Available to Be Poisoned: Toxicity as a Form of Life (Posthumanities and Citizenship Futures) 1666919810, 9781666919813

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Available to Be Poisoned

Posthumanities and Citizenship Futures

Series Editors

PEGGY KARPOUZOU AND NIKOLETA ZAMPAKI Through the innovative interface of Posthumanities and Citizen Humanities, the Posthumanities and Citizenship Futures Series examines the changing status of subject, subjectivity, agency, humanity and citizenship, depending on the complex relationships between nature, technology, science, and culture. The Posthumanities and Citizenship Futures Series reflects on the possible future outcomes of humankind and defamiliarizes the mainstream narratives of humanity so it can be better understood in how it is constructed, performed, and protected. The implications of human and nonhuman life forms’ co-existence within our networked world are researched in the theoretical framework of posthumanism and citizenship studies and through various fields and concepts such as literature, art, urban ecology, smart cities, Anthropocene, the future of humans, and Humanities. Proposals are invited by crosscultural and transnational approaches, including but not limited to: environmental posthumanities, citizen humanities, literary theory, cultural studies, philosophy, animal studies, plant studies, religious studies, disability studies, narrative studies, AI and robotics, biotechnology, biopolitics, civil justice, bioethics, medical humanities, gender studies, digital humanities, art, visual studies, media studies, indigenous studies, educational and social studies, psychology and anthropology. The Posthumanities and Citizenship Futures Series seeks to foster an ongoing dialogue between academics and scholars across the globe by featuring monographs and edited collections exploring new narrations, raised by the intersection among biosphere and technosphere in a more-than-human citizenship world. Recent Titles in the Series Available to Be Poisoned: Toxicity as a Form of Life, by Dipali Mathur

Available to Be Poisoned Toxicity as a Form of Life Dipali Mathur

LEXINGTON BOOKS

Lanham • Boulder • New York • London

Published by Lexington Books An imprint of The Rowman & Littlefield Publishing Group, Inc. 4501 Forbes Boulevard, Suite 200, Lanham, Maryland 20706 www​.rowman​.com 86-90 Paul Street, London EC2A 4NE Copyright © 2022 by The Rowman & Littlefield Publishing Group, Inc. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without written permission from the publisher, except by a reviewer who may quote passages in a review. British Library Cataloguing in Publication Information Available Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Names: Mathur, Dipali, 1989- author. Title: Available to be poisoned: toxicity as a form of life / Dipali Mathur. Description: Lanham, Maryland: Lexington Books, [2022] | Series: Posthumanities and Citizenship Futures | Includes bibliographical references and index. Identifiers: LCCN 2022031897 (print) | LCCN 2022031898 (ebook) | ISBN 9781666919813 (Cloth: acid-free paper) | ISBN 9781666919820 (eBook) Subjects: LCSH: Environmental degradation—India. | Pollution— Economic aspects—India. | People with social disabilities—Abuse of—India. | Geopolitics—Environmental aspects. | Neoliberalism—Environmental aspects. | Globalization—Environmental aspects—India. Classification: LCC GE140 .M386 2022 (print) | LCC GE140 (ebook) | DDC 304.2/80954—dc23/eng/20220805 LC record available at https:​//​lccn​.loc​.gov​/2022031897 LC ebook record available at https:​//​lccn​.loc​.gov​/2022031898 The paper used in this publication meets the minimum requirements of American National Standard for Information Sciences—Permanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials, ANSI/NISO Z39.48-1992.

For my parents: my strength, my inspiration, and my guiding light.

Contents

Acknowledgments ix Introduction: “Available to Be Poisoned”



1

Chapter 1 — Living in the Toxcene: Unnatural Histories of Our Toxic Present

21

Chapter 2 — Peddlers of Poisons: Chemical Colonialism and Precarious Livelihoods

61

Chapter 3 — Manufacturing Disaster: Bhopal as a Regime of Trut​​​​​​​h

99

Chapter 4 — Creating Ecological Death-Worlds: Pandemic Politics and Repeating the Toxic Past

131

Conclusion

177

Bibliography Index

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205

About the Author



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Acknowledgments

This book is a product of the years of research and reflection that went into the writing of my PhD thesis, and during this time, I have been fortunate enough to have been surrounded by a special group of people who have formed an incredible support network along the way. Without them, this book would never have been written. First and foremost, I am enormously grateful to my PhD supervisor, Professor Ian Buchanan, who encouraged me to publish my thesis and whose unassuming brilliance and excellent guidance helped transform my half-baked ideas into a winning dissertation. Thank you for giving me numerous opportunities to tutor courses taught by you—they have vitally shaped the direction this book has taken. Thank you for your boundless patience, your consistent support through all the ups and downs over the years, and for continuing to believe in me and my project even in those moments when I struggled to believe in myself. I couldn’t have done this without you. I am also very thankful for the constant support and kindness I have received from Dr. Sukhmani Khorana who introduced me to the Feminist Research Network and always reminded me to embrace my positionality in my politics. I would also like to acknowledge my gratitude to my thesis examiners, Professor Claire Colebrook and Professor Assa Doron, for their invaluable feedback and suggestions that have lent much needed nuance to my initial arguments. Thank you for seeing something in my thesis worthy of a commendation. Your encouraging words and positivity gave me the push I needed to get this book published. I owe many thanks to Dr. Iain Mackenzie for taking out the time to review my final manuscript and for his incredibly generous, kind, and inspiring comments on the final draft. Teaching is a constant source of inspiration and I must thank the students of Culture and Society 120 and Cultures in Context 130 from the 2019–2021 batches for enabling me to refine my arguments and rethink my assumptions during the writing of this book through our enlivening classroom discussions. ix

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Acknowledgments

I am very grateful to Nikoleta Zampaki and Peggy Karpouzou, the series editors for Posthumanities and Citizenship Futures, for investing their trust and belief in my book and agreeing to publish it as part of their book series. I would also like to express my gratitude to Courtney Morales and Emma Ebert, the acquisitions editors for Lexington Books, who have patiently waited for me to finalize the manuscript, even past the deadline, and encouraged me through my moments of self-doubt during the publication process. Many thanks are also owed to the University of Wollongong, Australia. Without the support infrastructure and funding provided by UOW for my PhD research, I could never have embarked on my PhD journey. I am grateful as well for the additional funding I received from the School of Arts, Social Science and Humanities (ASSH) to present a part of my research at the 10th “Beyond Humanism” Conference in Poland in 2018, and to travel to Delhi to conduct research for my chapters in 2019–2020. The University of Wollongong also very generously provided me support funding during the very stressful time of the COVID pandemic, for which I am infinitely grateful. Without my wonderful, loving family none of this would be possible. I want to thank my parents, Anup and Veni, without whose constant encouragement, support, and love, I would not be where I am today. Thank you for teaching us to stand up for what’s right and good in the world—it has enabled me to write with conviction about wrongs that need to be set right. Thank you for the many sacrifices you have made so that we may follow our dreams. In life’s game of chance, I am truly blessed to have you as parents. This book is for you. To my sister, Copal, whom I miss more than words can describe, and who has never stopped being the protective big sister and looking out for me. I have always looked up to you and the stellar example you continue to set makes me strive for greater things. Hopefully, we won’t have to live at opposite ends of the world anymore. To my loving grandparents—Dadima, Nanaji, and Nanima. Thank you for always taking such pride in my achievements and being supportive of my decisions. Your blessings have been the invisible force that has guided me. To my friends who are family—Raewyn, Ellen, Ashleigh, and Nathan: thank you for sharing this wonderful journey with me and being such a special part of my life. Ian, Evan, Sonia and Neerav: thank you for proofreading and providing feedback on my drafts. Your keen insights have made this book richer.

Introduction “Available to Be Poisoned”

In the twenty-first century, the state of environmental toxicity in India raises a deceptively simple and yet perplexing question: Why does the toxic contamination of India’s total environment continue even though it causes millions of premature deaths each year and costs the economy billions of dollars in annual losses? Today, India is one of the most polluted countries in the world and its capital, Delhi, has the most polluted air of any capital city in the world. In 2019, toxic air alone was responsible for 17.8 percent of the total deaths in the country and cost the Indian economy USD 36.8 billion, that is, 1.36 percent of India’s gross domestic product (GDP).1 While the degraded quality of India’s air has received much global attention in the last few years, scientific research also shows that 70 percent of India’s fresh water supply— groundwater and surface water—is contaminated,2 and food crops as well as poultry and milk contain dangerously high levels of pesticides including those that have been banned, such as DDT and aldrin.3 Moreover, contrary to popular belief that developed countries are the primary contributors of toxic chemicals to the earth’s ecosystems and Western populations embody the highest “toxic/chemical body burden,” studies have shown that India is a major contributor of persistent toxic pollutants to the global environment through the atmosphere and water,4 and Indian citizens embody some of the highest levels of pesticide residues in the world.5 Simultaneously, India’s disease burden has shifted predominantly to noncommunicable diseases (NCDs) since 1990—primarily cardiovascular diseases, cancers, chronic respiratory diseases, and diabetes—that are known to be associated with chronic exposure to toxic chemicals in addition to other factors and are estimated to levy an economic burden of 5–10 percent on the country’s total gross domestic product (GDP).6 According to the Environmental Performance Index 2020, which evaluates 180 countries on environmental health and sustainability, India performed worse than all other Southern Asian countries included in the study, that is, Bhutan, Sri Lanka, Maldives, Pakistan, Nepal, and Bangladesh, except Afghanistan, with a dismal overall score of 27.6 out of 100 and a 1

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bottom-tier rank of 168.7 On every high-priority and critical metric of environmental health such as air quality, sanitation and water quality, heavy metals in the environment, and waste management, India lags behind the regional average for South Asian countries, and well behind the world average. And yet, the environmental and public health threat posed by the proliferation of toxic chemicals in the human and more-than-human worlds fails to be considered a priority issue by India’s governing regimes. Time and again, curbing chemical pollution and preventing exposure to toxicity have failed to be included in the political manifestos of India’s ruling political parties.8 In fact, the toxicity of India’s air, water, and land has sharply increased over the last few decades despite the country’s global commitments and national policies to reduce toxic emissions, switch to renewable sources of energy, and protect the ecological balance of nature. In other words, following Akhil Gupta’s observation with regard to persistent poverty in contemporary India, the extent of environmental toxicity in India today should be considered abnormal and treated like a national emergency, but instead it has become a constituent and normalized feature of India’s landscape. The problem that concerns me here is: What kind of governmental rationality makes such an exceptional state of affairs normal so that it becomes invisible as an issue of sustained political concern? Why isn’t faster and more effective state intervention forthcoming for what clearly constitutes an environmental and public health emergency?9 In addressing these questions, Available to Be Poisoned is concerned with describing and critically analyzing a situation in which exposure to toxic pollution has become a fact, or rather a condition of life, in the twenty-first century more generally, and in India more specifically. In doing so, the book explores the conditions, both local and global, under which “living with” toxicity as a daily threat to existence is made allowable for lives lived in precarity and marginalization as a means to ensure “that survival is only ever a right for some.”10 In other words, the planetary spread of human-made toxicity and its uneven geographical distribution in the twenty-first century is neither natural nor entirely “accidental.” Instead, as I argue here, it is the direct consequence of a strategy employed by global capitalist regimes to maximize profits at the expense of the poisoning, pollution, and exploitation of “other” people and places. Invariably, it is the poorest and most vulnerable communities, such as lower-caste and outcaste Dalit communities, religious minorities, tribal and indigenous populations (the Adivasis of India), women and children, and their fragile environments that lie on the receiving end of such violent and unequal relationships of geopolitical power and privilege. In employing French philosopher Michel Foucault’s concepts of “governmentality” and “biopolitics,” this book makes the broader claim that environmental toxicity proliferates in India because the priorities of the Indian

Introduction

3

capitalist state are not orientated toward protecting the health and well-being of populations but instead in reducing the costs of doing business by making, in a slight but crucial alteration of Jasbir Puar’s formulation, the poor and marginalized “available to be poisoned.” Furthermore, the capitalist state is built upon preexisting regional hierarchies of power and discrimination. In India, the Hindu caste system and the religious tensions between Hindus and Muslims provide a ready-made social hierarchy for the capitalist state to exploit and to justify who is allowed to be poisoned and who is not. In this way, culture enables the regional circulation of toxicity, and the global flows of toxicity need to be socioculturally informed for an actionable politics and ethics. Building on recent literature highlighting the linkages between toxicity and capitalism, particularly by Lindsay Ofrias, Max Liboiron, Rob Nixon, and Jasbir Puar, I introduce the concept of “toxicity as a form of life,” which encapsulates the four main arguments of this book. First, the term “toxicity as a form of life” foregrounds toxicity as the new reality of the twenty-first century but is equally aware that the foundations for the present crisis were laid as far back as the European colonization of people and the planet. However, the acceleration of the toxic saturation of our bodies and our natural world with harmful anthropogenic chemicals and hazardous substances over the last sixty years means we have entered a new chemical age that I have named the Toxcene, where inhabiting toxicity has become a new “form of life.” Second, the condition of “living with” toxicity has been normalized, through multiple processes enacted by toxic capitalism, as an accepted rather than an exceptional condition of life in contemporary India, particularly for populations existing on the margins of society. Third, under such conditions, exposure to toxicity needs to be viewed as a form of organized, institutional violence, rather than disparate and innocuous incidents of isolated poisonings. What I mean to draw attention to are the ways by which an entire global system of power and privilege deploys toxicity to expose certain “undesirable” populations to toxic pollution as a way of externalizing the costs of doing business. And fourth, the concept of “toxicity as a form of life” claims that toxicity has been weaponized as a technology of social control over vulnerable populations and the places they inhabit. In other words, exposure to toxicity is a form of warfare. The concept of “toxicity as a form of life” makes a significant contribution to the exercise of discourse-formation on toxicity in India through which the local operations of toxicity as a structure of power and control can be described and analyzed. At present, while there are numerous studies analyzing individual sources of toxicity in India, such as e-waste, pesticides, industrial wastes, and air pollution, to name a few, and their sociocultural as well as environmental implications, exposure to toxicity as an organizing

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principle of life and as a technology of power in its own right in the context of India remains poorly understood. For Foucault, “discourse” is a set of historically and situationally contingent statements which, in their relationship to one another, form a way of representing a subject. Discourse, then, as Stuart Hall states, is about the production of knowledge through language. To put it simply, the problem before us is that even though the problem of toxic contamination in India has been recognized both globally and locally, the normalization of inhabiting varying states of toxicity has rendered it effectively invisible, both as a sustained issue of public concern and as an urgent cause for political action. We therefore need to find a language for its representation. As Donna Haraway puts it, “it matters what thoughts think thoughts.” In other words, the problem of toxicity in India needs to be “rendered visible” in the Deleuze and Guattari sense of the term, which is a task that requires theoretical intervention. According to Deleuze and Guattari, rendering visible is a process by which “the visual material must capture nonvisible forces” by “elaborat[ing] a material of thought in order to capture forces that are not thinkable in themselves.”11 These “forces” to be captured by thought are of an “immaterial, nonformal and . . . nonvisual”12 kind—of the kind presented by the invisibility and imperceptibility of toxicity. In order to reveal the circuits of toxicity in India, toxicity as a notion requires a different lens through which it can be articulated and its operations, both within theory and practice, made visible. The concept of “toxicity as a form of life” offers one such lens. Furthermore, in demonstrating the ways in which toxicity has been weaponized as a form of social control in India, this book also makes an important contribution to the theorization of Foucault’s concept of “governmentality,” a neologism coined by him to mean governmental rationality or mentality aimed at directing the conduct of populations, of managing and regulating them. At the most explicit level, we can say that the toxic saturation of India today is a problem of governance, that is to say, it suggests something about the prevailing political rationality which seems not only to tolerate but, on closer inspection, to encourage the global flows of toxicity in the country. The current project, then, turns to an unpacking of this logic or rationality of government. Surprisingly, the extensive literature on South Asian governmentalities has thus far crucially overlooked the intersecting ways in which the centuries old Hindu caste system has enabled the Indian nation-state to deploy exposure to chronic toxicity as a means of maintaining and perpetuating asymmetries of power and privilege. If, for Mary Douglas, waste is essentially a sorting exercise, a way of deciding what belong where, then toxicity under the caste system—a system that continues to structure social relations, shape Hindu mentalities and produce everyday realities for millions of Hindus in contemporary India13—has been used as a technique of

Introduction

5

control that categorizes and sorts people into their “proper place.” In such a deeply hierarchical society, how much or how little toxicity one is exposed to becomes a marker of caste and class status. And finally, this way of discussing the problem of toxicity in contemporary India will also have implications for the newly emergent discipline of posthumanism as the harmful effects of synthetic chemicals go beyond a consideration of the human species, radically infecting, disrupting, and transforming the health and well-being of the nonhuman world. At this stage, it must be stated that the ideas presented in this book do not claim to provide final solutions or even a comprehensive historicization of toxicity in India. Neither is it the aim of this book to discuss all forms of toxicity encountered in India and their shifting registers of sociocultural meaning. Instead, the presentation of ideas contained here should be approached in a manner akin to Walter Benjamin’s artful analogy likening “ideas” to “constellations.” Ian Buchanan provides a clear explanation of this relationship, “[For Benjamin] Ideas are to objects as constellations are to stars. That is to say, ideas are no more present in the world than constellations actually exist in the heavens, but like constellations they enable us to perceive relations between objects.”14 In this context, the concepts of “toxicity as a form of life,” “available to be poisoned,” and “toxicity as warfare” enable us to perceive or, more simply, allow us to see real-world relations which might otherwise have appeared too obscure or complex, disconnected or abstract and therefore remained hidden from view. Why India, Why Now? One reason India matters in the global arena today is because of its sheer size and its rapidly growing economy. With a population over 1.4 billion, India is the second most populous country in the world after China, and is expected to overtake China this decade. As the fastest growing trillion-dollar economy in the world, India is undergoing substantial industrial progress in a short span of time, which means that India is also responsible for ever-larger emissions of toxic chemicals and other harmful pollutants into the earth’s natural systems. For instance, 70 percent of India’s total energy demand is met by coal and as a result of this, India’s annual CO2 emissions are the third highest in the world, even though the country’s per capita emissions remain small compared to countries of the Global North.15 But since all life, human and nonhuman, depends on the Earth’s natural resources for survival, we cannot afford to disregard either the total annual emissions in favor of per capita emissions or the per capita emissions in favor of total toxic emission to suit

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our narratives and stand in as justification for inaction on climate issues and green policies. Moreover, India is the fourth largest producer of agrochemicals after the United States, Japan, and China. India’s chemicals industry, which includes basic chemicals and their intermediates—petrochemicals, fertilizers, paints, pesticides, bulk drugs and pharmaceuticals—is one of the most diversified industrial sectors covering more than 80,000 commercial products.16 The Indian chemicals industry which was worth USD 178 billion in 2019, is expected to grow at 9.3 percent per annum and reach USD 304 billion by 2025, while the domestic demand for chemicals is expected to expand by 9 percent per annum by 2025.17 The Indian government views the chemicals industry as a major growth sector and is preparing to increase the share of the sector to approximately 25 percent of the country’s gross domestic product (GDP) by 2025.18 However, this is a dangerous and rapid expansion that the country’s regulatory framework is ill-prepared to manage. India has on average recorded over four major industrial accidents every month since 2017 and most industrial accident cases remain unregistered by the monitoring authorities, leading to a substantial under-reporting and counting of such incidents.19 Poor monitoring and inspection of industrial activities, weak laws governing the manufacture, use, and sale of hazardous chemicals and periodic corruption at every stage of law enforcement means that not only is India prone to industrial disasters like the 1984 Bhopal gas tragedy and preventable deaths due to chemical poisoning, but also the mismanagement of toxic chemicals within India’s borders has adverse effects outside its borders. In the absence of rigorous monitoring and the prevalence of low public awareness, the indiscriminate use of banned and hazardous pesticides and unsafe disposal practices for hazardous wastes, such as biomedical wastes, plastics, and e-wastes, is an ongoing problem in India. One way in which the transboundary movement of toxicity occurs is through food exports. For instance, between 2005 and 2017, Indian exports to Europe faced 1,324 interceptions as compared to 452 for Brazil, 602 for China, 114 for Turkey, and 922 for Vietnam.20 But while toxicity from trade exports can be more easily monitored and controlled by importing countries, the transboundary mobility of toxic pollutants through air and water poses an extremely daunting challenge. Studies have found that “persistent organic pesticides [a class of severely toxic pesticides that do not break down in the environment] originating from India adversely affect the neighboring countries . . . leading to its distribution on a global scale”21 and moreover that “India is a significant emission source of global persistent organic pesticide contamination.”22 For instance, according to a study conducted by Macdonald et al., the global use of technical hexachlorocyclohexane (HCH), an insecticide banned in the United States since 1976,23 and the atmospheric concentrations of alpha-HCH

