argues that conventional accounts of IR tend to view nuclear developments primarily through the prism of Strategic Studies. The outcome is an undue focus on external threat dimensions without almost any attention to domestic detail. Critical of this position, the book sifts alternative registers of both the material and symbolic realms as they engage with issues surrounding nuclearization manifest in the domestic spaces of India and Pakistan. As a consequence of this heuristic choice, popular culture, for instance, becomes a valid trope to interrogate the social make up of responses to nuclearization in the region.
A fundamental question that animates the entire collection of articles is why South Asia lacks a “mass movement” against nuclearization (p. 3). While several plausible lines of reasoning are postulated (monopolization of public discourse by strategic experts, the coupling of the peaceful civilian programs with military options, conflation of nuclear ambitions with anti-imperialism, cultures of secrecy), the most striking rationale relates to the limits of public discourse set by postcolonial elites in their quest for effective legitimacy. As an illustration, Sankaran Krishna argues that salvaging a particular notion of postcolonial identity that privileges high science and absolute fidelity to the script of Westphalian modernity has taken precedence over more immediate concerns such as access to health, education and housing for citizenry. The atomic program in this account appears to perform a significant function for the Indian middle classes, namely to assuage failure and powerless on every other indicator that matters to a vast majority of people.
The taint of this hegemonic view of science does not escape even anti-nuclear mobilization in the region. As Srirupa Roy observes: “…Indian Armageddon had a resolutely scientific lineage. The frightening visions of the end of the world were unadorned by rhetorical excess and were presented instead in the methodical and measured language of scientific research” (p. 128). The way out of the impasse, Roy argues, would be to rehabilitate the “politics of anger” by channelizing it to focus on ongoing “insecurities and injustices” (p. 128), problematizing not nuclear weapons per se “but its owner” and finally building on the possibility of brighter futures rather than focusing on apocalypse alone (p. 128).
If the Indian atomic program was enamored by Enlightenment modernity, the Pakistani atomic program seems to have ridden on the back of an aspirational matrix that sought to emulate the United States. Zia Mian chronicles vividly how the 1955 US Atoms for Peace initiative fed into “the public consciousness of a significant number of urban, middle- class Pakistanis” (p. 35). Echoing Krishna's claim about the function of nuclearization in India, Mian reiterates that for Pakistan too “…mastery of the bomb, the reactor, and the missile provides a flimsy veil over its many failures as a state and society” (p. 37).
Popular culture in Raminder Kaur's essay reminds us that it does not always represent a simple counter-point to elite representations nor does it serve as a perfect medium for anti-nuclear mobilization. Iftikhar Dadi demonstrates that attempts at “monumentalizing” nuclear developments in Pakistan have also resulted in some awkward reversals by the state and contestations amongst civil society actors; some of them think of these structures as unwarranted while others build an attachment to them and protest their removal (pp. 190–192).
This book as reflected in its various contributions covers some exciting ground and will be of interest to multi-disciplinary audiences who share a concern about the future of South Asia and the politics of nuclearization. In my assessment, the book would have been on stronger legs if it robustly contested the external strategic rationales constantly invoked for antecedent as well as further nuclearization in the region. However, by generally widening both the archive of sources and repertoire of questions that we may ask of the nuclear program in South Asia the book undoubtedly makes an immensely valuable contribution.
