Why this struck me in particular is that up until a month or so ago, I was involved with a group of students in Delhi who were trying to lobby MPs about the creation of a comprehensive food security act (to get involved, see their Facebook page here ). The crux of the argument for such an act rests on the creation of a universal PDS – one to which rich and poor all have equal and shared access. What we have, at present, is a targeted PDS: one which distinguishes between APL (above poverty line) who are adjudged not to need subsidy and BPL (below poverty line) who are considered to be ‘legitimate’ beneficiaries of state assistance. With some noteworthy exceptions, most MPs we met baulked at the idea of a universal PDS. It just did not make sense to them. As one Kerala MP put it, ‘Why should I use state money to feed the Tatas and Ambanis?’

The logic which opposes universal PDS in India and which is proposing scrapping child benefits to women earning over 40,000 GBP is a similar one. The common premise is that the domain of the state’s activity, particularly with respect to providing social security, is to be a limited one. The economic rationale for this, in macro-economic terms, is typically through terming it unproductive expenditure or highlighting the state of the budget deficit as a result of this. There are, of course, sound economic arguments on the other side. In the case of the PDS, for instance, there is the question of the costs of creating and revising a system of targetting, the impossibility of eliminating exclusion errors in most systems of targetting that are not universal or near-universal, the fact that there will be a degree of self-selection even in universalised systems (I cannot imagine Mukesh Ambani feasting on ration-shop rice), the productivity of the fiscal deficit, etc.

I want to highlight, however, the political questions that are thrown up by universal entitlements. I would argue that in certain basic areas even a spontaneous ethical common-sense should dictate universal entitlements. Nutrition, health, education and political participation must surely rate as the most obvious of these. The fact that this is not the case is evidence of the grip that more regressive ideological formulations have over our ethical imagination. If it is neo-liberal individualism in the West, then in India, the persistent clutches of caste must have added its own special macabre twist. Note that, of the four areas I have listed above, only the last is (if only procedurally) acknowledged in the Indian context. Whereas in in England as well as in other developing countries, to a greater or lesser degree all of these are.

Universal entitlements enfold principles of equality and fairness that are crucial affirmations of a shared humanity. More concretely, they also ground us all in common struggles to improve the quality and effectiveness of things we hold in common. Conversely, the implications of non-universal structures, especially in these areas, is to create divisions. At one extreme of the divisions are the people who can afford to “opt out” of struggling to make things better. This includes, in the Indian context, most of us reading and writing these columns who are living in circumstances that allow us to have nothing in common with the hundreds who queue for hours at public hospitals everyday in order for the 5 minute perfunctory examination by the overworked OPD doctor. Those hundreds are the other extreme, who must fight for the improvement of these services, but whose voices are neither as articulate, nor as loud. They can, consequently, be safely ignored. Amartya Sen probably put it best when he suggested that facilities for the poor tend to be poor facilities.

The task before us in any civilized conception of society, must be to expand and improve universal entitlements in basic areas. In concrete terms for Indians this must mean fighting for the creation of universal entitlements in, at the very minimum, nutrition, health and education. What we can learn from the creation of institutions like the NHS in England is that these spheres are not won without militant struggles of working people and others alike. But the further lesson is that, once won, these are gains that have to be enduringly defended.

Prasad was a scrapyard worker in the Mayapuri market who happened to be in a group that broke open a piece of equipment in search of metal. At its core was an unfamiliar substance which was handed over to the scrapyard owner. The latter, unsure of its worth, stored it away. Very soon, however, they were all to be among 8 people who were hospitalised, at least 6 of them for over 20 days. Prasad died an agonising death through multiple organ failure at the end of that time.

Too important to be public

The ignorance of Prasad and his co-workers reveals one of the key aspects of the social base of Indian democracy. The careful insulation of certain elements of state policy from any public life at all. In the 12 years since India has tested nuclear weapons, there is shockingly little sense that Indians as a whole have grown more aware of the ramifications of nuclearisation.

Successive governments have chosen to talk about nuclear issues in one of two ways. They are presented either as having ‘raised’ India’s profile to that of a superpower or as a success of our home-grown scientific establishment. Apart from these two celebratory chords the, Indian nuclear legitimation sitar has also predictably maintained a more doleful drone about regional (read Pakistani) threats. We are told that we are now a great power to be taken seriously and that we have (successfully) tested a range of missiles and other nuclear-capable vehicles. Along the way, at least one Defence minister has reminded all of us on the subcontinent that India could, “take a bomb or two more but when we respond there will be no Pakistan.” In this endeavour, the media too has danced faithfully to the alternately celebratory and alarmist cadences of the state. All of this ‘hardheaded’ (a favourite adjective) and ‘mature’ talk is designed to make us leave nuclear issues to the experts and not identify them as a legitimate arena for social questioning.

Even more chilling, however, than the success of what the state has been able to speak, is what it has been able to stay silent about. One of the most significant of these silences has been about the question of radiation. The aplomb with which the citizenry of a nuclear-capable nation in the midst of an ongoing arms race is able to think of nuclear weapons as just a bigger version of a conventional bomb, is truly remarkable. This is the really big success of the nuclear establishment of India – its ability to obscure the inherent moral evil of nuclear weapons and nuclear deterrence. The silence on the effects of radiation is just one aspect of this much larger diversion.

Inequality and Radiation

But Prasad’s death also laid bare another aspect of the social life of radiation in India. Though it is deemed worthy of discussion and direction only among the elite, its victims have invariably been among the poor. The state of affairs in communities around power plants in Rawatbhata and mining activities in Jharkhand has been swept under the carpet for many years. A study conducted by the Indian Doctors for Peace and Development in 2007 found that the rates of cancer, miscarriages, stillbirths and congenital deformations in the vicinity of the Jaduguda uranium mines are each well above what was found in control villages 30 kms away. The cause is persistent exposure to low-grade radiation as a result of the worst uranium mining practices anywhere in the world. As the scientist M.V. Ramana has pointed out, workers in Indian nuclear power plants have also been routinely exposed to higher-than permitted doses of radiation during the course of work.¹ There are people whose lives have been tragically affected and even cut-short by radiation. Yet, the atomic establishment has consistently refused to conduct baseline studies of health in areas surrounding new facilities that it has proposed, or to commission independent studies of radiation effects around existing ones. The fact that it took an event in Delhi to put radiation into the national imagination reveals much about inequalities in India.

The nuclear establishment in India has over the entire course of its existence been unaccountable, secretive and inefficient. The fact that it is able to continue to do so is testament to the fundamentally un-democratic nature of the nuclear establishment in its conjoined military and civil avatars. As Itty Abraham has pointed out, part of the reason for this is the historical construction of the nuclear public sphere as the exclusive domain of a narrow strategic community.² In this, nuclear discourse represents the distilled essence of the undemocratic strands of the Indian polity, with almost none of the mitigating freedoms that are visible in other arenas. A more aware and engaged “atomic public”, however, is necessary if the subcontinent is to avoid being the site of the next nuclear nightmare.