Introduction

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in the arctic region have shown two significant declines, once when China banned the use of technical HCH in 1983 and the second around 1990 when India banned its use in agriculture.24 Undoubtedly, the presence of poisonous anthropogenic chemicals everywhere, from marine animals 10,000 meters deep in the ocean sediment to the upper reaches of the Himalayan glaciers,25 and in everything, from all consumer products to the human bloodstream and breast milk, is testament to the fact that toxicity has little respect for human-made borders. Toxicity as a Form of Life In offering a reconsideration of toxicity as a “form of life” in the twenty-first century, I am inspired by the recent work of Jairus Victor Grove in his book Savage Ecology where he introduces the concept of “war as form of life,” by which he means to consider “war and warlike relations as processes of making a form of life in which warfare is normal.”26 In saying so, he draws our attention to the fact that the entire field of relations, from resource extraction and primitive accumulation by dispossession to all-out combat, that emerged out of European colonization is warlike.27 While Grove borrows the concept of “form of life” from Wittgenstein, he declares his preference for Giorgio Agamben’s “more radical reading of Wittgenstein” in describing form of life as “those ways of being in the world—always lived collectively—without which one would no longer be who or what one is.”28 But ultimately Grove makes a departure from both “Wittgenstein’s linguistic provincialism” as well as “Agamben’s species provincialism” which, in his view, have restricted the full development of the concept of “form of life” to “what defines the human or is exclusively a human attribute.”29 According to Grove, reading the term “form of life” ecologically foregrounds “how many different species, practices, histories, cosmologies, habitats, and relations come to constitute what we might call a form of life.”30 Importantly, then, in paying attention to the deep interconnections between life and the ways in which it is lived, for Grove, “form of life” also becomes “the current or flow against which we can even identify a change or intervention as violent rather than merely as a change.”31 The concept of “war as a form of life,” then, is a means to “emphasize the way collectively making death comes to be its own organizing ecology rather than just an instrumental means for other ecologies, such as racism or sexism or capitalism, that are often more obviously invested in ordering—subordinating others—than destruction.”32 My use of the term “toxicity as a form of life” emerges from this conceptual landscape as a way of signposting not only the ubiquity of toxicity in all forms of life today, human and other-than-human, but also the

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instrumentalization of toxicity for “collectively making death,” and thereby exposing the machinery of its operation. In the twenty-first century, toxicity is a global threat to the survival of all life. And yet, the immanent dangers of toxic inhabitation have been subsumed by an alternative narrative of the “becoming-normal” of toxicity, by which I mean we as individuals are increasingly made to feel (whether by our governments or big corporations or both) as though we must accept toxicity as normal because there is no real choice and we cannot see an alternative when faced with its overwhelming presence all around us. In this context, Max Liboiron et al., in their essay “Toxic Politics,” state that toxicity is the Anthropocene in its longue durée and its planetary-scale disruptions to traditional ways of living and being in the world. But as Raj Patel and Jason W. Moore point out, in order to “explain why the world looks the way it does today . . . we need to make the case that it’s not just some natural human behavior but rather a specific interaction between humans and the biological and physical world that has brought us to this point.”33 For Patel and Moore, as for many other commentators, the specific interaction that changed the relationship between humans and the rest of nature into one solely concerned with “putting natures to work—as cheaply as possible”34 can be traced back to the birth of capitalism in the 1400s and the series of European invasions of distant lands and populations beginning with the so-called New World. Following the entwined histories of capitalism and colonialism enables us to see the trajectories that have allowed the extraction of nature as low-cost raw materials and indigenous populations as cheap labor as well as the “externalization of environmental damages” to “peripheral countries.” The acceleration of these extractive economies of capitalism and colonialism under the conditions of global neoliberalism, since the 1970s, have resulted in the consciously negligent dumping of new synthetic toxic chemicals and hazardous substances, such as industrial chemicals, plastics from the oil industry, pesticides and e-wastes, in the neighborhoods of the poor by multinational corporations and governments for whom it is cheaper to pollute than protect environmental health. In pursuing the methods of colonialism, “toxic colonialism” uses these “reserves” of cheap land and labor provided by colonial extraction to offload the most polluting and toxic industries into the backyards and bodies of the poorest. Today, these anthropogenic chemicals and substances are leaching their toxic legacy into the depths of the earth, leading to the human-made shift in Earth systems that has propelled us into the Anthropocene or the “age of humans.” Clearly though, not all humans are equally responsible for the toxic pollution of the planet or equally shoulder the burden of its spread. The exposure to toxic harm and its debilitating consequences is disproportionately borne by the bodies and the environments of those least equipped to defend themselves against such harms, for instance, among the most dispossessed populations

Introduction

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in developing countries like India. In other words, the geographical spread of toxicity is deeply uneven and depending on the region of the world we belong to (or are driven out of, as is the case with “environmental refugees”) and our specific racial, ethnic, socioeconomic, gendered, and religious affiliations within those regions, we are either more or less exposed and more or less likely to have access to means of recuperation and regeneration from toxic harms. From this perspective, toxicity becomes a biopolitical technique of governance for sorting population groups into different categories as those who are “allowed to be poisoned” and those who are not. Toxicity, under the conditions of a ruthlessly extractive capitalism, has been weaponized to “make killable” already disadvantaged populations living on the margins of society. In this sense, the global circuits of toxicity reproduce chronic warlike conditions for the poor and marginalized by making habitation in heavily polluted environments, resource scarcity, bodily atrophy, restricted access to health infrastructures and services, socioeconomic deprivation, and exclusion permanent rather than transitory conditions of life. Wide-spread toxic contamination is the result of externalization of costs according to which corporations offload chemical pollution into the environments of the poor, indiscriminately, instead of bearing the costs of treating it, thereby sacrificing the lives of the many in the process. When viewed thus, in following the work of Jairus Victor Grove and Akhil Gupta, the ongoing exposure to toxicity is not warlike or war by other means, but rather it is war. ‌‌‌‌ if deliberate exposure to toxicity is a form of warfare then the quesBut tion arises, “What makes such violence invisible?”35 In this context, Soraya Boudia and Nathalie Jas make an important observation in pointing out that in the decades after the Second World War, there has been “an historical shift in the politics of toxicant regulation” such that “the prevention of contaminations is now being replaced by the requirement to regulate a continuously expanding number of toxicants in a world which is already toxic, and to ensure that populations accept and learn to live and cope with generalized contamination.”36 The idea that there are “acceptable” levels of being poisoned has been normalized by the global chemicals industry, governments, and international monitoring agencies through the introduction of “threshold limits” or “safe limits” of exposure to harmful human-made chemicals even as industry is allowed to set its own safety limits for the chemicals it profits from selling. This historical shift in the global politics of toxicity regulation from prevention of toxification to management after the fact has necessarily ensured that certain populations and places become “disposable” targets for contamination. Crucial in this context is Lindsay Ofrias’s concept of “the incentive to contaminate” as a means to emphasize that “contamination itself—not simply the cost-cutting measures that often produce it—offers

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some actors opportunities for gain, while being severely detrimental to others.”37 As Ofrias rightly points out, in most scholarly work contamination is presented as the “secondary effect”38 of capitalist forces. However, toxicity needs to be read as a conscious strategy of capitalist industrialization in the modern era. The profit motive of the capitalist machinery is sustained and perpetuated through relations of toxicity between the owners of capital and the dispossessed, that is, through the “conscious imposition of ‘power over’ a group of people.”39 Ofrias argues that “contamination has to do with more than the substance of chemicals and the problems of industrial waste; fundamentally, contamination has to do with human relations and conceptions of what and who belongs where (Douglas 2003 [1966]; Harvey 1999).”40 From this perspective, exposure to toxicity is no longer to be read as an Agambian “state of exception” in the functioning of the global system but as the logic par excellence on which its machinations rest. If Jasbir Puar, in her book The Right to Maim, has compellingly demonstrated the ways in which global neoliberal governance is premised on the “right to maim,” that is, the right to expose “excess” populations to chronic injury and illness as well as death, then the history of regulations governing toxicity have generated an entire section of the world’s population that is made, what I call “available to be poisoned.” For Puar “the occlusion of the centrality of debilitation to the workings of capitalism”41 is the masterstroke of the global capitalist machinery. Such invisibility of injury and illness as normal conditions of work and life for the majority of the planet’s population from public and political discourse enables the acclimatization of “toxicity as a form of life” in the twenty-first century. Puar’s work is influenced by Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari who, in their classic work A Thousand Plateaus, had foregrounded the linkages between work and war under the conditions of global capitalism. According to them, such systemic forms of violence are sanctioned by the state, “The State apparatus needs, at its summit as at its base, predisabled people, preexisting amputees, the still-born, the congenitally infirm, the one-eyed and one-armed.”42 It is clear that the uncurbed and unchecked global flows of toxicity enable and maintain a reserve of “predisabled people” as those populations who can be sacrificed for the “ease of doing business.” As Jasbir Puar contends, drawing on Deleuze and Guattari’s insight, under the conditions of global neoliberalism, “Mutilation and amputation are [. . .] no accident but are part of the biopolitical scripting of populations available for injury, whether through laboring or through warring or both . . . ”43 Paur locates her analysis in the visible forms of state-sponsored “mutilation and amputation” that shape the “tactical calculations of settler colonial rule”44 of Palestine by Israel and the ongoing incidents of police brutality against the African American community, particularly targeting young Black men, as a means of control such that “power [becomes] visible on the body.”45 Here I want to add that

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11

the effects of power as violence are not always visible on the body and might inhabit more invisible forms of maiming and debilitation, such as the silent (and at times slow-moving) harms caused by exposure to toxic pollution. In the context of India, the rules of caste hierarchy mark the lower castes and “outcaste” Dalits as well as the minority Muslim community as “predisabled” populations available for exposure to toxic pollution. In light of this, we can begin to rethink “the still-born, the congenitally infirm, the one-eyed and one-armed” who are born today as a result of the 1984 Bhopal gas tragedy as a form of continuous toxic warfare on “excess” populations by a state organized for making death, or what Foucault called “thanatopolitics.” However, the scripting of some populations as “predisabled” or “disposable” by governmental power is in no way a statement on the passivity, helplessness, or inability of such social groups to resist and detach from such debilitating forms of subjectivity imposed on them. As Foucault emphasizes in his lecture of March 1, 1978, individuals and populations have the power to contest and break with a particular way of being governed through acts of “counter-conduct,” that is, by opposing the processes implemented for directing their behavior.46 Importantly, Foucault’s concept of counter-conduct does not lie outside but is constitutive of governmentality and therefore sits at the very foundation of the production of political subjectivity. In her essay “Counter-Conduct and the Everyday,” Olga Demetriou further suggests that counter-conduct as a concept offers a useful analytical tool specifically in order to highlight the processes of production (and reshaping) of minority subjectivity that “entails, in contrast to majority subjectivity, the constant reflection, rethinking and negotiation of the power that underlies everyday encounters.”47 Indeed, it is through such acts of political and social contestation that the Dalits (the traditionally Untouchable castes) of India gained political recognition through the governmental category of Scheduled Castes (SCs) in postcolonial India that entitles them to policies of positive discrimination. While it lies beyond the scope of this book to recount the history of such contestations of identity by Dalit castes, suffice it to say here that even though the Dalit movements for self-determination and liberation have yielded benefits heretofore inaccessible to them under the preindependence caste-feudal organization of society, in the form of access to education, government jobs, and upward class mobility, as Gail Omvedt notes, “this democratic revolution” remains “incomplete” and “freedom from the ‘forced labour’ of caste [duties] in India is still only partial.”48 This is borne out by the recurring incidents of atrocities against the Dalit castes reported in the media, in response to their assertions of equality and self-respect. In their co-edited book Economies of Death, Kathryn A. Gillespie and Patricia J. Lopez concern themselves with the “economic logics governing life and death and how certain lives and bodies are more killable and

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disposable.”49 They argue for the need to better understand the ways in which “uneven hierarchies of power operate to privilege some bodies and subjugate others”50 and furthermore, the ways in which “the global accumulation of capital [is] implicated in the appropriation of these lives and bodies.”51 However, if toxicity is a system of power employed by global capitalism in accumulating profits by exporting chemical pollution into the environments and bodies of “disposable” humans, the question which should follow this observation is, “how is the global system of toxicity legitimized in specific cultural contexts?” While Max Liboiron et al. have astutely noted that most often “the state and its related systems are part of the structure of toxicity that allows the ubiquity and tonnage of toxicants to be produced and circulate in the first place,”52 asking the aforementioned question encourages us to identify regional fractures in social relations along which the state-inflicted capitalist violence of toxicity can more easily flow. In India, the neoliberal state makes use of the existing ideology and practice of caste in its cost-benefit analysis of who lives and who dies for the sake of profit. The social hierarchy instituted by the caste system can be read as a thanatopolitics for governing the population according to the logics of “letting die.” By categorizing Hindu society at birth into one of four castes constituting the “varna” system— Brahmins (priests and teachers), Kshatriyas (warriors and rulers), Vaishyas (traders and merchants) and the Shudras (labourers) or the fifth outlier caste of Dalits (sweepers and cleaners), the erstwhile “untouchables”—the caste system is centrally premised on weaponizing toxicity in establishing hereditary relations between work and caste-rank such that work becomes a form of warfare. To put it simply, for instance, Dalit castes continue to be employed in the most hazardous and toxic trades such as manual scavenging, disposal of human and animal corpses, street sweepers, garbage collectors, and daily-wage laborers at polluting factories and construction sites. In this sense, the caste rules of purity and pollution assign degrees of “toxicity” to individuals on the basis of their caste occupation whereby the Dalits castes are seen as the most “polluted,” associated as they are with “dirty” and degrading labor-intensive trades, while upper-caste Brahmins are ideoculturally viewed as embodying the ideal of “purity,” associated as they are with “respectable” occupations pertaining to the intellect. Most importantly, as previously mentioned, while the liberalization of India’s economy and the policies of affirmative action have encouraged a loosening of traditional caste structures and relationships in certain parts of India enabling Dalit castes such as the Chamars of Uttar Pradesh and the Mahars of Maharashtra to move away from their “polluting” caste-stipulated occupations of leatherwork, removal of dead animals, scavenging, midwifery, and caretakers of burial grounds,53 attempts at social mobility continue to face fierce resistance by upper castes who view such contestations for dignity and equality as a threat to their caste

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13

privileges.54 Indeed, it is not just the elite castes but also the government that continues to employ the Dalit castes for the manual cleaning of latrines and sewers.55 As D. Shyam Babu notes, for the upper castes, the “caste-to-class” movement of Dalits “may not amount to much” because even though many Dalits have successfully overcome hurdles to attain upward class mobility, “they could never shake off their Dalit identity.”56 On the issue of whether caste or class is more relevant to the Dalit reality in India today, Ramkrishna Mukherjee argues that it is “caste in class . . . and not caste per se or caste and class”57 that depicts the new reality as even the Dalit middle classes are unable to shed their Dalit identity. The persistence of such ideological, cultural, social, and material effects of caste in contemporary India forecloses opportunities for “exiting” toxic environments and accessing opportunities for embodying more healthful states of being. It is in this context, I would like to suggest, that exposure to toxic pollution as a pivotal factor in the generation and perpetuation of poverty in India requires analysis in its own right. From this perspective, exposure to toxicity emerges as a means of what David Harvey calls “accumulation by dispossession.” Chronic exposure to toxic conditions of work and life produces and reproduces both material and physical debilitation by forcing poor communities to make a false choice between “health” and “survival,” “life” and “livelihood.” My argument is that exposure to chronic toxicity not only produces but often reproduces poverty and becomes a significant contributing factor in making poverty intergenerational since children born into poor families, particularly in a deeply segmented society like India governed by caste alliances, either continue the family’s toxic trade or find themselves pushed into other precarious trades that are equally toxic. Indeed, as David Mosse observes, “modern caste persists in the age of the market because of its advantages—its discriminations are opportunities for others, although rarely examined as such.”58 In light of this, “toxicity as a form of life” is effectively a practice of what Achille Mbembe refers to as “necropolitics”—a politics of “death-making” rather than enhancing life. Tracing the deployment of toxicity as a tool for subjugating certain population groups and exploiting ecosystems for private gain allows us to “defamiliarize,” in a Brechtian sense, the acceptance of toxic conditions of work and life as tolerable forms of life, and enables us to conceive of previously unimaginable life alternatives. As Gilles Deleuze evocatively reminds us, “There is no need to fear or hope, but only to look for new weapons.”59

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Chapter Summaries In engaging these lines of inquiry, the following chapters will analyze three case studies from India: the problem of pesticides poisoning in India’s agricultural sector, the 1984 Bhopal gas tragedy, and the unchecked spread of COVID-19 in India. These case studies have been selected because they represent some of the most urgent issues of toxic contamination in modern India as ongoing catastrophes—of dead land, dead water, poisoned air and bodies. However, in analyzing these well-known instances of toxic tragedy, I have confined my discussion to the clearly defined aim of this book which is to render visible a particular governmental rationality that controls populations through a “logic of toxicity” and according to which some populations are more disposable than others for realizing the “interests” of the state. The following case studies are, therefore, not exhaustive accounts outlining the details of these toxic events, but rather precisely focused theorizations with a view to understanding how, that is to say, according to what discourses, techniques, and mechanisms, such unlivable conditions of existence for some come to be tolerated as the normal state. I must also add that the decision to include a chapter on COVID-19 was without a doubt a belated one. However, as I closely followed the COVID-19 tragedy unfold across India in the media, situated at a distance while writing this book across the ocean in Australia, it reiterated the condition of “toxicity as a form of life” and demanded an analysis through the lens of toxicity. Chapter 1, “Living in the Toxcene,” is an analytical chapter and begins by defining and mapping the scale of the problem of toxicity from a global perspective. In understanding toxicity as a “wicked problem,” it suggests that “resolving” the issue of toxicity is “tricky” not only because many of the anthropogenic chemicals and substances responsible for environmental degradation and adverse impacts on human health are also beneficial for human lives, such as pharmaceutical drugs and modern technologies which produce e-waste, but also because some of the most toxic and polluting industries are the source of livelihood for millions of poor who must not be abandoned in our effort to transition to cleaner and safer ways of life. Furthermore, replacing toxic and polluting chemicals and substances with “green” options, such as less polluting high-tech, isn’t always within the realm of possibility for economically weaker countries where change must be “affordable” as well as “inclusive” to be sustainable. The chapter then analyzes toxicity as an invisible problem of the poor and introduces the concept of “slow governance” to foreground the ways in which the process of political decision-making consciously employs tactics to delay and defer the delivery of justice in cases of poisoning of the poor. This form of structural violence maintains the

Introduction

15

unequal balance of power and wealth by ensuring that the poor remain poor, in service to a capitalist regime. Finally, the chapter traces the “unnatural histories” of our toxic present in order to answer the question, “How did we get here?” It identifies the interlocking histories of colonialism and capitalism as responsible for building the architecture of inequality and discrimination along which the modern flows of toxicity as a system of power operate. It concludes by discussing the regional caste-based circuits of toxic pollution in contemporary India where lower castes and Dalits are forced into “hereditary” toxic trades through the active policing of their bodies by elite castes in alliance with the state machinery. In reading the local and global together, chapter 2 “Peddlers of Poisons,” establishes a genealogy of pesticides poisoning by locating the unnatural origins of modern-day pesticides in the violent histories of war, colonialism, and racism. It makes the argument that pesticides were first formulated as wartime poisons against human enemies, and were peddled into the consumer market after the Second World War by powerful agrochemical corporations on the basis of a false narrative of “safety.” The idea of “safe” levels of hazardous pesticides rests on the tactics of deception and misrepresentation employed by big agrochemical corporations in collusion with local governments. The chapter then turns to the early lessons of Rachel Carson whose magnum opus, Silent Spring, was pivotal in generating widespread awareness of the dangers of unheeded and indiscriminate pesticides use. The second half of the chapter engages with the extensive oeuvre of Indian agroecologist Vandana Shiva in making the argument that independent India’s toxic trajectory has been directed by American neoliberal imperialism, grounded in a “logic of toxicity,” which has systematically “manufactured consent” for the Green Revolution as a way of introducing a capital-intensive system of industrial agriculture in place of India’s sustainable indigenous farming techniques. In effect, this militarization of agriculture, based upon the strategies of war, has established the “chemical dependency” of a newly independent India on America and proved to be the “recolonization” of India through corporate capitalism. The introduction of poisonous pesticides and life-denying methods of agriculture into poor agricultural communities has today resulted in degraded soils, dead water, and poisoned people. Chapter 3, “Manufacturing Disaster: Bhopal as a Regime of Truth,” turns its attention to an analysis of the ongoing tragedy of the 1984 Bhopal gas disaster in asking the central question: how does the Indian government allow the Bhopal disaster to continue even though it knows the survivors face an intolerable situation? The purpose of this chapter is to provide possible frameworks through which we can make sense of the situation of Bhopal’s ongoing tragedy where “toxicity has become a form of life” for Bhopal gas survivors in the absence of positive governmental intervention to alleviate

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their suffering. While the Bhopal gas disaster has been analyzed through multiple perspectives and represented through a diversity of media, I make a case for reading Bhopal as a “regime of truth” that enables the toxic poisoning of Bhopal’s people and environment to continue, but also allows the state to justify neglecting the rehabilitation of Bhopali gas survivors and the remediation of the contaminated environment surrounding the factory site. In order to do so, my references to the legal, biomedical, and scientific interpretations of Bhopal will be highly selective, with the purpose of delineating alternative ways of analyzing the “ongoingness” of the disaster. The chapter negotiates with Rob Nixon’s statement that “discrimination precedes disaster” by presenting a profile of those who were allowed to be poisoned as a result of having been deemed “pre-polluted.” It then engages with Foucault’s concepts of biopolitics and “regime of truth” to present the argument that the Indian government has been able to shirk its responsibility toward its citizens by creating a “regime of truth” that allows it to delegitimize their lived experiences of toxic embodiment. Chapter 4, “Ecological Death-Worlds: Pandemic Politics and Repeating the Toxic Past,” examines the Indian government’s management and response to the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic as a necropolitics that is creating “death-worlds,” both social and ecological. The government’s handling of the pandemic reiterates the central themes of this book and the argument that toxicity is a form of life in contemporary India. The first part of the chapter examines the “social death-worlds” created by the government through its neglect, indifference to, and abandonment of citizens, instead of being oriented toward protecting life, such that all segments of the population are “made available to be poisoned” through the risk of exposure to the virus, illness, and death. The second part of the chapter turns to an evaluation of the “ecological death-worlds” engendered by a corporatized state solely invested in maximizing profits and establishing conditions that facilitate the ease of doing business. Under such conditions, all life, human and other than human, is sacrificed for the profit-oriented “interests” of the state and businesses. Notes 1. Anamika Pandey et al., “Health and Economic Impact of Air Pollution in the States of India: the Global Burden of Disease Study 2019,” Lancet Planet Health 5, no. 1 (January 2021): e25-e38, https:​//​doi​.org​/10​.1016​/ S2542-5196(20)30298–9. 2. Composite Water Management Index: A Tool for Water Management (New Delhi: NITI Aayog, June 2018), 27. 3. Savy Soumya Misra, “Pesticide-Rich Food,” Down to Earth, February 15, 2011, https:​//​www​.downtoearth​.org​.in​/news​/pesticiderich​-food​-32964.

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4. Annamalai Subramanian and Shinsuke Tanabe, “Persistent Toxic Substances in India,” Developments in Environmental Science 7 (2007): 433–485, https:​//​DOI:​10​ .1016​/S1474​-8177(07)07009​-X. 5. Misra, “Pesticide-Rich Food.” 6. Veenapani Rajeev Verma, Piyush Kumar, and Umakant Dash, “Assessing the Household Economic Burden of Non-Communicable Diseases in India: Evidence from Repeated Cross-Sectional Surveys,” BMC Public Health 21, no. 881 (May 2021): 1, https:​//​doi​.org​/10​.1186​/s12889​-021​-10828​-3. 7. “India,” Environmental Performance Index 2020, accessed July 27, 2020, https:​ //​epi​.yale​.edu​/epi​-results​/2020​/country​/ind. 8. In the run-up to the 2019 elections, air pollution found a mention in the party manifestos of the Bhartiya Janta Party (BJP) and the Congress for the first time. But this has resulted in no discernable change in regulations to curb the proliferation of chemical toxicity in the country. 9. Akhil Gupta, “Chapter 1: Poverty as Biopolitics,” in Red Tape: Bureaucracy, Structural Violence, and Poverty in India (Durham: Duke University Press, 2012), 5. 10. Jairus Victor Grove, Savage Ecology: War and Geopolitics at the End of the World (Durham and London: Duke University Press, 2019), 2. 11. Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia, trans. Brian Massumi (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1988), 342. 12. Ibid., 342–343. 13. Surinder S. Jodhka, “Introduction: The Idea of Caste,” in Caste in Contemporary India, 2nd ed. (London: Routledge, 2018), 4. 14. Ian Buchanan, Oxford Dictionary of Critical Theory (London: Oxford University Press, 2018). Italics mine. 15. Jocelyn Timperley, “The Carbon Brief Profile: India,” Carbon Brief, March 14, 2019, https:​//​www​.carbonbrief​.org​/the​-carbon​-brief​-profile​-india; and Laura Cozzi et al., Global Energy Review 2021: Assessing the Effects of Economic Recoveries on Global Energy Demand and CO2 Emissions in 2021 (France: International Energy Agency, April 2021), Global Energy Review 2021 (windows.net). 16. “Indian Chemicals Industry Report,” Indian Brand Equity Foundation (IBEF), July 28, 2021, https:​//​www​.ibef​.org​/industry​/chemical​-industry​-india​.aspx. 17. Ibid. 18. Ibid. 19. Vivek Mishra, “Poison, Unlimited: India’s Chemicals Industry Remains Dangerously,” Down to Earth, January 9, 2020, https:​//​www​.downtoearth​.org​.in​/news​ /environment​/poison​-unlimited​-india​-s​-chemicals​-industry​-remains​-dangerously​ -68718. 20. “Toxicity, the Bane of Our Food Exports,” Business Line, The Hindu, January 8, 2018, https:​//​www​.thehindubusinessline​.com​/opinion​/toxicity​-the​-bane​-of​-our​ -food​-exports​/article9909816​.ece. 21. Ishwar Chandra Yadav et al., “Current Status of Persistent Organic Pesticides Residues in Air, Water, and Soil, and Their Possible Effect on Neighbouring

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Countries: A Comprehensive Review of India,” Science of the Total Environment 511 (December 2014): 130, https:​//​doi​.org​/10​.1016​/j​.scitotenv​.2014​.12​.041. 22. Ibid. 23. The production of technical HCH has been banned in the United States since 1976. 24. As quoted in Annamalai Subramanian and Shinsuke Tanabe, “Persistent Toxic Substances in India,” Developments in Environmental Science 7 (2007): 438. 25. “Chemical Pollutants Are Ubiquitous in the Environment and in Humans,” Global Chemicals Outlook II: Summary for Policymakers, UNEP (January 21, 2019): 8, https:​//​papersmart​.unon​.org​/resolution​/uploads​/k1900123​.pdf​#overlay​-context​ =pre​-session​-unea​-4 26. Grove, Savage Ecology, 60. 27. Ibid. 28. Ibid., 2. 29. Ibid., 3. 30. Ibid. 31. Ibid. 32. Ibid., 61. 33. Raj Patel and Jason W. Moore, “Introduction,” in A History of the World in Seven Cheap Things: A Guide to Capitalism, Nature, and the Future of the Planet (Victoria: Black Inc., 2018), 5. Italics mine. 34. Ibid., 19. 35. Akhil Gupta, “Poverty as Biopolitics,” Red Tape: Bureaucracy, Structural Violence, and Poverty in India (Durham: Duke University Press, 2012), 5. 36. Soraya Boudia and Nathalie Jas, “Introduction: Science and Politics in a Toxic World,” in Toxicants, Health and Regulation since 1945, ed. Soraya Boudia and Nathalie Jas (London: Routledge, 2016), 2. Italics mine. 37. Lindsay Ofrias, “Invisible Harms, Invisible Profits: a Theory of the Incentive to Contaminate,” Culture, Theory and Critique 58, no. 4 (August 2017): 437, https:​//​ doi​.org​/10​.1080​/14735784​.2017​.1357478. 38. Ibid., 436. 39. Ibid. 40. Ibid. 41. Jasbir K. Puar, The Right to Maim: Debility, Capacity, Disability (Durham: Duke University Press, 2017), 78. Italics mine. 42. Deleuze and Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, 426. 43. Puar, The Right to Maim, 64. 44. Puar, “Preface,” in The Right to Maim, x. 45. Ibid. 46. Michel Foucault, “1 March 1978,” in Security, Territory, Population: Lectures at the Collège de France 1977–1978, ed. Michel Senellart, trans. Graham Burchell (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007), 201–202. 47. Olga Demetriou, “Counter-Conduct and the Everyday: Anthropological Engagements with Philosophy,” Global Society 30, no. 2 (2016): 218, https:​//​doi​.org​ /10​.1080​/13600826​.2015​.1133568.

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48. Gail Omvedt, “Literature of Revolt: Prefatory Note,” in Poisoned Bread: Translations from Modern Marathi Dalit Literature, ed. Arjun Dangle (New Delhi: Orient Blackswan Private Limited, 2009), xv. 49. Kathryn A. Gillespie and Patricia J. Lopez, “Introducing Economies of Death,” in Economies of Death: Economic Logics of Killable Life and Grievable Death, ed. Patricia J. Lopez and Kathryn A. Gillespie (London: Routledge, 2015), 1. 50. Ibid. 51. Ibid. 52. Max Liboiron, Manuel Tironi, and Nerea Cavillo, “Toxic Politics: Acting in a Permanently Polluted World,” Social Studies of Science 48, no. 3 (2018): 336, DOI: 10.1177/0306312718783087. 53. See Manuela Ciotti, “Chapter 1. Chamar Modernity: Progressing into the Past,” in Retro-Modern India: Forging the Low-Caste Self (New York: Routledge, 2010), 4–7; D. Shyam Babu, “Caste and Class among the Dalits,” in Dalit Studies, ed. Ramnarayan S. Rawat and K. Satyanarayana (Durham: Duke University Press, 2016), 242–243.; Omvedt, “Literature of Revolt: Prefatory Note,” xv–xvi. 54. Babu, “Caste and Class among the Dalits,” 241. 55. Omvedt, “Literature of Revolt: Prefatory Note,” xvi. 56. Babu, “Caste and Class among the Dalits,” 243. 57. As quoted in Babu, “Caste and Class among the Dalits,” 246. 58. David Mosse, “Caste and Development: Contemporary Perspectives on a Structure of Discrimination and Advantage,” World Development 110 (October 2018): 430, https:​//​doi​.org​/10​.1016​/j​.worlddev​.2018​.06​.003. 59. Gilles Deleuze, “Postscript on Societies of Control,” October 59 (Winter 1992): 4, http:​//​links​.jstor​.org​/sici​?sici​=0162​-2870​%28199224​%2959​%3C3​%3APOTSOC​ %3E2​.0​.CO​%3B2​-T.

Chapter 1

Living in the Toxcene Unnatural Histories of Our Toxic Present

In the nearly sixty years since Rachel Carson first publicized the life-denying potential of an unregulated and incautious use of synthetic chemicals on the entire web of life in her book Silent Spring (1962),1 scientific understandings of toxic threats to life have grown significantly. But so has the problem of chemical pollution. Since the 1950s, roughly 140,000 chemicals and pesticides have been introduced into the world which did not previously exist in nature, but only a minute fraction of these chemicals have been tested for their long-term health impacts, let alone regulated or banned.2 Indeed, chemicals continue to be presumed innocent until proven guilty and are allowed to be used in a wide array of consumer products before being fully tested for safety and long-term adverse impacts on humans and ecosystems.3 More worryingly, big agrochemical corporations are also notorious for concealing facts from the public about the known toxicity of many synthetic chemicals to humans and the environment and instead marketing them as “safe.” One case in point is the thousands of US lawsuits against the multibillion dollar agrochemical corporation Bayer’s (that has bought Monsanto) popular herbicide Roundup, which has been blamed for causing cancer in thousands of people.4 Alarmingly, Roundup has been in the consumer market for over fifty years despite the designation of its key ingredient, glyphosate, as a “probable carcinogen” and Monsanto’s internal scientific studies claiming it to be so.5 In the twenty-first century, not only are human-made chemicals everywhere— from the upper reaches of the Himalayan mountains to the lowest depths of the oceans6—and in everything—from the air, water, and soil that sustain us to all manner of consumer products (such as toys, cosmetics, furniture, cleaning products, synthetic carpets, personal care products and food products, among others) that shape our modern world, but moreover, our own bodies 21

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have become the last great “toxic sink” harboring a cocktail of harmful chemicals which cross the permeable borders of the skin to gestate in our cells, wombs, blood, and organs until such time as their effects manifest as chronic illness, injury, disability, and even death. For instance, dioxins, furans, and the banned pesticide DDT have been detected in human breast milk, phthalates in urine, and heavy metals in human blood.7 The frequent references to the “toxic or chemical body burden” as a measure of the kind and degree of toxic load in our bodies is one indication of the ways in which toxicity, in ever increasing and dangerous combinations, is accumulating in our bodies with as yet unknown future consequences. But a new study has found that we have already breached the Earth’s “planetary boundary” for “novel entities”—artificial chemicals and other human-made pollutants—such that it poses a threat to Earth’s entire operating system, and humanity.8 The most recent Global Chemicals Outlook II (GCO-II) 2019 report declares that the global chemicals industry (including pharmaceuticals), worth USD 5.68 trillion in 2017, is the second largest manufacturing industry in the world, and the global sales for the chemical industry are expected to double from 2017 to 2030, with the highest growth projected in Asia.9 Unsurprisingly, this doubling of the chemicals market will lead to an increase in “global chemical releases, exposures, concentrations and adverse health and environmental impacts unless the sound management of chemicals and waste is achieved worldwide.”10 While we have already missed the 2020 deadline for the Sustainable Development Goal (SDG) 12.4 “to achieve environmentally sound management of chemicals and all wastes throughout their life cycle,” if business as usual continues (which it is, and is, in fact, growing), we are unlikely to meet the 2030 target for SDG 3.9, which is to “substantially reduce the number of deaths and illnesses from hazardous chemicals and air, water and soil pollution and contamination.”11 According to The Lancet Commission on Pollution and Health 2017, pollution resulting from chemicals in the air, water, and soil is the largest environmental cause of disease and premature death globally, responsible for an estimated 9 million premature deaths in 2015, which was 16 percent of all global deaths that year—amounting to “three times more deaths than from AIDS, tuberculosis, and malaria combined and 15 times more than from all war and forms of violence”12—and 268 million disability-adjusted life years (DALYs).13 However, even these figures significantly underestimate the global health burden from environmental toxicity because the majority of the highly toxic and globally distributed chemicals, such as mercury, arsenic, pesticides, phthalates, and polychlorinated biphenyls or PCBs, remain neglected in the evaluation of the Global Burden of Disease (GBD) study, which quantifies the magnitude of health loss from all major diseases and injuries globally.14 Similarly, another study indicates that the economic costs associated

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with preventable disease and death from environmental chemical exposures is currently underestimated and the actual costs likely exceed 10 percent of the global gross domestic product (GDP).15 In other words, the adverse human and environmental health impacts, as well as economic costs of unsafe chemical exposures continue to be largely invisible, and its risks severely underestimated even sixty years after Carson’s warning. The reality is, we simply do not know the extent of toxic risks that impinge on everyday life. Such regulatory and knowledge gaps in the governance of toxicity have meant that toxic pollution has become an ubiquitous and inescapable condition of life in the twenty-first century, issuing from a diversity of sources that have together manufactured the environmental and human health crises we are struggling to overcome, such as biodiversity loss, climate change, species extinction, ocean acidification, rise in toxicity-related noncommunicable diseases (NCDs) and even novel infectious diseases like COVID-19. But what counts as “toxicity”? There are five main sources of “toxicity”’16 or toxic/chemical pollution in our modern, globalized world: agricultural chemical pollutants or pesticides; veterinary and human health care pollutants, or pharmaceutical drugs; heavy metals from the mining industry such as lead, cadmium and mercury; electronic industry pollutants, also called e-waste; and residual waste and emissions from other industries, such as the textile, leather, paper, construction, and rubber industries.17 While some of these toxic pollutants have existed for centuries, such as heavy metals and residual waste from, say, the leather industry, there is a definite “newness” to the problem of twenty-first-century toxic pollution principally due to the tonnage and pace at which these toxic substances, both “old” and “new,” are being produced and distributed in our interconnected, globalized present. But the newness of contemporary global toxicity is also because some of the most harmful chemicals in our environments and bodies today, such as phthalates, bisphenol A, flame retardants, perfluoroalkyl compounds (PFCs), and pesticides, are the legacy of more recent timelines of the World Wars and the years following 1945. Indeed, for the first time, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) in its Sixth Assessment Report released in August 2021 has declared with certainty that human activity on the planet is responsible for all global warming events encountered today, with the intensity and scale of climatic shifts dramatically rising since the 1950s. For instance, human influence has affected the global retreat of glaciers since the 1990s, warming of the global upper ocean since 1970s, ocean acidification due to anthropogenic CO2 emissions, changes in land biosphere since 1970s consistent with global warming, and depletion of the Arctic sea ice, among other catastrophic environmental impacts.18

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The Planetary Scale of Toxic Pollution In their book Animacies: Biopolitics, Racial Mattering, and Queer Affect, Mel Y. Chen observes that “Recent years have witnessed a tremendous growth of knowledge productions relating to the toxic ecology of the human body.”19 Indeed, what we do know through scientific research and inquiry is disquieting, confirming the hypothesis that in the twenty-first century, toxicity is a form of life. To begin with, “all human bodies tested, anywhere in the world, contain industrial chemicals”20 in varying quantities and diverse mixtures. According to biologist and endocrinologist Barbara Demeneix, not only are all children today born pre-exposed to a complex mixture of dangerous chemicals in their mothers’ wombs but more worryingly synthetic chemicals are interfering with normal brain development, sex hormones, and the body’s other hormones crucial for growth and development.21 This intensifying chemical trespass on our bodies has been linked to rising incidents of a host of diseases, chronic illnesses, and disorders such as cancer, attention deficit and hyperactivity disorder (ADHD), and autism spectrum disorders (ASD) in children, deformed births, declining IQs across populations, diabetes, obesity and asthma, to name a few. In the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic, new research has connected exposure to “multiple toxic stressors,” which degrade the body’s immune system, with the increased “likelihood for comorbidities and mortality associated with COVID-19.”22 Moreover today, the majority of the drinking water supply in the United States of America likely contains perfluoroalkyl and polyfluoroalkyl substances (PFASs), commonly known as “forever chemicals,” a class of synthetic chemicals that can take thousands of years to break down in the natural environment and are known to accumulate in the human body, potentially leading to severe health problems such as “kidney and testicular cancer, thyroid disease, liver damage, developmental toxicity, ulcerative colitis, high cholesterol, pregnancy-induced preeclampsia and hypertension, and immune dysfunction.”23 The most recent addition to this growing corpus of scientific literature, following the legacy of Carson’s Silent Spring, is environmental and reproductive epidemiologist Shanna Swan’s observation in her recently released book, Countdown, that human sperm counts in Western countries have declined by over 50 percent between 1973 and 2011, and simultaneously female fertility has also been steadily declining. According to Swan, the proliferation of human-made endocrine-disrupting chemicals (EDCs) “found in everything from plastic containers and food wrapping, to waterproof clothes and fragrances in cleaning products, to soaps and shampoos, to electronics and carpeting”24 are significantly to blame for the present crisis. As Swan reveals, “These endocrine-disrupting chemicals are playing havoc with the building blocks

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of sexual and reproductive development. They’re everywhere in our modern world—and they’re inside our bodies, which is problematic on many levels.”25 If we don’t address this toxic crisis, Swan warns, by 2050 many couples will be entirely reliant upon assisted reproductive technologies in order to reproduce.26 In other words, the unnatural concentrations and combinations of hazardous synthetic chemicals in our natural and built environments could threaten the very future of humanity. Even more worryingly, these devastating health effects are compounded by the fact that the damaging effects of synthetic chemicals are not restricted to one generation but can reverberate across multiple generations. For instance, Swan recounts the example of diethylstilbestrol (DES), a synthetic form of the female hormone estrogen, first put to a range of “therapeutic purposes” in the 1940s including being commonly prescribed to pregnant women as a means to prevent miscarriages.27 However, in 1971 it was discovered that the daughters of women exposed to DES during pregnancy had a higher risk (about forty times higher) of developing adenocarcinoma of the lower genital tract, a rare type of cancer, than the daughters of unexposed mothers.28 Furthermore, even the grandsons of pregnant women exposed to DES have been found to have an increased risk of genital abnormalities.29 Swan also points to research that has discovered, “exposure to environmental toxins can lead to the intergenerational inheritance of PCOS [polycystic ovary syndrome] or a premature reduction in the pool of viable eggs (aka diminished ovarian reserve).”30 But perhaps two of the most prominent examples in this regard are provided by the horrifying toxic legacies of the 1984 Bhopal gas leak in India and the chemical warfare of Agent Orange in Vietnam by the US military during the Vietnam War from 1961–1971. The negligent leak of the highly toxic methyl isocyanate gas (MIC) from an American-owned pesticide plant in Bhopal, India, continues to cause congenitally deformed births and significant developmental issues in children belonging to the third generation of gas survivors. Similarly, as a result of the Vietnamese population’s exposure to the carcinogenic by-product of herbicide manufacture, 2,3,7,8-tetrachlorodibenzo-p-dioxin (TCDD), a type of dioxin, in addition to other active ingredients of the defoliating herbicide called Agent Orange and a deadly cocktail of other poisonous chemicals, half a million children are estimated to have been born with serious birth abnormalities.31 Moreover, these adverse and alarming disruptions to health are not restricted to the human species but extend to the extra-human world, where the proliferation of human-made toxic chemicals have occasioned catastrophic and often irreversible alterations to nonhuman forms of life. Today, there is mounting evidence that Rachel Carson’s prediction over sixty years ago about the inevitability of rapid ecosystem decline if the unregulated use of pesticides continues unchanged has come true. According to the meticulously

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monitored and recorded data for a research study conducted by the German entomologist Martin Sorg and his colleagues, between a twenty-seven-yearperiod from 1989 until 2017 there has been a shocking 75 percent decline in insect populations across 63 nature reserves in Germany.32 The data collected by Sorg “ruled out changes to weather and vegetation”33 as the cause of this extraordinary decline, instead identifying the chemicals and pesticides used in modern farming as the root cause of the problem. The ripple effects of the monumental decrease in the insect population are being felt across the ecosystem. As Professor Hans De Kroon from Radbound University in Germany, who has noticed a significant decline in wildlife numbers over the years explains, “about 80 per cent of our crops depends on insects for pollination. Eighty per cent of the wild plant species as well. A major part of the insects is being eaten by birds and by other animals being essential in the food chain [sic]. So if we are losing all of that, we are losing the sort of the ecological foundation of ourselves.”34 In yet another alarming study, published in 2019 and conducted by the Cornell Lab of Ornithology, Dr. Ken Rosenberg and his team of scientists have discovered that since 1970, the population of grassland birds in North America has declined by 53 percent whereas bird populations across all biomes have reduced by 29 percent, and 74 percent of grassland species have registered a decline in populations in the same 48 year period.35 According to the study, these declines are driven by “habitat loss and more toxic pesticides use.”36 Similarly, in a report published by marine scientists Jon Brodie and Matt Landos in 2019, 50 individual pesticide residues were detected in the ecologically threatened Great Barrier Reef waterways in Queensland, Australia.37 These agricultural chemicals included several hazardous chemicals like atrazine, a herbicide banned in sixty countries for its potential to cause endocrine disruption and adverse reproductive effects such as miscarriages, reduced male fertility, and birth defects, as well as for its toxicity to animals.38 More worryingly, most industrial chemicals persist in the environment “in a geological time frame that exceeds the timescale of the human species,”39 and from where they enter and circulate in the food chain. ‌‌ the twenty-first century, countless such studies have armed us with inconIn trovertible evidence that the unabating speed and scale at which humans have discharged industrial chemicals into the earth’s ecosystems has poisoned and contaminated all forms of life on the planet. As environmental sociologist Rebecca Altman has noted, “Synthetics created in the 20th century have become an evolutionary force, altering human biology and the web of life.”40 Indeed, all these currents point to the fact that we are living in a new chemical age that I have called the Toxcene, where “toxicity as a form of life” has become a condition of our being on the planet. I offer the term Toxcene despite the prevalence of “–cenes” in contemporary critical theory because

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as Raj Patel and Jason Moore have said, “we need an intellectual state shift”41 to start thinking about our new reality with new conceptual tools. The first task therefore, as Patel and Moore have argued, must be one of “linguistic rigour” in reframing the very terms of the debate to envision a more potent politics for the present crisis. The challenge is to make toxicity thinkable and to make it available to think with, and as Deleuze and Guattari put it, “‘If one concept is ‘better’ than an earlier one, it is because it makes us aware of new variations and unknown resonances, it carries out unforeseen cuttings-out, it brings forth an Event that surveys us.’”42 My use of the term Toxcene to name our new chemical age is an effort to capture the specific product of human ingenuity on the planet which has occasioned the ecological catastrophe of our present historical moment. The Toxcene foregrounds “toxicity” as the agent of planetary-wide disruptions to traditional ways of living and being in the world, and importantly, names the kind of human legacy we are leaving behind in the “Anthropocene”—a toxic legacy. Toxic pollution, whether this be the result of nuclear radiation, pesticides, e-waste, plastic pollution, or other hazardous anthropogenic chemicals, is the disruptive capacity of human activity on the planet that is not captured by the term Anthropocene. From an ecological multispecies perspective, the Toxcene identifies the material problem that has led us to the “age of humans.” Given the relative “newness” of these human-made products of planetary-wide disruption, the emergence of the Toxcene as a new age of toxicity coincides with the period of “Great Acceleration” in human activity, which Bonneuil and Fressoz position as occurring between the years 1945– 1973, corresponding with “a capture by the Western industrial countries of the ecological surpluses of the Third World.”43 In effect, this capture amounted to the further pauperization and impoverishment of so-called third world ecologies and populations through “the unequal relations of ecological credit and debit that set in with the Great Acceleration.”44 It was also during this time period that the world began to see the formation of a new “logic of toxicity” according to which there was a shift in intention from “prevention” of toxic contamination to “management” after the fact. The Bhopal gas tragedy of 1984 in India was the outcome of this mindset. The term Toxcene, therefore, is useful to identify the historical moment and the ideo-structures which support the ecological and humanitarian contamination of the planet at a scale and with an intensity unparalleled in human history. And yet, despite the recent trajectory of the Toxcene, the foundations for our intoxicated present are built on the longer, violent histories of colonial and capitalist onto-epistemological frameworks and structures of exploitation. In this context, while the concept of the “Eurocene,” preferred by Jairus Victor Grove, names who is responsible, and the concept of the “Capitalocene,” preferred by Bonneuil and Fressoz as well as Patel and Moore, names the system that is responsible,

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my concept of the Toxcene becomes a way to identify the specific artifacts (or the what) of planetary catastrophe. My purpose in forwarding a new –cene to think with, therefore, is not to replace one concept with another, but rather to recognize that each of these terms brings forth new resonances and takes us one step closer to a more comprehensive understanding of how “we” arrived at the Anthropocene and the damages “we” have caused to earth systems. Given the enormity of the problem of toxic pollution, it is imperative that we first find more effective ways to think though and articulate the problem of toxicity before we begin finding “solutions” to address its global spread. As Max Liboiron points out, the ways in which we think about a problem “matters, because policy makers, NGOs, and other change-makers define solutions in response to how problems are defined. . . . The representation of a problem forecloses some forms of action while allowing others to make sense.” Till such time as the problem of toxicity is framed as the unavoidable price of progress, it will continue to naturalize what is in fact an entirely unnatural way of life.45 Toxicity as a “Wicked Problem” In their 1973 essay “Dilemmas in a General Theory of Planning,” Horst W. J. Rittel and Melvin M. Webber introduced the term “wicked problems” to distinguish the problems of governmental planning and social policy from the “tame” or “benign” problems of science and engineering. According to Rittel and Weber, unlike problems in the natural sciences that belong to a closed system and are therefore “definable and separable and may have solutions that are findable,” planning-type problems which are a part of open social systems are “ill-defined” and lack clarity, not only in the very definition of the problem but also in the possible solutions to it. Rittel and Webber argue that some of the barriers to perfecting problems of planning/governance are, for instance, that our current knowledge/intelligence is insufficient for adequately assessing the problem at hand or the “plurality of objectives held by pluralities of politics makes it impossible to pursue unitary aims.”46 That is, different stakeholders involved in any given social or policy problem will have their own ways of conceiving the problem and therefore differing solutions for treating it. Furthermore, the complex and amorphous nature of wicked problems arises from their existence in open, interconnected systems where each social/policy issue influences and is shaped by other social/policy issues. Such problems exist in a continuum of cause and effect with other problems in the network, and cannot be isolated for treatment. For these reasons, Rittel and Webber argue that “[wicked problems] are never solved” but only “re-solved—over and over again.”47 In other words,

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there is no definite formulation for wicked problems because all the “information needed to understand the problem depends upon one’s idea of solving it.”48 This latter is because “every question asking for additional information [to solve the problem] depends upon the understanding of the problem—and its resolution—at that time.”49 In a circularity of logic, the way in which we understand or define a wicked problem determines the direction in which we search for a treatment for the problem, and the solutions we devise for the problem based on our understanding of the problem, in turn, determine the kinds of questions we ask in gathering more information about the problem (that is, to describe it). Therefore, the process of formulating the problem and conceiving solutions for wicked problems are concomitant to each other.50 But all the information needed to solve wicked problems is not available in advance because “each wicked problem is unique in its complexity and so has never been solved before,”51 and since all the information is not available before solving the problem, its solutions cannot be devised with absolute clarity and accuracy. Rittel and Webber use the term “wicked” to describe open-system problems in a “meaning akin to that of ‘malignant’ (in contrast to ‘benign’) or ‘vicious’ (like a circle) or ‘tricky’ (like a leprechaun) or ‘aggressive’ (like a lion, in contrast to the docility of a lamb),”52 rather than implying “malicious intent.”53 As examples, they ask us to consider solving a mathematical equation, an organic chemist analyzing the structure of an unknown compound or a chess player attempting to accomplish checkmate in five moves as “clear” problems of a scientific or technical nature.54 In each of these cases, not only is the problem at hand clearly defined but the steps needed to solve it are equally clear whether the problem has yet been solved or not. In sharp contrast to these problems are the questions of solving the poverty problem, the adjustment of a tax rate or the modification of school curricula,55 each of which is “tricky” insofar as it might be understood in different ways, solved using a variety of techniques and may or may not achieve the desired results in spite of efforts at solving it (hence the need to “re-solve”). In light of this, the problem of toxicity is a “wicked problem,”56 yet, it is a problem of both governmental policy and science. As Max Liboiron points out, contra Rittel and Webber’s rather neat categorization of social versus scientific problems, some scientific problems can be wicked too, particularly those pertaining to environmental issues,57 such as toxicity. The problem of toxic pollution is wicked because, first and foremost, it lacks a clear formulation, that is to say, an exhaustive inventory of all the information needed in order to solve the problem. Its specific characteristics as “invisible,” “imperceptible,” and “transboundary”, but also, its emergence as a “novel” problem of our contemporary societies, complicates the task of how the problem should be understood, much less solved. Because of these traits of toxic

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pollution, the information needed to understand the problem and thereby devise solutions either does not yet exist, is not yet known, cannot yet be perceived (given the slow-acting nature of toxicity in many cases), or cannot be accurately assessed with available technologies. For instance, while we might know how a specific toxic chemical behaves in controlled laboratory conditions, its behavior in real-world conditions where it interacts with other chemicals in varying quantities and combinations might be unknown and unknowable. Furthermore, toxicity is not a single or isolated problem but shaped by other social policy issues in an open system. There are multiple ways in which incidents of toxicity can be defined and understood, depending upon a range of intersecting factors, such as regional context, socioeconomic ability/disability, education, cultural values and beliefs, racial/ethnic/caste/ gender identities, and so on. So, for instance, defining toxic pollution as a problem afflicting the poor is one approach to the problem of toxicity—there can be countless other ways to approach the issue.58 This makes each iteration of toxic pollution unique and requiring its own set of analytical tools. There is no one-size-fits-all model that can be applied in every case. Secondly, addressing the global spread of toxicity is not always a “simple” matter of banning or eliminating the chemicals and substances responsible for environmental degradation and adverse human health impacts today. Indeed, not all chemicals and substances responsible for causing environmental and human harms today are inherently “bad” or “evil.” On the contrary, chemicals play a vital role in our daily lives and have innumerable benefits that not only shape, but also improve the quality of our modern lives. For instance, the use of pharmaceutical drugs to treat human and animal diseases is indispensable to health and longevity though it is causing the problem of antimicrobial resistance (AMR), the use of pesticides have increased agricultural yields, improved standards of living, and led to food self-sufficiency59 though their presence in our bodies and environments is causing severe illnesses and environmental degradation, and our modern technologies, such as laptops, computers, and mobile phones, have compressed time and space by enabling global connectivity but are piling up in landfills as e-waste and releasing harmful toxics detrimental to human health and the environment. And third, replacing polluting substances with “less toxic” alternatives such as green technologies is often resisted by governments and local communities. This is because wide socioeconomic and developmental gaps exist between the rich developed nations of the Global North and poorer developing countries of the Global South, which significantly determines the kind of strategies that can be adopted to mitigate toxic harms at the national level. For instance, adopting greener and cleaner high-technologies used in sparsely populated rich nations might lie beyond the economic scope of more densely populated low-income countries that might require a much larger quantity of

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such technologies to match the levels of efficiency in high-income countries. And furthermore, some of the most toxic and highly polluting industries form the main source of livelihood for billions of poor people around the world. The challenge is to transition to safer and cleaner technologies without excluding them from gainful employment and the benefits of growth. For instance, in a recent article on coal mining in India, Vigya Sharma notes that transitioning away from coal-powered energy is a wicked problem for India because India’s coal-mining regions such as the eastern state of Odisha employ millions of poor who depend on the industry for livelihood.60 India, therefore, must find ways of moving away from coal without abandoning the poor and finding them alternative means to livelihood. Similarly, India’s informal e-waste recycling sector manages 95 percent of e-waste yet does so in unsafe and hazardous conditions, employing women and children as cheap labor. In formalizing the e-waste sector India must find a way of including the vulnerable communities of the informal sector and providing them job and health security, instead of excluding them from the formal sector and gainful employment altogether. Toxicity as the Invisible Problem of the Poor However, these complexities do not mean that the problem of toxicity is unsolvable, or even unknowable. On the contrary, the persistence of environmental toxicity is quite clearly a problem of governance—we know that a competent system of governance, with a strong regulatory framework, strict implementation of laws, and close monitoring of adherence to policies and regulations by industry is the most effective way out of the toxic soup we find ourselves in. And yet, despite the advances in knowledge productions and evidence of toxicity’s adverse effects, regulations and legislations governing toxicity remain largely unchanged since Carson’s time, not having kept pace with what we scientifically know about toxic chemicals. One example of this laxity in the regulation of known toxic chemicals is provided in the recently released movie, Dark Waters (2019). Based on the true story narrated in American corporate defense lawyer Robert Billot’s self-authored book, Exposure, the movie Dark Waters covers Billot’s protracted twenty-year-long legal battle with the multibillion-dollar agrochemical corporation DuPont for deliberately discharging the highly toxic anthropogenic chemical perfluorooctanoic acid (PFOA), used in the manufacture of Teflon owing to its nonstick properties, into West Virginia’s water supply. Dark Waters perfectly captures the lethargy and reluctance of governmental monitoring agencies to tighten regulations for the use of synthetic chemicals even when faced with definite proof of their

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adverse effects on human and nonhuman health. When faced with such troubling evidence of the effects of widespread toxic contamination, the global political response (or the lack thereof) to environmental toxicity functions as, what Jairus Victor Grove calls, “proof of the opposite of common sense.” How can we begin to account for this gap between knowledge and practice? At one level, such a disconnect points to a lack of awareness of the extent of toxic pollution among global publics, including the assumption that dangerous chemicals are being monitored and regulated by the government. Among elite publics of the Global North, while the awareness of inhabiting a “toxic” world has gained much traction in the twenty-first century, this “awareness” is enclosed within a specific narrative that serves to obfuscate rather than target the global problem of toxicity. As Alexis Shotwell has so compellingly argued in her book, Against Purity, the hypervisibility of toxicants in the everyday world has resulted in the contemporary desire to render them absent or invisible by sublimation with its opposite—purity. “This ethos,” Shotwell explains, “is the idea that we can access or recover a time and state before or without pollution, without impurity, before the fall from innocence, when the world at large is truly beautiful.”61 The desire to “escape” toxicity and to minimize its intrusions on the human and more-than-human worlds is evident in affluent societies in the (re)turn to “natural” and “organic” products and lifestyles that are “environmentally friendly,” “sustainable,” and “nontoxic” in an effort at recovering states of “health,” “well-being,” and “wellness.” This is achieved by incorporating certain practices and habits as part of the routines of daily life such as transitioning to veganism and/or “organic” and “healthy” foods, banning disposable plastics, turning to consumer products with “natural” ingredients wrapped in “recyclable” or “biodegradable” packaging, using organic instead of chemical pesticides, composting kitchen wastes, cultivating community gardens and backyard kitchens, and practicing yoga and meditation. From this perspective, the process of detoxification for a new generation of environmentally sensitive elite consumers implies a lifestyle change—one that is cleaner, purer, healthier, and, therefore, happier. However, quite apart from the issue of there being no “primordial state” or “pretoxic body”62 to return to that the world’s affluent elite seem to pursue in their response to toxicity’s planetary spread, this way of approaching the problems generated by the entanglement of toxicity with the web of life as though it were somehow a simple matter of making the right lifestyle “choices” only serves to further invisiblize the critical issues that lie at the heart of the problem of toxicity as a form of life in the twenty-first century. The emergence of this new version of environmentalism is problematic not only because it shifts the onus of responsibility for exposure from governments and industry to individuals but also because it creates a sense of continuing “urgency” on an issue-by-issue basis, as if suspending the public in

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a state of endless deferment. This amounts to tiptoeing around the elephant in the room but never actually addressing the elephant. One need only think of the ban on plastic bags that was followed by the ban on plastic straws and has now “expanded” to a call for a ban on all single-use plastics in most developed as well as developing countries. Or the way in which regulatory agencies in collusion with multibillion-dollar agrochemical corporations play a game of pesticide musical chairs by replacing one banned pesticide with another equally harmful pesticide in a never-ending chain of poisoning. This format of what can be called “cause-by-cause environmentalism” prevents a recognition of toxicity as an organized structure of power, and therefore a systemic problem, foreclosing any real understanding of how this system works like a machine, in a Deleuzo–Guattarian sense,63 by concealing its different working parts. Even more problematically, the circulation of this mainstream narrative on toxicity among affluent publics fails to consider what it means to inhabit states of chronic toxicity for the world’s poorest and most marginalized communities who do not have the luxury of “choosing” otherwise. To say so is also to recognize that the communities who embody the most catastrophic consequences of toxic exposure are invariably the ones left out of the popular discourses of toxicity. What I am suggesting is that one of the foremost reasons why political action on the problem of toxicity is sluggish can be explained by the fact that toxicity is seen as a problem of the poor and is therefore not regarded as an urgent matter for intervention. While toxicity has become a global phenomenon in the twenty-first century, the body and environmental burdens of toxic harms are unequally borne by those in lowand middle-income countries, as a result of the off-loading of toxic pollution from the neighborhoods of the rich into the environments of the poor, where the “slow violence” of the toxic contamination of people and places can occur out of sight. Rob Nixon defined “slow violence” as “a violence that occurs gradually and out of sight, a violence of delayed destruction that is dispersed across time and space, an attritional violence that is typically not viewed as violence at all.”64 The concept of “slow violence” is vital in order to critically capture the toxic burdens with which disadvantaged populations of the world live as everyday reality such that the slow yet ongoing atrophy of the body and the accompanying social, economic, and psychological disabilities remain invisible as the site of sustained violence. Moreover, what is less commonly recognized is that the uneven geographical contamination of the planet is not an “accidental” by-product of industrial progress and modernization, as Lindsay Ofrias points out in her essay “Invisible harms, invisible profits . . . ,” but rather operates as the deliberate strategy of a global neoliberal politics that encourages the “toxic colonialism” of the neighborhoods of the poor as a way to ensure that profits generated by the capitalist exploitation

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of “other” people and places remain in the hands of a few. Indeed, as Soraya Boudia and Nathalie Jas pertinently ask, “In these circumstances, what does it mean to be ‘in control of one’s life,’ for populations, often the poorest . . . with no possibility of leaving the dangerous territory in which they live, or rehabilitating it?”65 In sharp contrast to the affluent populations of Western countries, poor and marginalized communities faced with the grueling hardships of extreme poverty paired with illiteracy, find themselves left out of domains of knowledge production and dissemination, as a result of which, they are seldom aware of the toxic risks they live with every day. But even in those instances when disadvantaged communities are aware of the adverse effects of chronic exposure and live with the debilities occasioned by repeated toxic poisoning, they have no option to “exit” or even mitigate the harms of toxic environments and lifestyles when the very question of survival is at stake. In this context, the history of toxicity in the Global South has functioned as a form of, what can be called, “cruel pessimism,” in a reversal of Lauren Berlant’s concept of “cruel optimism.” For Berlant, “cruel optimism is the condition of maintaining an attachment to a significantly problematic object,”66 by which she means to describe our attachments to those things/objects in our lives we think won’t harm us and the continued presence of which makes us feel good, “even though its presence threatens [our] well-being.”67 In a sharp reversal of this formulation, I think of the proliferation of toxic chemicals in the environments and bodies of the poorest communities in the world as a form of “cruel pessimism” because the things/objects/ways of life the poor know will harm them are nevertheless inescapable and leave them no option but to continue living in the midst of such harms, confronted as they are with a false choice between “life” and “livelihood.”68 Those who produce and perpetuate these harms are least at risk from its long-term and tragic fallout, insulated by structures of power, whereas those who play no part in the production of poisons are condemned to the invisible violence of a “slow death,” which Berlant describes as “the physical wearing out of a population in a way that points to its deterioration as a defining condition of its experience and historical existence.”69 Toxic Catastrophes as Present Crises, Not Future Threats Given this context, there is little doubt that we are living in, what German sociologist Ulrich Beck has called, the “world risk society” in our experience of the global threats and uncertainties of toxic pollution as a condition of existence on the planet. According to Beck’s theory of risk, experienced by Western nations, “modern society has become a risk society in the sense

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that it is increasingly occupied with debating, preventing and managing risk that it itself has produced”70 where “risk is not the same as catastrophe, but the anticipation of the future catastrophe in the [present].”71 This distinction between “risk” and “catastrophe” is an important one according to Beck. As he argues, “risks are not ‘real,’ they are ‘becoming real’”72 because “the moment at which risks become real—for example, in the shape of a terrorist attack—they cease to be risks and become catastrophes.”73 It is in this sense that “risk society” is “a catastrophic society” (invested in anticipating catastrophes) in which “the state of emergency threatens to become the normal state.”74 My argument is that “toxicity as a form of life” in the twenty-first century is an effect of the “becoming-normal” of toxic risks as a part of our daily reality. In this context, French philosopher Frédéric Neyrat’s concept of the “biopolitics of catastrophe” is a useful critical intervention for describing the “political response to life in the Anthropocene, its environmental catastrophes, and its new sensitivity to risks.”75 According to Neyrat, this new form of governance is incapable of preventing environmental problems since it functions through two modes aimed at avoiding rather than addressing environmental catastrophes: “an averting mode” which averts the event in advance, and “a regulating mode,” whose function is “to erase events after the fact.”76 Importantly, these “incalculable risks and manufactured uncertainties”77 confronting risk society, argues Beck, “are not the result of the errors of modernization but of its successes and hence are contingent on human decisions through which science and technology are perfected.”78 Risks, in this instance the threat of exposure to toxic harm, have become “immanent in society and hence cannot be externalized,”79 which means that environmental problems today are equally social, political and economic problems, and not isolatable to an exterior “nature,” somehow divorced from society. From this perspective, the chemical contamination of the planet and the accompanying adverse impacts on human and environmental health are the “unwanted” and “unseen” consequences of the victory of Western modernity—the realization of the modernist vision of industrialization, urbanization, technological advancement, and agricultural innovations through mechanization. Once there is a “recognition” of modernization risks by publics of risk societies, Beck argues that political concern is forced to extend beyond “the established repertoire of politics—controlling the market through economic policy, redistribution of income, social security measures—[to] the non-political: the elimination of the causes of hazards in the modernization process itself becomes political.”80 That is to say, the collective knowledge and belief of inhabiting the risks of modernity in contemporary industrialized societies gives rise to a new ecological awareness which enables the opening up of “previously closed areas and opportunities for action,” making the thus far “unthinkable and unmakeable . . . possible for a short period.”81 But if the

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citizens of “industrialized” countries have awakened to a new stage of modernity that Beck calls a “second modernity” or “reflexive modernity,” it raises the question, at whose expense are such previously unthinkable possibilities for action realizable? Is this reflexivity possible for non-Western publics, or “can this reflexivity travel?”82 Relatedly, the question I want to pursue here is, what has the triumph of modernity in “the West” meant for “the rest”? If “risk,” according to Beck, is not catastrophe but the “anticipation of catastrophe” in developed nations of the Global North, this is because, I argue, catastrophe has been systematically exported to poorer countries of the Global South, who do not live and cope with the anticipation of future risks but with the devastating effects of toxic catastrophes to their life-worlds in the present. This is the basis of the problem we encounter in India where the normalization of exposure to toxic pollution for some is actualized in spite of the embodied experience of toxicity as catastrophe, not risk. At this stage, it should be clarified that while toxicity might be a becoming-normal for some as risk, it has been accepted as normal for others marked as “disposable” populations, not only as risk but also as catastrophe. Viewed thus, one of the conditions of possibility for the two modes of “averting” and “erasing” events according to which Neyrat’s biopolitics of catastrophe functions is relocating the potential harm of risks as catastrophe. For instance, the export of wastes, including e-waste, for disposal from rich nations to developing countries that lack regulations and infrastructure for the safe management of hazardous wastes averts the immediate risk of toxic pollution in the rich neighborhoods of affluent populations by relocating it in the backyards of the poor, but also eases the process of “managing” toxic catastrophes when they occur in the neighborhoods of those whose lives and natural worlds are deemed less valuable. For Beck, “Risks are risk conflicts in which there is a world of difference between the decision makers who could ultimately avoid the risks and the involuntary consumers of dangers who do not have any say in these decisions and onto whom the dangers are shifted as ‘unintentional, unseen side effects.’”83 The distribution of toxic risks and catastrophes between nations, and communities within nations is the division between “those who run risks and define them versus those to whom they are allocated.”84 Importantly, then, how risks are defined by powerful actors itself becomes a game of power which enables the maximization of risks for “others” and the minimization of risks for “themselves.”85 In our contemporary moment, low- and middle-income countries of the Global South are simultaneously experiencing the human and environmental costs of Western modernity, as well as the toxic load from their own trajectories of development and progress, which invariably follow the Western model. This “double burden” of toxic stress is today palpable in the concentration of toxicity-related illnesses, injuries,

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and deaths in poorer developing countries where nearly 94 percent of all preventable pollution-related deaths occur.86 As “‘acceptable exposures’ turn into ‘intolerable sources of hazards’”87 in developed nations, a “relativity of acceptable levels”88 of exposure is increasingly established between rich Western countries and poorer non-Western countries, whereby that which is now viewed as “intolerable” in the West becomes “acceptable” for the rest. Indeed, the central conflict, when facing the unequal exposure to forms of chemical harm, is the issue of “who has the power to divert the hazardousness of the risks they incur onto others [as catastrophe].”89 In this context, I want to suggest that it becomes possible to trace the history of modernity as a constant negotiation between governments, industry, and global publics about how much toxicity is tolerable and for whom. Insofar as these negotiations of acceptable levels of toxicity continue in our contemporary moment, the regulation of toxicity is legible as, to adopt Jürgen Habermas’s concept, “the unfinished project of modernity.” Indeed, it is possible to decipher the emergence of a new form of governance premised on a “logic of toxicity” that I am going to call, rather crudely and for lack of a better term, a toxic governmentality or “toxicality.” In his lecture on governmentality, Foucault explained that “with government it is a question not of imposing law on men [as it was with Sovereignty], but of disposing things: that is to say, of employing tactics rather than laws, and even of using laws themselves as tactics—to arrange things in such a way that, through a certain number of means, such and such ends may be achieved.”90 Quoting from Guillaume de Perrière’s book, Foucault therefore states that, “government is the right disposition of things, arranged so as to lead to a convenient end.”91 The question that interests me here is: How can we begin to account for the tendency of governments to “conduct the conduct” of certain social groups to the end of “disposing of” rather than “fostering life”? Phrased another way, at what point and in what ways does the governmental tendency of “disposing” become a tendency toward “disposing of” in different sociocultural contexts? I want to suggest that this new toxic rationality of power that I call “toxicality” might provide a possible framework to describe this disposition of state power to “dispose of” as a way of reducing state expenses, and its exercise of this power through the entire ensemble of institutions, ideologies, processes, discourses, practices, and tactics that give expression to this new technology of power. While Foucault’s early concern was with answering the questions, “what is good government?” and “what should it look like?,” as he developed his concept further, governmentality became difficult to distinguish from “security” and “social control.” It therefore becomes important to examine the ways in which social control is exercised by governments in order to manage and regulate different population groups. The troubling reality is that poverty

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is directly proportional to toxic exposure since the majority of the poor in low- and middle-income countries are living and working in close proximity to toxic chemicals.92 This unequal reality means toxicity is seen as a problem of the poor. As will be discussed in what follows, this fact combined with the growing “business ethic” of the neoliberal nation-state form the main reasons for, what I call, the “slow governance” of toxic chemicals, not only in poorer countries of the Global South but also in rich countries of the Global North. The association of toxicity with poverty and a profit-oriented ethics serve to render the problem invisible as a matter for urgent political intervention. Slow governance is the primary mode by which “toxicality” or toxic governmentality functions. In using the concept of “slow governance,” I wish to draw attention to those forms of political decision-making that rather than being action-orientated with a view to improving existing relations in society are more invested in maintaining existing asymmetries of power and privilege by employing a diversity of “tactics” directed at impeding the delivery of relief and justice to those deserving of it. The tactics of slow governance can include, but are not limited to, the drafting, introduction, and implementation of weak laws and policies that provide an unfair advantage to elite segments of the population whether they be individuals, groups, or businesses, or prove a disadvantage to already weaker sections of society, such that the two forms do not always and necessarily intersect but produce the same results; lack of implementation and monitoring of existing laws and regulations such that the gap between policy and practice widens; political inaction, or delayed action on issues requiring urgent intervention such that justice delayed is justice denied as is the case in most instances of toxic contamination where a delay in compensation and cleanup amounts to a buildup of toxicity resulting in further injury and degradation that remain uncompensated. At times, slow governance is performed by means of the deliberate formation of “nonknowledge” and “unknowns” in a manner contrary to what Foucault called the state’s “savoir” (knowledge). What I mean by the nonknowledge of the state is that the state might present itself as one that “does not know,” “cannot know,” or “did not know” as a way of shirking responsibility for the failure to protect life. This slow pace of governance, then, is always enacted from a cost-benefit analysis as a way of maximizing gains, whether economic, political, or social, in any given situation. In this sense, slow governance is a form of political violence that finds expression through a calculated indifference, neglect, or even outright abandonment as technologies of power but is invariably dismissed as “incompetence” without recognizing, what Foucault calls, the “interests” of governments underlying all forms of political decision-making. Moreover, the spread of toxicity, first as disease during contact with Indigenous and native populations and then as pollution over the course of

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colonialism as inextricably bound with the exploitative histories of colonization, industrialization, racism, and corresponding speciesism of Europe and America, can be understood as a part of this “logic of toxicity,” of allowable contamination. Unnatural Histories of Our Toxic Present, or How Did We Get Here? The global problem of toxicity is relatively recent, not only in terms of the sources of toxicity, such as industrial chemicals, pesticides, plastics (which leach toxic chemicals called “plasticizers” or “monomers” that are added to plastic), and e-waste, whose timelines begin in the years following the Second World War, but also in terms of the “speed-up” of manufacturing processes from the 1970s onward that discharge these contaminants into global ecosystems at a speed and scale hitherto unknown. However, the structures that allow the uneven global distribution of toxicity today are based on older asymmetries of power and privilege enabled by the convergence of European colonialism and the birth of capitalism as early as the fifteenth century. In their latest book, Pollution Is Colonialism, Max Liboiron argues that “pollution is not a manifestation or side effect of colonialism but is rather an enactment of ongoing colonial relations to land. That is, pollution is best understood as the violence of colonial land relations rather than environmental damage, which is a symptom of violence.”93 While Liboiron is right in insisting on the recognition that the original violence of the colonial encounter enacted the wide-scale dispossession of land from Indigenous and colonized populations through genocide and slavery on which the continuing unrestricted access to this land for a variety of purposes by former colonial countries depends, I want to argue, given that “capitalism’s ecology now affects every tendril of the planet’s ecology,”94 that pollution is also capitalism. While “primitive accumulation” under colonialism forms the “prehistory of capital” as Marx puts it, in order to understand how toxicity operates like a global system of power in the twenty-first century, it is more productive to read the ways in which the interlocking histories of colonialism and capitalism are responsible for building the architectures of extraction on which the extraordinary accumulation of capital and wealth by countries of the Global North depends and along which the unequal flows of modern-day toxicity can be traced. So, for instance, while the ecology of colonialism provided vast “reserves” of stolen land and the labor of those it had categorized as “subhuman” and “not fully human” to capitalism, the mechanism of capitalism in turn was necessary for transforming these otherwise “dead” reserves into “profit” through the lowest possible cost of doing business. Indeed, as

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Bonneuil and Fressoz point out, it is because “a long historical process of economic exploitation of human beings and the world”95 was already in place that the Industrial Revolution in Europe was even possible, a process which began the shift in the Earth’s natural systems and inaugurated the “age of humans” or the Anthropocene through extensive pollution and ecological devastation. The unholy alliance of colonialism and capitalism enabled colonizing countries to “monopolize the benefits of the Earth”96 by extracting the natural resources of colonized lands as raw materials at low cost, exploiting Indigenous peoples as cheap labor, and exporting environmental damages and pollution to their neighborhoods. Even when the governance of the biosphere and the protection of environmental health began to be coded into law, such as the “polluter-pays principle,” over the course of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, as Christophe Bonneuil and Jean-Baptiste Fressoz point out in The Shock of the Anthropocene, it failed to “prevent pollution but, on the contrary, historically accompanied and legitimized the degradation of environments.”97 This was quite simply because such laws produced three results in a capitalist system oriented toward the maximization of profits at all costs, “the employment for the most dangerous tasks of the weakest sections of the population, whose illnesses can remain socially invisible; the concentration of production and pollution in a few localities; and the choice, for these localities, of poor territories lacking in social and political resources, thus minimizing the value of environmental compensation.”98 Crucially, then, as Marv Waterstone argues, “widespread resource depletion, as well as pervasive environmental pollution, including climate change”99 occur “because of capitalism’s dependence on externalizing (that is, putting the burden on others) any costs that detract from the bottom line.”100 In order to ensure a steady rise in profits, that is, to ensure continued growth and expansion, capitalism must always be in search of “cheaper and/or more submissive labor, newer cheaper resources, new markets, places to dump pollution, and so forth.”101 For its survival, capitalism centrally rests on processes of, what Raj Patel and Jason W. Moore have called, “cheapening,” which they describe as “a strategy, a practice, a violence that mobilizes all kinds of work—human and animal, botanical and geological—with as little compensation as possible.”102 As colonial nations rapidly industrialized and attained high levels of socioeconomic development over the course of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, their capitalist economic models required access to still more land, not only for the raw materials to manufacture its products but also for dumping the wastes and pollution that accompanied such industrialization—in a never-ending loop of rapacious extraction—and access to still more “cheap lives,” not only for exploitable labor but also for absorbing toxic pollution from industrial processes. In this way, a capitalist colonialism made certain

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populations and their environments “available to be poisoned” by devaluing the personhood of non-Western colonized peoples through a double movement; first, the colonial state established a racial hierarchy measuring degrees of “humanness” from “savage” to “civilized,” and second, these governmentalized categories were then used by the capitalist state to determine who is allowed to be polluted as a way of lowering the costs of doing business. It is only because all life was no longer seen as equally valuable that the exposure of “disposable” populations and the environments they inhabit to forms of chronic toxicity could be justified. However, the process of regularizing such unnatural relations between humans and nature as well as between some humans and “other” humans required more than the implementation of laws and the use of force legitimizing these unequal patterns of behavior; it required the production of what Gramsci has called a “common sense”—in this case, a capitalist common sense. By common sense, Gramsci means our deeply embedded conceptions and notions of how the world works. However, these ways of understanding the world are also the site of fierce contestations for political power. As Waterstone explains, this is because “If you can convince people that your sense of how the world ought to operate is the way it ought to operate, [it] is an extremely powerful political tool.”103 The state mechanisms by which a capitalist common sense came to be established among Western populations of the late seventeenth and eighteenth centuries are what Michel Foucault calls “disciplinary technologies.” Disciplinary societies employ constant surveillance and training of individual bodies, as a technique of power, at every stage of social interaction—the school, the army, the factory, the prison—to establish a system of social control which operates through “self-regulation” by disciplining the body. This form of governance aligns with Gramsci’s concept of “hegemony” by which he meant “governance with the consent of the governed.”104 To put it simply, the “re-education” of the masses to habituate them to a new capitalist ideology was vital for the continuation of capitalism; that is, such technologies of social control produced a new “docile” working class reconciled to the unfair extraction of its labor by capitalist owners. However, since hegemonic discourses are just one construction of the world, such narratives have to be consistently and actively reinforced by the ruling class to remain dominant. In this regard, Christophe Bonneuil and Jean-Baptiste Fressoz rechristen the Anthropocene as the “Agnostocene,” in borrowing the term “agnotology” from “sociology and the history of science [where Agnotology is] a new field of research . . . which studies the production of zones of ignorance.”105 In studying the deliberate ways in which “zones of ignorance” were created by the dissemination of a capitalist ideology throughout the nineteenth century that “accompanied the commodification of man and nature,”106 Bonneuil and

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Fressoz state that these “great adjustments to the world picture” or capitalist worldview enabled “environmentalist critique to be disqualified and the finitude of the Earth to be denied.”107 Nature could then be made to appear as an endless resource for limitless capitalist extraction rather than as a delicately balanced living system with finite capacities. Importantly, these ideological “adjustments” to the European worldview were pivotal in naturalizing and therefore invisibilizing processes that were, in fact, historically contingent. In this context, we can begin to find a response to questions of the sort posed by Bonneuil and Fressoz, “How are the damages of ‘progress’ made invisible (think of the effects of asbestos, known since 1906 and ignored at the cost of hundreds of thousands of deaths)?”108 Toxicity could only become a form of life in the twenty-first century through the enactment of both “coercive” forms of direct violence, such as laws, policing, punishment, dispossession, enslavement, and genocide, and “noncoercive” forms of slow, institutional violence, such as producing “consent” of the people by remaking “common sense” to align with hegemonic structures of power favoring the dominant classes, in this case, the capitalists. These two forms of governance are not mutually exclusive, but exist on a continuum, where governments might resort to direct forms of violence when consent fails.109 The emergence of global neoliberalism as the latest stage of capitalism in 1970s America exacerbated the existing imbalances of power between the rich countries of the Global North and the poorer nations of the Global South, but also between wealthy and disposable populations within countries. In other words, global neoliberalism has led to the production of “more and more surplus people.”110 According to Waterstone, this is because of the dominance of “finance capital” under global neoliberalism which “is increasingly divorced from the real (i.e. productive) economy.”111 That is to say, the financialization of capital enables neoliberals to produce profits without production “from fictitious commodities and rent, either transaction costs or fees or a whole number of other things.”112 Under such conditions, ever larger sections of the global population are being rendered redundant as “workers” due to “automation, because of out-sourcing, because of profits without production” and these “excess” populations become part of the “global reserve army of labor.”113 No longer “useful” as workers and too poor to be consumers, such populations, then, are the disposable populations of global neoliberalism who can be made “available to be poisoned.” But furthermore, global neoliberalism has also enacted the conditions for the “commercialization of everything” including the state itself. The dominant neoliberal “common sense” is that everything should be run like a business and according to the logics of a cost-benefit analysis. The corporatization of governance and politics has meant that the corporate elite exercise significant control over decision-making processes from a profit-oriented calculation of risks and

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benefits. One effect of this has been the consciously negligent dumping of new synthetic toxic chemicals and hazardous substances in the environments of the poor by multinational corporations and governments for whom it is cheaper to pollute than protect environmental and human health. While today it has become fashionable to single out “neoliberalism” for the multiple crises confronting us in the twenty-first century, from climate change to the refugee crisis, from the spread of novel diseases to extensive biodiversity loss, the purpose of tracing what I have called, the “unnatural histories” of toxicity has been to demonstrate that neoliberalism or corporate globalization is simply a continuation and refinement of processes that began with colonialism and capitalism. As with colonialism and capitalism before it, today “free trade” simply means “naturalising the violent imposition of corporate rule and the rule of the 1%.”114 Toxicity flows along these established corridors of power to guarantee the further consolidation of capital for the global elite. As Vandana Shiva puts it, “The poverty created by corporate colonialism was then essentialised and separated from its causes, and, over the centuries, the disease has been offered as the cure.”115 Toxicity as Biopolitics It is within these larger structures of power and inequity that exposure to toxicity becomes governmentalized as a technique for the biopolitical control of populations. For Foucault, the end of the eighteenth century witnessed the emergence of a new governmental rationality—what Foucault called “biopolitics”—one invested in the power to “make live and let die,” which was the very opposite of the old sovereign power to “take life or let live.” Foucault is explicit on the point that the new era of biopower as it emerged in liberal democracies of Europe, the first stage of which was the “anatomo-politics” of disciplinary power in the seventeenth century while the second stage was the biopolitics of life from the end of the eighteenth century, was an “indispensable element in the development of capitalism; the latter would not have been possible without the controlled insertion of bodies into the machinery of production and the adjustment of the phenomena of population to economic processes.”116 This new “art of government” takes its report card from the market such that the market becomes “the truth” of government, that is, governmental performance is now measured in relation to the mechanisms of the market. Therefore, if the new “productive power” of biopolitics is one where the state is invested in “optimizing a state of life” rather than “have people put to death,” it was only insofar as the population was seen as the source of “productive” workers for the economy, and therefore of the state’s wealth. For the first time, life itself is governmentalized, that is to say,

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“biological existence is reflected in political existence”117 and is “passed into knowledge’s field of control and power’s sphere of intervention.”118 But this is a “calculated management of life”119 indexed to the cost-benefit analysis of the market. As Foucault mentions, neoliberalism is invested in producing “abilities-machines,”120 those who are capable of contributing to the growth of the economy through their capacity to labor. Such a formulation automatically implies that those who are unable to contribute labor power, such as the old, infirm, sick, mad, and otherwise disabled, are exposed to “letting die.” According to Foucault, biopolitics can only present itself as life-affirming (for some) if it harnesses sovereignty’s life-denying power (for the many) by presenting it “as the counterpart of a power that exerts a positive influence on life, that endeavours to administer, optimize, and multiply it, subjecting it to precise controls and comprehensive regulations.”121 The old sovereign power “to kill” is reintroduced in this life-making governmental power through “racism,” which Foucault defines as “a way of introducing a break into the domain of life that is under power’s control: the break between what must live and what must die.”122 Indirect forms of murder are sanctioned by the state as “something that will make life in general healthier: healthier and purer.”123 To put it simply, under such conditions, racial violence, but by extension violence against any “undesirable” minority and marginalized populations, is legitimized by the state and such populations are available for exposing to the risk of death through a variety of means including the denial of life necessities by the state, such as access to clean water, shelter, medical care, means to a livelihood, or education. In her book, The Right to Maim: Debility, Capacity, Disability, Jasbir Puar makes an important intervention in Foucault’s living/dying pendulum of power by introducing the concept of “debilitation” under global neoliberalism, in order to argue that “debilitation and the production of disability are in fact biopolitical ends unto themselves, with moving neither toward life nor toward death as the aim.”124 Puar calls this “the right to maim” as a means of foregrounding the ways in which “experiences of chronic illness and senescence, as well as disability per se”125 come to be seen as “normal consequences of laboring.”126 Importantly, Puar’s conceptualization of the “biopolitics of debilitation” refers to those who are “remaindered” by liberal inclusion and “points to the forms of violent debilitation of those whose inevitable injuring is assumed by racial capitalism.”127 The concept of “debility,” unlike disability, is capable of capturing the socioeconomic and political forms of exclusion from the mainstream, such as extreme poverty, and is not restricted to the physiological forms of exclusion and difference implied by the word “disability.” According to Puar, “maiming” rather than death becomes the central organizing principle of neoliberal capitalism which is more focused on extracting profit from everything and by any means possible. As Puar

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argues, “Maiming is a source of value extraction from populations that would otherwise be disposable.”128 However, I would add that maiming is not always a means of “value extraction” but is equally a means of disposing of “excess” populations. More accurately then, maiming is indicative of how such population groups have actually become superfluous to the churning of the capitalist machinery. It is within this new conceptual terrain that I situate my theorization of toxicity as a form of sustained warfare against dispossessed populations. The centrality of maiming to processes of profit-making rather than death is a key shift in the logics according to which a neoliberal biopolitics functions, where death is seen as contributing no additional value to economic growth. By exposing undesirable populations to permanent states of injury, illness, disability, and poverty, global neoliberalism secures a constant supply of cheap labor and one that is too poor, too sick, or too infirm to resist oppressive conditions of life and livelihood. Under these conditions, exposure to forms of chronic toxicity is no longer accidental or an unavoidable consequence of “progress” and “modernization” but a calculated strategy of neoliberal governmentality that prioritizes “profits over people” and therefore allows certain populations and their environments to be contaminated. Locating toxic and heavily polluting industries in the environments of the poor in lower-income countries of the Global South and employing the poorest and most vulnerable sections of the world’s populations in such hazardous occupations, then, becomes an organized form of “collectively making death”129 by increasing the precarity of their living conditions. Exposure to toxicity is a technology of power for categorizing global populations into those who are allowed to be poisoned and those who are not. Maiming through exposure to toxic harm is a way to ensure that the poor remain poor while wealth continues to be concentrated in the hands of the global elite. The slow degeneration of the body’s integrity when it is in continued contact with poisonous chemicals and toxic effluents, through work or habitation or both, traps the already dispossessed in an endless cycle of sickness and means for recovery, where states of “health” remain constantly beyond reach. “Living with” toxicity as a daily reality, according to the profit-oriented logics of corporate neoliberalism, is a war strategy where those who are allowed to be poisoned are targeted in insidious ways, not always visible or perceptible as war. And yet, such desperate conditions of life and livelihood are warlike relations to existence on the planet, a new “form of life in which warfare is normal.”130 From such a perspective, as Liboiron, Tironi, and Calvillo point out, toxic harm is that “which disrupts order and existing relations, while also . . . maintain[ing] systems, including those that produce inequality and sacrifice.”131 While recognizing “toxicity [as] a system”132 of power in the late twentieth and twenty-first centuries is an important first step, this is only, what Deleuze and

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Guattari have called, the “strata”; we need to go a step further in understanding the cultural acceptance of this system in specific social contexts. In his latest book, Assemblage Theory and Method, Ian Buchanan offers a clear explanation of Deleuze and Guattari’s deployment of the concept of “strata” as “a way of problematizing appearances.”133 In other words, “[strata] maps the relations of dependency that exist between various moments in history that taken together produce the present as we know it.”134 For Deleuze and Guattari, each stratum is composed of “content and expression” where “content” is the formation of bodies/machines and “expression” is the formation of signs (both symbols and language). In this context, toxins form the content while toxicity is the expression, and what concerns me here is the discourse (that is, the expression) needed to sustain a form of life in which exposure to toxins is regarded as normal and acceptable. My argument is that the regional manifestation of toxicity as a system of power is enabled by preexisting structures of discrimination and inequality that are embedded in sociocultural reality through discourse. The next task, therefore, must be to trace the fractures in the fabric of sociocultural relations that produce a ground for uneven toxic flows to materialize and circulate as a means of maintaining a grossly unbalanced global system. As I have mentioned in the introduction, in India, the cultural acceptance of chronic exposure to forms of toxicity is traditionally derived, in part, from the caste system which categorizes people into disposable or valuable, polluted or pure. The caste system and the politically amplified communal tensions between Hindus and Muslims in India institute a ready-made social hierarchy for exploitation by the neoliberal Indian state as a way of justifying who is allowed to be poisoned and who is not. What does “living with” toxicity mean for those who live in conditions of privation, loss, and exclusion and for whom the struggle for adequate food, clean water, shelter, and health care is definitive of daily existence? What social and cultural pressures force marginalized communities in India into “dirty” and “toxic” trades? What are the mechanisms adopted by the Indian nation-state and caste elites in “predisabling” certain populations to toxic pollution? ‌‌‌‌ begin with, caste is a biopolitics because it functions on the domain of life To and makes it the basis of enacting a politics of social control of the population as a whole. This caste politics, which inextricably binds the “social” with the “political,” is the distinctive feature of Indian life and infects every aspect of life from education, employment, diet, social interaction, and dress codes to marriage, voting rights, health, access to electricity and sanitation, and gender equality. Even with India’s entry into the global market since 1991, caste has far from disappeared and caste difference continues to remain an important index along with class, gender, and religion according to which

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the Indian population is subdivided and categorized along a declining scale of power and social advantages. As Arundhati Roy explains, “The top of the caste pyramid is considered pure and has plenty of entitlements. The bottom is considered polluted and has no entitlements but plenty of duties.”135 In fact, in twenty-first-century India, a market-friendly democracy, the social hierarchy of caste identity is proving to be one of the biggest challenges to the success of projects of development aimed at addressing the most pressing social issues of modern Indian society, such as eradicating poverty, improving education, providing better access to sanitation and health care, or even rural development programs. Unsurprisingly, India’s widening wealth gap in the age of market capitalism can be explained by the centuries of caste-based discrimination against caste “others.” B. R. Ambedkar, the architect of India’s Constitution, a born Dalit and a pioneering figure of Dalit social reform movements, had early realized that the only way independent India could progress as a nation, unimpeded, will be with the “annihilation of caste,” and he devoted his life to the cause. Today, one only needs to look at the state of human and environmental health in India to realize how right he was. If, according to Foucault, what enables the productive power of biopower to exercise the sovereign right to kill in exposing “its own citizens to the risk of death”136 is “racism” or “state racism,” in India, the function of death introduced by state racism in the Euro-American context is performed by casteism as “a way of fragmenting the field of the biological that power controls.”137 But in order to understand how the caste hierarchy is premised on a logic of toxicity, and more precisely, the role played by caste in the spread of toxic pollution in India we need to examine the mechanisms of the caste system.138 In the numerous attempts to define “caste,” Dr. B. R. Ambedkar’s definition of caste most accurately identifies the characteristics that distinguish it from class or race, and thereby help explain the reasons for its uniqueness and persistence in India. According to Ambedkar, caste is an “enclosed class” premised upon “the custom of endogamy,” and functions through a system of “graded inequality.”139 For Ambedkar, the “unnatural thing” about castes is that the natural “subdivisions” of the population, which are to be found in every country and society across the world, “have lost the open-door character of the class system and have become self-enclosed units called castes,”140 which precludes the possibility of social mobility enabled by other forms of social stratification. One is, therefore, born into a caste and dies a member of the caste into which one was born. However, this enclosure of caste groups into self-sustaining units can only be maintained through the strict practice of endogamy, which last, according to Ambedkar, “is the only characteristic that is peculiar to caste.”141 It is only by prohibiting intercaste marriages that the “purity” of a caste group can be maintained, and its “pollution” by inferior castes prevented. And finally, as Ambedkar argues, such an unnatural

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institution that rests on the “artificial chopping off of the population into fixed and definite units, each one prevented from fusing into another”142 can only be sustained through “graded inequality,” which is not the same as “inequality” based on race or class groups. This is because, Ambedkar explains, “there is no such class [within the caste system] as a completely unprivileged class except the one which is at the base of the social pyramid. The privileges of the rest are graded. Even the low is privileged as compared with lower. Each class being privileged, every class is interested in maintaining the system.”143 Ambedkar succinctly described this system as an “ascending scale of reverence and a descending scale of contempt.”144 I want to suggest that this “graded inequality” should be read as a graded system of toxicity, according to which degrees of toxicity are assigned on the basis of caste rank such that the highest degree of exposure to toxic pollution is borne by those occupying the lowest caste rank, while the upper castes are the least likely to be exposed to toxic harm. As Roy explains, within Hinduism’s varnashrama dharma (caste system) or chaturvarna (a system of “four castes”) exist approximately four thousand endogamous castes and subcastes (jatis), each with its own hereditary occupation and divided into four main caste groups—Brahmins (priests and teachers), Kshatriyas (soldiers and rulers), Vaishyas (traders and merchants), and Shudras (laborers and artisans). Given the diversity and heterogeneity of castes and subcastes in India, as Surinder Jodhka points out, “there are multiple and varied experiences of caste in today’s India.”145 Excluded from the varna system are the Ati-Shudras or the achhooth (“untouchables”) Dalit castes “whose presence, whose touch, whose very shadow is considered to be polluting by privileged-caste Hindus.”146 In this way, what are in the first instance, philosophical ideas about ritual “purity and pollution” engender material effects on the daily lives of oppressed castes as real exposure to toxic pollution through work and habitation.147 But the caste system is not limited to Hindu society and extends the relations of ritual purity and pollution to other religions, many of whom have adopted some version of the caste system, but who also often find themselves at the receiving end of the fastidiousness of the rules of caste purity, for instance, a high-caste Hindu might refrain from sharing utensils or food with a Muslim. The caste system, like capitalism, rests on externalizing its operational costs—in this case, the costs of maintaining the system are borne, primarily, by the “outcaste” Dalits, including those Dalits who have converted to other religions to escape the stigma of caste, such as to Buddhism (in following their leader B. R. Ambedkar), Christianity, Islam, or even Sikhism. In this hereditary, occupation-based system of discrimination, Dalits, as the “most polluted” and therefore “polluting” (out)castes, are forced into occupations traditionally considered “degrading,” “dirty,” “polluted,” and “unclean,” such as manual scavenging, disposing of human and

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animal corpses, sweeping, cremation ground workers, and garbage collection, with little opportunity for exiting a life of indignity and precarity. In the age of neoliberalism, Dalits continue to suffer the social stigma of being “filthy” and remain locked in unskilled, low-paying, and highly hazardous and toxic jobs, which has systematically excluded them from sharing in the benefits of upward social and economic mobility promised by the market liberalization of India. Caste, therefore, needs to be understood as an entire system of social, political, legal, and civil dis/advantages that oppress certain caste groups in states of permanent disability. Caste in the Age of Neoliberalism While for the elite castes, caste blindness or caste denialism are the most effective methods of invisibilizing the reality of caste in twenty-first-century India, the scarce government data available on the state of caste discrimination in contemporary India is alarming to say the least. And while it is certainly true that as a result of governmental policies and the opportunities furnished by the marketization of India, Dalits have not only been able to get an education and occupy coveted white-collar jobs in society as doctors, engineers, civil servants, and university lecturers, but that India has also had a Dalit president and a Dalit chief justice, as well as an influential political party, the Bahujan Samaj Party (BSP) whose leader is a Dalit woman, a quick look at the castewise break-up of occupations reveals that the invisible violence of caste is alive and well in the age of neoliberalism. India abolished the caste system as early as 1950, making the practice of “untouchability,” that is, “the imposition of social disabilities on persons by reason of birth into a particular caste,”148 illegal and punishable by law, and yet, according to a 2014 report by the Human Rights Watch, of the 201 million Dalits, according to the 2011 census of India, who make up 17 percent of India’s population, 1.3 million, mostly women, are involved in manual scavenging, the practice of removing human excrement from dry latrines in households and public toilets by hand.149 Furthermore, other reports suggest that 99 percent of those involved in manual scavenging are Dalits and among them, 95 percent are women.150 This form of “forced labour or slavery”151 continues despite the existence of laws aimed specifically at ending manual scavenging. The Employment of Manual Scavengers and Construction of Dry Latrines (Prohibition) Act was passed in 1993, and in 2013, the Indian Parliament enacted The Prohibition of Employment as Manual Scavengers and Their Rehabilitation Act, 2013, which goes beyond dry latrines and prohibits all manual excrement cleaning of insanitary latrines, open drains, or pits, and even city sewers. Ironically, despite the ban, government agencies, such as the Indian Railways, the army,

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and urban municipalities, continue to be the biggest employers of manual scavengers in the country.152 Manual scavenging becomes one example of the way “diversification brought by post-reform development has not broken the association, across states, of upper castes with higher-status professions and Dalits with manual and casual labor.”153 David Mosse provides another example of the way “caste identity shapes modern opportunity at every level” in India where “Dalit workers in the Tiruppur garment industry are more likely to find themselves in the low-skill dirty dyeing units, and non-Dalits in the skilled tailoring sections (Carswell, De Neve, & Heyer, 2017).”154 In the New India, even as the avenues of discrimination shift, they are built upon the old structures of power and inequality. For instance, in the twenty-first century, e-waste disposal has emerged as a new avenue of discrimination in India, as well as other developing countries. It is estimated that 95 percent of the e-waste recycling in India is managed by the informal sector which employs workers from India’s vulnerable communities, such as lower castes and the Muslim minority, who are daily exposed to hazardous toxic fumes and develop severe health complications such as lung cancer, respiratory problems, bronchitis, and cognitive disorders.155 The reason Dalits and Adivasis (India’s Indigenous tribal populations) remain at the bottom of the economic pyramid even in the age of market-opportunity is because centuries of inequality and discrimination has deprived them of access to education and acquiring social capital required to gain a job at multinationals. For instance, according to the 2001 census data, only 2.24 percent Dalits are graduates, and 71.3 percent of Scheduled Castes (which is the legal terminology for Dalit castes) drop out before they matriculate.156 This disparity in access to education effectively locks out Dalits and Adivasis from most multinational jobs, but also from government jobs and other white-collar jobs. The assaults of caste discrimination in the age of India’s “development” and “modernity,” however, are not restricted to the social life of vulnerable communities but extend to their environments. As Roy notes, “Dalits and Adivasis make up the majority of the millions of people displaced by mines, dams and other major infrastructural projects”157 rendering them landless (an estimated 70 percent of Dalits fall into this category) and pushing them into exploitative conditions of work as contract workers and farm laborers. Given this context, it becomes possible to conclude, in using Foucault’s notion of governmentality, that the Indian state is disposed to thinking about ritual pollution through the category of caste but is not disposed to thinking about toxicity because the problem of toxic pollution is closely associated with practices of caste that overshadow an independent assessment of toxicity as a threat to all life, human and other than human. And moreover, since “Discourses [and practices] of caste purity or honor [are] cultural resources

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serving (not separate from) political and economic power,”158 practices of ritual purity and pollution as well as the related material pollution continue to persist. Since certain polluting and hazardous occupations are associated with lower castes, Dalits, Adivasis, and minority Muslims, and because caste, as a graded system of inequality, assigns degrees of “humanness” as “purity” or “pollution,” the spread of toxicity is made allowable for what are considered “pre-polluted” bodies and their environments as a way of maintaining the hegemony of caste elites. By reducing and fixing workers’ bodies in varying states of disability, processes of dispossession are enacted such that opportunities for securing “a better life” are foreclosed. Moreover, this system of hereditary advantages and disadvantages is a means of what David Harvey called “accumulation by dispossession.” I am suggesting that exposure to toxicity reproduces poverty and becomes a significant factor in the intergenerationality of poverty, yet one the full implications of which have remained relatively overlooked. In a society segmented along “enclosed classes” where social mobility is restricted, children born into lower castes find themselves forced to continue the caste trade, or find themselves in other work environments that are equally toxic. For instance, Dalits in modern India continue to perform the traditionally “dirty” tasks of manual scavenging and disposal of human and animal corpses. While on the other hand, long-term exposure to toxic pollution enacts the process of slow injury, illness, and death such that the debilitated body is a weakened body, one incapable of expending productive energy as an “able” body. Under such conditions, access to states of “health” and “well-being” remain forever beyond reach. That the biological effects of toxic exposure can be hereditary is well documented but from this perspective, it becomes possible to say that even the socioeconomic effects of toxic exposure are hereditary. Social inequality is transmitted from one generation to the next through exposure, and this is because exposure diminishes a person’s capacity to perform to the best of their ability, but also encloses the body in a continuous battle for health which is economically draining. If poverty is recognized as “hereditary,” as a persistent problem trapping one generation to the next in the binds of debt, joblessness, and exploitation, then chronic exposure to toxicity continues the cycle of dispossession. Importantly, then, the caste system does not lend itself to a thorough explication as what Giorgio Agamben called a “state of exception” since the caste system would cease to exist without “exceptions,” and in fact the practicing of “exceptions as exclusions” is an adherence to the “rules” of caste, not a contravention of them. In other words, minority-caste violence and exclusion does not function through a logic of the “suspension of (caste) law” but rather is exemplary of caste law. Furthermore, as Marcelo Svirsky crucially points out, in offering a corrective to Agamben, “the daily execution of exemption,

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cannot be understood only in terms of leadership decision making” but needs also to be understood in terms of the support it receives from the majority of the population.159 Without acknowledging the critical role played by the dominant castes in upholding the system of caste, we arrive at an incomplete picture of how the state machinery is abled through the social and ideological consent of elite castes. Any attempt, therefore, to understand caste violence as an instance of a “state of exception” is bound to meet analytical defeat because in the eyes of the “law” the caste system has been abolished and any case of caste-based discrimination is, at least in theory (and on rare occasions in practice), punishable by law. In India, the social and the material have always been inextricably bound by the caste system wherein the discourse of caste politics and the daily practices of caste rules produce material conditions of existence for the lower castes as also the bodily debilities borne by those at the bottom of the caste ladder. Conversely, material objects such as brooms, waste, or even human excreta are lent agency as symbolic of the oppressed castes, such that they are seen as standing-in for “outcaste” persons.160 It is necessary to recognize that in the twenty-first century, toxic exposure has become the dominant narrative through which old anxieties about race, class, caste, gender, and sexuality are played out. We need only think of the myriad examples of “enemies” of the state or of the self being presented as “toxic,” capable of “contaminating the health” of the nation or the body. The most recent example of this last has been the way in which lower-caste “migrant laborers” and the Muslim minority have been targeted by the state and statesupportive social groups (read: upper-caste Hindus) as “super-spreaders” of the COVID-19 virus in India. Language reduces the lower castes not just to “bare life” but to “things” and “objects” where their capacity to provide productive labor is the only consideration between “killing” or “(not) letting die.” And finally, their “thingification” is complete by relegating the most hazardous, polluting, and demeaning occupations to them. The notion of toxicity not only draws attention to the invisible pollutants responsible for environmental devastation but also highlights the new relationships of power between the state and its subjects and between different social groups. For instance, during the COVID pandemic, the lower castes who have traditionally been responsible for the removal of all manner of waste, continue to be placed in positions of precarity and harm as “sanitation workers” and sweepers at hospitals and homes. This means they are disproportionately exposed to the risk of contamination and disease as they dispose of human excrement, used PPE kits, and discarded needles and other hospital wastes from COVID hospital wards and households in their capacity as sanitation workers without access to any protective gear. This is a point I will take up once again in chapter 4. Toxicity, therefore, becomes a technology of power by which the state

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can enact forms of invisible killing and invisible violence, not as exception but as the normalized condition of life for some. Notes 1. Chapter 2 will take up a more detailed discussion of Carson’s contribution to the regulation of toxicity and awareness generation about the imperceptible effects of toxic exposure. 2. Owen Mulhern, “Chemical Poisoning: A Review,” Earth.org, September 15, 2020, https:​//​earth​.org​/data​_visualization​/chemical​-poisoning​-a​-review​/. 3. Shanna H. Swan with Stacey Colino, Countdown: How Our Modern World is Threatening Sperm Counts, Altering Male and Female Reproductive Development, and Imperiling the Future of the Human Race, (New York: Simon & Schuster, Inc., 2020), 108. 4. Tim Loh and Jeff Feeley, “Bayer’s Roundup Costs Could Top $16 Billion as Provisions Mount,” Bloomberg Business, July 29, 2021, https:​ //​ www​ .bloomberg​ .com​/news​/articles​/2021​-07​-29​/bayer​-to​-set​-aside​-4​-5​-billion​-for​-potential​-roundup​ -claims. 5. For a comprehensive discussion about Monsanto’s Roundup see, Mitchel Cohen ed., The Fight Against Monsanto’s Roundup: The Politics of Pesticides (New York: Skyhorse Publishing, 2019). 6. “Chemical pollutants are ubiquitous in the environment and in humans,” Global Chemicals Outlook II: Summary for Policymakers, United Nations Environment Assembly of the United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP), (March 11–15, 2019), 8. 7. Ibid., and Jian Du et al., “Longitudinal Study of Pesticide Residue Levels in Human Milk from Western Australia during 12 Months of Lactation: Exposure Assessment for Infants,” Science Report 6, no. 38355 (2016), https:​//​doi​.org​/10​.1038​ /srep38355. 8. Elizabeth Claire Alberts, “New Study Shows We Have Breached Earth’s Threshold for Chemical Pollution,” Mongabay, February 3, 2022, New Study Shows We Have Breached Earth’s Threshold for Chemical Pollution (Mongabay.com). 9. Ibid., 6. 10. Ibid., 3. 11. GCO II, UNEP, 3. 12. Philip J. Landrigan et al., “The Lancet Commission on Pollution and Health,” Lancet 391, no. 10119 (October 2017): 462, doi: 10.1016/S0140-6736(17)32817-9. 13. The World Health Organization (WHO) defines disability-adjusted life years (DALYs) as “One DALY represents the loss of the equivalent of one year of full health. DALYs for a disease or health condition are the sum of the years of life lost to due to premature mortality (YLLs) and the years lived with a disability (YLDs) due to prevalent cases of the disease or health condition in a population.” Accessed on June 13, 2020, https:​//​www​.who​.int​/data​/gho​/indicator​-metadata​-registry​/imr​-details​/158.

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14. Rachel M. Shaffer et al., “Improving and Expanding Estimates of the Global Burden of Disease Due to Environmental Health Risk Factors,” Environmental Health Perspectives 127, no. 10 (October 18, 2019): 2, https:​//​doi​.org​/10​.1289​/EHP5496. 15. Philippe Grandjean and Martine Bellanger, “Calculation of the Disease Burden Associated with Environmental Chemical Exposures: Application of Toxicological Information in Health Economic Estimation,” Environmental Health 16, no. 1 (December 2017): 7, doi: 10.1186/s12940-017-0340-3. 16. My use of the term “toxicity” is in relation to these forms of modern-day chemical pollution. 17. Frederik T. Weiss et al., “Chemical Pollution in Low-and-Middle-Income Countries,” Eawag: Swiss Federal Institute of Aquatic Science and Technology (Dübendorf: Swiss Federal Institute of Aquatic Science and Technology), 2016, ChemPoll-LAMICS_Chapter1.pdf (eawag.ch). 18. Richard P. Allan et al., “Climate Change 2021 The Physical Science Basis: Summary for Policymakers,” Sixth Assessment Report, Switzerland: Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), (August, 2021): 5–10, IPCC_AR6_WGI_ SPM_final.pdf. 19. Mel Y. Chen, Animacies: Biopolitics, Racial Mattering, and Queer Affect (Durham: Duke University Press, 2012), 189. 20. Max Liboiron, Manuel Tironi, and Nerea Calvillo, “Toxic Politics: Acting in a Permanently Polluted World,” Social Studies of Science 48, no. 3 (2018): 332, doi: 10.1177/0306312718783087. 21. Barbara Demeneix, Toxic Cocktail: How Chemical Pollution Is Poisoning Our Brains (New York: Oxford University Press, 2017), 2–3. 22. Ronald N. Kostoff et al., “The Under-Reported Role of Toxic Substance Exposures in the COVID-19 Pandemic,” Food and Chemical Toxicology 145, no. 111687 (November 2020), doi: 10.1016/j.fct.2020.111687. See also, Laurie Schintler et al., “Environmental and Occupational Exposure to Toxic Industrial Chemicals and COVID-19: An Exploratory Analysis of United States Counties,” SSRN (July 1, 2020), http:​//​dx​.doi​.org​/10​.2139​/ssrn​.3640797. 23. Annie Sneed, “Forever Chemicals Are Widespread in U.S. Drinking Water,” Scientific American, January 22, 2021, https:​//​www​.scientificamerican​.com​/article​/ forever​-chemicals​-are​-widespread​-in​-u​-s​-drinking​-water​/. 24. Erin Brockovich, “Plummeting Sperm Counts, Shrinking Penises: Toxic Chemicals Threaten Humanity,” The Guardian, March 18, 2021, Plummeting Sperm Counts, Shrinking Penises: Toxic Chemicals Threaten Humanity. 25. Swan with Colino, Countdown, 9. 26. Ibid., 8. 27. Ibid., 117. 28. Ibid. See also, “Diethylstilbestrol (DES) and Cancer,” National Cancer Institute, accessed on June 10, 2020, https:​//​www​.cancer​.gov​/about​-cancer​/causes​ -prevention​/risk​/hormones​/des​-fact​-sheet​#what​-is​-des. 29. Swan with Colino, Countdown, 139. 30. Ibid.

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31. “Agent Orange,” history.com, updated on May 16, 2019, https:​//​www​.history​ .com​/topics​/vietnam​-war​/agent​-orange​-1. 32. Eric Campbell, “Insectageddon,” for Foreign Correspondent, ABC Australia, October 15, 2019, Insectageddon - Foreign Correspondent (abc.net.au). 33. Ibid. 34. Ibid. 35. Kenneth V. Rosenberg et al., “Declines of the North American Avifauna,” Science 366, no. 6461 (September 19, 2019): 120–124, DOI: 10.1126/science.aaw1313. 36. Ibid. 37. Virgilio Marin, “Researchers Find High Levels of Pesticides in the Great Barrier Reef, Including One That’s Banned in 60 Countries,” Pesticides.News, December 23, 2020, https:​//​pesticides​.news​/2020​-12​-23​-high​-levels​-of​-pesticides​-in​-great​ -barrier​-reef​.html. 38. Ben Smee, “Great Barrier Reef: Scientists Find High Levels of Pesticides and Blast Chemical Regulator,” The Guardian, November 6, 2019, Great Barrier Reef: Scientists Find High Levels of Pesticides and Blast Chemical Regulator. 39. Liboiron, Tironi and Calvillo, “Toxic Politics,” 332. 40. Rebecca Altman, “Time-Bombing the Future,” Aeon Magazine, January 2, 2019, https:​//​aeon​.co​/essays​/how​-20th​-century​-synthetics​-altered​-the​-very​-fabric​-of​ -us​-all. 41. Raj Patel and Jason W. Moore, A History of the World in Seven Cheap Things: A Guide to Capitalism, Nature, and the Future of the Planet (Victoria: Black Inc., 2018), 12. 42. Ian Buchanan, “Introduction,” in Assemblage Theory and Method (London: Bloomsbury Academic, 2021), 2. 43. Christophe Bonneuil and Jean-Baptiste Fressoz, The Shock of the Anthropocene: The Earth, History and Us, trans. David Fernbach (London: Verso, 2016), 236. 44. Ibid. 45. Max Liboiron, “Redefining Pollution and Action: The Matter of Plastics,” Journal of Material Culture 21, no. 1 (December 2015): 2, https:​//​doi​.org​/10​.1177​ /1359183515622966. 46. Horst Rittel and Melvin Webber, “Dilemmas in a General Theory of Planning,” Policy Sciences 4, no. 2 (1973): 160, Rittel & Webber, 1973: Dilemmas in a General Theory of Planning (urbanpolicy.net). 47. Ibid. 48. This is the first of the ten characteristics of “wicked problems” as described by Rittel and Webber. Ibid., 161. 49. Ibid. 50. Ibid. 51. Max Liboiron, “Redefining Pollution: Plastics in the Wild” (PhD thesis, New York University, 2012), 4. 52. Ibid. 53. Ibid., 160–161. 54. Ibid. 55. Ibid.

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56. Ibid., 3–6. 57. Ibid., 4. 58. Ibid., 5. 59. These arguments concerning synthetic pesticides follow “conventional” wisdom and will be taken up for a more detailed analysis in chapter 2. 60. Vigya Sharma, “India’s Wicked Problem: How to Loosen Its Grip on Coal While Not Abandoning the Millions Who Depend on It,” The Conversation, July 14, 2021, https:​//​theconversation​.com​/indias​-wicked​-problem​-how​-to​-loosen​-its​-grip​-on​ -coal​-while​-not​-abandoning​-the​-millions​-who​-depend​-on​-it​-163075. 61. Alexis Shotwell, Against Purity: Living Ethically in Compromised Times (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2016), 3. 62. Ibid., 4. 63. I am indebted to my supervisor, Ian Buchanan, for igniting my interest in a Deleuzian mode of analysis that facilitates a reading of toxicity as a machinic assemblage. 64. Rob Nixon, Slow Violence and the Environmentalism of the Poor (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2011), 2. 65. Soraya Boudia and Nathalie Jas, “Introduction: Science and Politics in a Toxic World,” in Toxicants, Health and Regulation since 1945, eds. Soraya Boudia and Nathalie Jas (London: Routledge, 2016), 16. 66. Lauren Berlant, Cruel Optimism (Durham: Duke University Press, 2011), 24. 67. Ibid. 68. I am indebted to my supervisor, Professor Ian Buchanan, for bringing this inverted relationship between toxicity and poverty to my notice. My engagement with Berlant’s work is a product of his astute insight. 69. Berlant, Cruel Optimism, 95 (italics mine). 70. Ulrich Beck, “Living in the World Risk Society,” Economy and Society 35, no. 3 (2006): 332, https:​//​doi​.org​/10​.1080​/03085140600844902. 71. Ulrich Beck, “Critical Theory of World Risk Society: A Cosmopolitan Vision,” Constellations 16, no. 1 (2009): 3. 72. Beck, “Living in the World Risk Society,” 332. 73. Ibid. 74. Ulrich Beck, Risk Society: Towards a New Modernity, trans. Mark Ritter (London: Sage Publications, 1992), 78–79. 75. Frédéric Neyrat, “The Biopolitics of Catastrophe, or How to Avert the Past and Regulate the Future,” The South Atlantic Quarterly 115, no. 2 (2016): 248, https:​//​doi​ .org​/10​.1215​/00382876​-3488398. 76. Ibid. 77. Beck, “Critical Theory of World Risk Society,” 6. 78. Ibid., 7. 79. Ibid., 7. 80. Beck, Risk Society, 78. 81. Ibid., 77.

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82. Agnes Kneitz, “How Well Does Risk Society Speak Beyond the Global North?,” in Revisiting Risk Society: A Conversation with Ulrich Beck, RCC Perspectives 6 (2011): 25, https:​//​www​.jstor​.org​/stable​/26240339. 83. Beck, “Critical Theory of World Risk Society,” 9. 84. Ibid. 85. Beck, “Living in the World Risk Society,” 333. 86. Philip J. Landrigan et al., “Health Consequences of Environmental Exposures: Changing Global Patterns of Exposure and Disease,” Annals of Global Health 82, no. 1 (2016): 10, https:​//​doi​.org​/10​.1016​/j​.aogh​.2016​.01​.005. 87. Beck, Risk Society, 77. 88. Ibid., 78 (italics mine). 89. Beck, “Critical Theory of World Risk Society,” 9. 90. Michel Foucault, “Governmentality,” in The Foucault Effect: Studies in Governmentality, eds. Graham Burchell, Colin Gordon and Peter Miller (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1991), 95 (italics mine). 91. Foucault, “Governmentality,” 93. 92. Lynn Goldman and Nga Tran, “Toxics and Poverty: The Impact of Toxic Substances on the Poor in Developing Countries,” World Bank Report (August 2002): v, TOXICS text 9.17 (worldbank.org). 93. Max Liboiron, Pollution Is Colonialism (Durham: Duke University Press, 2021), 6–7. 94. Patel and Moore, A History of the World in Seven Cheap Things, 28. 95. Bonneuil and Fressoz, The Shock of the Anthropocene, 218. 96. Ibid., 216. 97. Ibid., 208. 98. Ibid. 99. Marv Waterstone, “Chapter Two: The Current Common Sense: Capitalist Realism,” in Consequences of Capitalism: Manufacturing Discontent and Resistance, Noam Chomsky and Marv Waterstone (UK: Hamish Hamilton, 2021), 70. 100. Ibid. (italics mine). 101. Ibid., 71. 102. Patel and Moore, A History of the World in Seven Cheap Things, 22. 103. Marv Waterstone, “Chapter 1: Common Sense, the Taken-for-Granted, and Power,” in Consequences of Capitalism: Manufacturing Discontent and Resistance, Noam Chomsky and Marv Waterstone (UK: Hamish Hamilton, 2021), 13. Emphasis on the word “your” is mine. Emphasis on the word “is” from the original. 104. Ibid. 105. Bonneuil and Fressoz, The Shock of the Anthropocene, 192. 106. Ibid. 107. Ibid. 108. Ibid. 109. Waterstone, “Waterstone Lecture, January 15, 2019,” 13. 110. Marv Waterstone, “Chapter 5: Neoliberalism, Globalization, and Financialization,” in Consequences of Capitalism: Manufacturing Discontent and Resistance, Noam Chomsky and Marv Waterstone (UK: Hamish Hamilton, 2021), 227.

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111. Ibid., 226. 112. Ibid. 113. Ibid., 227. 114. Vandana Shiva with Kartikey Shiva, “The Money Machine of the 1%,” in Oneness vs. the 1%: Shattering Illusions, Seeding Freedom (Victoria: Spinifex Press, 2018), 40. 115. Shiva with Shiva, Oneness vs. the 1%, 41. 116. Michel Foucault, “Right of Death and Power over Life,” in The History of Sexuality Volume 1, trans. Robert Hurley (Victoria: Penguin Books, 2008), 140–141. 117. Ibid., 142. 118. Ibid. 119. Ibid., 140. 120. Michel Foucault, “14 March 1979,” in The Birth of Biopolitics: Lectures at the Collège De France 1978–1979, ed. Michel Senellart, trans. Graham Burchell (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2010), 229. 121. Foucault, “Right of Death and Power over Life,” 137. 122. Michel Foucault, “17 March 1976,” in Society Must Be Defended: Lectures at the Collège De France 1975–1976, eds. Mauro Bertani and Alessandro Fontana, trans. David Macey (New York: Picador, 2003), 254. 123. Ibid., 255–256. 124. Jasbir K. Puar, “Preface: Hands Up, Don’t Shoot!,” in The Right to Maim: Debility, Capacity, Disability (Durham: Duke University Press, 2017), xviii. 125. Ibid., xvi. 126. Ibid. (italics mine). 127. Ibid., xvii–xviii. 128. Ibid., xviii. 129. Jairus Victor Grove, Savage Ecology: War and Geopolitics at the End of the World (Durham: Duke University Press, 2019), 61. 130. Ibid., 60. 131. Liboiron, Tironi and Calvillo, “Toxic Politics,” 333. 132. Ibid., 334. 133. Buchanan, Assemblage Theory and Method, 26. 134. Ibid. 135. Arundhati Roy, “The Doctor and the Saint,” in My Seditious Heart: Collected Non-Fiction (UK: Hamish Hamilton, 2019), 674. 136. Foucault, “17 March 1976,” 254. 137. Ibid., 255. 138. In what follows, my purpose is to sketch the broad contours of the mechanisms of caste insofar as it aids in an analysis of the association between caste and toxicity, rather than dovetail into the complexities and nuances of caste practices and rules in India. As a result, much has been excluded from my brief outline of the caste system as not immediately relevant to the present discussion. 139. Bhimrao Ramji Ambedkar, “Castes in India: Their Mechanism, Genesis and Development,” in Dr. Babasaheb Ambedkar: Writings and Speeches Vol. 1, compl. Vasant Moon (New Delhi: Dr. Ambedkar Foundation, 2014), 9–15.

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140. Ibid., 18. 141. Ibid., 9. 142. Ibid. 143. Ibid., 20. 144. Arundhati Roy, “The Doctor and the Saint,” in My Seditious Heart: Collected Non-Fiction (UK: Hamish Hamilton, 2019), 674. 145. Surinder S. Jodhka, “Introduction: The Idea of Caste,” in Caste in Contemporary India, 2nd ed (New York: Routledge, 2018). 146. Ibid., 675. 147. See, Sunder Sarukkai, “Phenomenology of Untouchability,” in The Cracked Mirror: An Indian Debate on Experience and Theory, ed. Gopal Guru and Sundar Sarukkai (New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2012), 157–199. 148. “IV. Background,” Caste Discrimination: A Global Concern, Human Rights Watch, accessed January 15, 2020, https:​//​www​.hrw​.org​/reports​/2001​/globalcaste​/ caste0801​-03​.htm. 149. “Cleaning Human Waste: ‘Manual Scavenging,’ Caste, and Discrimination in India,” Human Rights Watch, www​.hrw​.org, August 25, 2014, Cleaning Human Waste: “Manual Scavenging,” Caste, and Discrimination in India | HRW. 150. Aditi Yadav, “The Scourge of Manual Scavenging,” Oxfam India, www​ .oxfamindia​.org, July 31, 2019, https:​//​www​.oxfamindia​.org​/blog​/manual​-scavenging​ -in​-india. 151. Ibid. 152. Prachi Salve, “Though government bodies deny it, manual scavenging is widespread in India despite ban,” Scroll.in, August 27, 2016, https:​//​scroll​.in​/article​ /814976​/though​-government​-bodies​-deny​-it​-manual​-scavenging​-is​-widespread​-in​ -india​-despite​-a​-ban. 153. David Mosse, “Caste and Development: Contemporary Perspectives on a Structure of Discrimination and Advantage,” World Development 110 (2018): 427, https:​//​doi​.org​/10​.1016​/j​.worlddev​.2018​.06​.003. 154. Ibid. 155. Vikrant Wankhede, “How e-Waste Crisis Continues to Plague Informal Sector,” Down to Earth magazine, June 30, 2020, https:​//​www​.downtoearth​.org​.in​/blog​/ waste​/how​-e​-waste​-crisis​-continues​-to​-plague​-informal​-sector​-72033. 156. Roy, “The Doctor and the Saint,” 19. 157. Ibid. 158. Mosse, “Caste and Development,” 425. 159. Marcelo Svirsky, “The Cultural Politics of Exception,” in Agamben and Colonialism, eds. Marcelo Svirsky and Simone Bignall (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2012), 61. 160. Sarukkai, “Phenomenology of Untouchability,” 2012.

Chapter 2

Peddlers of Poisons Chemical Colonialism and Precarious Livelihoods

Forty years ago, David Weir and Mark Schapiro documented “a scandal of global proportions—the export of banned pesticides from the industrial countries to the third world”1 in their book The Circle of Poison (1981). Based on years of investigation and abundant evidence, they recorded the ways in which powerful multinational agrochemical corporations, such as Dow, Shell, Bayer, and Chevron, among others, had “turned the third world into not only a booming growth market for pesticides, but also a dumping ground.”2 In the more recent documentary, Circle of Poison, based on Weir and Schapiro’s book, Weir explains how the circle of poison was set in motion by America in the years following the Second World War when “Anything heavily regulated and banned or restricted or unregistered in the U.S. was being allowed by the U.S. government, and in fact encouraged, to be sent overseas, almost as compensation to corporations for losing the U.S. market.”3 In order to circumvent tightening regulations at home in the developed West, multinational chemical corporations had devised a “clever strategy” that involved separately shipping the chemical ingredients of a banned pesticide to poorer countries of the Global South and manufacturing that pesticide in “formulation plants” in these “off-shore” countries.4 Furthermore, Weir and Schapiro denounced the very idea of “safe” pesticides by pointing out that in developing countries “lack of regulation, illiteracy, and repressive working conditions can turn even a ‘safe‘ pesticide into a deadly weapon.”5 Indeed, three years after the publication of Weir and Schapiro’s book, these very factors would combine to result in the “world’s worst industrial disaster” in Bhopal, India. But the toxic harms posed to the elsewheres of the world by the export of poisons wasn’t the only issue requiring public attention. Contrary to popular belief, as Weir and Schapiro revealed, dumping agricultural poisons onto 61

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distant shores was no guarantee of safety from the adverse effects of these hazardous substances for domestic populations and environments either. In fact, these harmful exported pesticides find their way back into the bodies and biospheres of unaware US citizens by means of imported foods: “Drinking a morning coffee or enjoying a luncheon salad, the American consumer is eating pesticides banned or restricted in the United States, but legally shipped to the third world.”6 According to Weir, by the 1970s, disturbing environmental and human health problems that the world had never witnessed before, caused due to widespread pesticides use, had become impossible to ignore. It was the mounting evidence of these unnatural patterns in the earth’s delicately balanced ecosystems that had prompted Rachel Carson to write her classic book, Silent Spring, almost a decade earlier in 1962 as an urgent warning to the American public of the invisible harms occasioned by unabated pesticides pollution. By 1972, the gaining momentum of the modern environmental movement, birthed in large part due to the influence of Silent Spring, led to the amendment of the Federal Insecticide, Fungicide, and Rodenticide Act (FIFRA), the federal statute governing the registration, distribution, sale, and use of pesticides in the United States since 1947. The amendment provided a legal loophole to American pesticides manufacturers to find new markets for pesticides banned for use in the United States by allowing them to be exported to other countries. This varying scale of “acceptable risk” for different populations, established by the chemical industry and the governments of developed nations, functioned to normalize a troubling double -standard according to which poisoning “third-world” populations was seen as tolerable in order to protect the health and environments of their wealthier counterparts in developed countries. But the seeds of discontent, disaster, and death had been planted long before the 1972 Amendment to FIFRA. The global dominance of American-style industrial agriculture, based on the “anti-nature” principles of the Enlightenment and an ecology of war, had introduced a highly input-intensive and pesticides-reliant agricultural system into the world’s poorest and most vulnerable communities, in countries like India and Mexico, who lacked the means to safeguard themselves against the resultant multi-systemic toxic harms. What Weir and Schapiro were drawing the world’s attention to was, in effect, the “chemical colonialism” of the world’s poorest nations by the world’s wealthiest through agriculture. The modern architecture of toxicity was conceived of and built by post–Second World War America whose imperial ambitions materialized in the project of “development” of the newly independent countries of the “Third World.” While the first iteration of this project of development was called the “Green Revolution,” introduced to developing countries in the 1960s, its second iteration was called “Structural Adjustment Programs,” or the SAPs for short,

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introduced in countries of South and East Asia, Africa, and Latin America since the 1990s. In the history of colonialism, “development” as colonialism was certainly not a novel concept; it had a healthy precedent in the British model of colonialism which had crucially relied upon (re)educating the “natives” as a way of, what Chomsky has called, “manufacturing consent” for rule by the dominant order. Contrary to the popular theorization of neoliberalism’s entry into India with the economic reforms of the Structural Adjustment Programs in 1991, the earliest form of corporate rule had been introduced in India with the arrival of the British East India Company, a private British company solely interested in profiteering through the exploitation of India’s lands, her resources, and her people. While the East India Company was the first to establish the rule of corporate colonialism in India and was only belatedly “regulated” by the British Crown, the new form of chemical colonialism adopted by the US-introduced life-denying methods of agriculture into poor agricultural communities resulting in degraded soils, dead water, crippling debt, and poisoned people. It is seldom realized that independent India’s toxic trajectory has been directed by postwar American neoliberal imperialism, as much as colonial India’s exploited natural resources and impoverished masses had been the unwanted legacy of British colonialism. The post-war US-style neoimperialism introduced American control over the lands, people, and governance systems of the newly independent countries of the “third world” by systematically “manufacturing consent” for and enforcing an experimental agricultural system into the fragile rural economies of the newly independent countries of the Global South. In effect, this capital-intensive and fossil fuels-based system of agriculture established a “chemical dependency” of poorer, non-Western countries like India on the United States, and by extension wealthy Western nations, proving to be the gateway to the “recolonization” of India and other formerly colonized nations through corporate capitalism. This manufactured “chemical dependency,” which is the ongoing and indiscriminate use of toxic pesticides because of their diminishing efficacy on pests and despite their adverse effects on local ecosystems and people’s health due either to a lack of availability of safe alternatives or the higher cost of alternative pest control systems, has resulted in a public and environmental health crisis on a planetary scale that has most severely affected people and ways of life already existing on the margins of “progress,” “modernity,” and “development.” According to Indian environmental activist and agroecologist Vandana Shiva, the inauguration of this “toxic culture” on a global scale has not only led to the “total destruction” of biodiversity but also to the simultaneous destruction of human communities by introducing greater poverty, hunger, social strife, disease, and debt in their midst.7 As she puts it, “Anthropogenic

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species extinction and climate change is ecocide, crimes against nature. Killing farmers through debt, and people through cancer and pesticide poisoning is genocide, crimes against humanity.”8 Recent studies have begun measuring the scale of slow genocide caused by the introduction of industrial agriculture based on poisonous pesticides into farming communities. One study estimates that since the introduction of the Green Revolution in the 1960s, globally over fourteen million people have committed suicide by consuming highly hazardous pesticides from 1960–2018.9 However, the authors declare that even this figure likely underestimates the total number of pesticide suicides during this period because “suicide is illegal in many countries [like India], and most pesticide suicides occur in poor rural areas without effective death registration.”10 Importantly, as the authors conclude, “Most pesticide suicides are relatively impulsive with little planning: in the absence of highly hazardous pesticides, many people would have survived their suicidal impulse, gone on to find support amongst family, community, and health services, and lived a full life.”11 A recent study on “Suicide by pesticide poisoning in India” states that in India alone pesticides were responsible for 441,918 reported suicides from 1995 to 2015.12 And yet another recent study fills in the critical research gap on nonfatal “unintentional pesticide poisonings,” adding to a fuller understanding of the human cost of poisonous agriculture. According to the authors, . . . about 385 million cases of Unintentional Acute Pesticide Poisoning occur annually world-wide including around 11,000 fatalities. Based on a worldwide farming population of approximately 860 million this means that about 44% of farmers are poisoned by pesticides every year. The greatest estimated number of UAPP cases is in southern Asia, followed by south-eastern Asia and east Africa with regards to non-fatal UAPP.13

As a result of chemical colonialism, poor and largely illiterate rural communities in developing countries today that are entirely unequipped to safely use or store these poisons, use more pesticides per square meter and more hazardous pesticides than developed countries due to which they face greater levels of toxic exposure.14 But furthermore, this Western-style of chemical agriculture, aggressively promoted by the four “Big Ag” agrochemical corporations, or to use Vandana Shiva’s clever nomenclature “the Poison Cartel”—Syngenta, Bayer, BASF, and Dow—in collusion with local governments and seemingly beneficent international funding organizations such as the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund (IMF) has led to the disappearance of more than 90 percent of crop varieties, and “some 75% of plant genetic diversity has been pushed to extinction by the monocultures of the mechanical mind.”15 As Shiva has carefully and meticulously demonstrated in her extensive

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oeuvre and reiterated in her latest book, “While industrial agriculture is promoted as a solution to hunger, it is responsible for 75 per cent of all ecological and health problems prevalent at the global level. Hunger, malnutrition, obesity, diabetes, allergies, cancers, neurological disorders are intrinsic to the design of a greed-driven, toxin-based food system.”16 This is because industrial agriculture is premised on, what Shiva has called, “monocultures” of farming practice where one high-yielding crop variety (but not necessarily “nutritious” crops), heavily reliant on pesticide inputs and abundant irrigation, is cultivated year-round in place of indigenous practices of crop rotation where as many as four nutritious crops would be planted in one year. This unnatural system has depleted local reserves of water, led to the desertification of soils, and reduced food diversity from farms. Indeed, in a manner akin to Rachel Carson, Shiva argues that “Biodiversity is not just about some plants. It is about the very web of life and about how ecosystems work. Biodiversity is the very foundation of an economy that is perennial.”17 For Shiva, agricultural monocultures are based on “monocultures of the mind” which replace local knowledge about sustainable farming practices with the dominant Western knowledge systems viewed as universal.18 As she rightly points out, this knowledge–power nexus is responsible for normalizing the war against nature and the war against humanity. Worryingly, the export of hazardous agricultural chemicals and the circle of poison continues in the twenty-first century. An Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) report from 2013 revealed that banned, restricted, and unregistered pesticides continue to be manufactured by twenty-three states in the United States for the purpose of export only.19 The marketing of these dangerous pesticides in developing countries deceptively represents them as “safe” for use where weak monitoring and a lack of awareness work against poor rural communities who are easily swayed by manipulative marketing strategies. These hazardous pesticides are then applied to tea, coffee, cotton, fruits, and vegetables in importing countries and reenter the United States as pesticide residues in US food imports.20 A more recent report released by the European Parliament in 2021 revealed that the European Union (EU) also continues to export synthetic pesticides banned for use within the EU to developing countries despite growing evidence that “these chemicals pose serious and long-term risks to human health and the environment [. . .] and threaten global food security.”21 But agriculture has not always relied on toxic chemicals. As Kathryn Gilje, former co-executive director of Pesticide Action Network North America, states, “Before World War 2 there wasn’t widespread use of pesticides but reliance on some individual chemicals.”22 Yet today, the global acceptance of pesticides as an indispensable part of modern agricultural practices has obscured the violent genealogies of war, colonialism, and capitalist profiteering that gave birth to modern-day

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agricultural poisons. Indeed, as David Weir emphatically states, “without war, we wouldn’t have pesticides.”23 Pesticides that are today pervasive in the natural world, and in human and nonhuman beings, have their origins in an ecology of war and a military mind-set and were first formulated as poisons to be used against enemy populations during the years of the World Wars in the twentieth century, as agents of chemical warfare. After the Second World War, these newly discovered poisonous formulations were peddled by American agribusinesses into the new markets of food and agriculture as a means to survive during peacetime and generate a steady stream of profits from these wartime poisons. Tracing the war ecology of pesticides enables us to render them visible as deathmaking apparatuses that have unleashed slow acting devastations on the entire web of life. As Vandana Shiva points out, “Industrial agriculture, based on toxics and fossil fuels, is the main driver of both the sixth mass extinction and of climate change.”24 The rest of this chapter outlines the origins of what Vandana Shiva has called the “chemical-military-industrial complex”25 that has resulted in the militarization of modern agriculture along the strategies and ideologies of warfare. It is this militarization of agriculture, premised on a “logic of toxicity,” that is responsible for the cocktail of pesticides in our total environment and our bodies such that today, toxicity has become a form of life. The War Ecology of Pesticides and the Militarization of Agriculture In his essay, “Speaking of Annihilation,” Edmund P. Russell highlights the “links between war and pest control” in the twentieth century. As he points out, In the first half of the twentieth century, the science and technology of pest control sometimes became the science and technology of war, and vice versa. Chemists, entomologists, and military researchers knew that chemicals toxic to one species often kill others, so they developed similar chemicals to fight human and insect enemies. They also developed similar methods of dispersing chemicals to poison both.26

In the 1940s, war and pest control had their basis in the same ideology of “annihilating the enemy,” whether that enemy be human or nature. As Russell points out, there were strong institutional and metaphorical links between the civilian and military spheres, and “ideas and hardware” moved between them.27 After conquering the geopolitical landscape, America had turned

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its attention to reinvigorating the national landscape, an important aspect of which included overcoming the age-old struggle of Man’s mastery over Nature. America’s humanistic hubris was written into the idea of American exceptionalism which valued the principles of individualism, liberty, and self-determination and saw itself as the upholder of democracy in the world and imagined itself superior to other nations. During the Second World War, American exceptionalism was not only about displaying military prowess to its enemies but was also crucially concerned with innovation in industry, particularly with technological and scientific advancement. Industrialization, urbanization, capitalism, and secularization, the pillars of modernity, formed the path that would lead to the future of a more prosperous humanity. In the resultant clamor for scientific and technological dominance, the war years witnessed various chemical formulations being tested by both the Allied forces and the Axis power Germany to be used as nerve gases against their enemies. These experiments led to the discovery of chemical combinations which equipped humans to wage a war against nature as well, particularly against disease-carrying insects and pests. Russell draws attention to the abundant research that has pointed out the shared science, technologies, and knowledge that enabled the control of enemy pests as well as enemy populations. For instance, “manufacturing of explosives in World War I produced a by-product called PBD (paradichlorobenzene), which entomologists then developed into an insecticide; [. . .] entomologists often used military metaphors; [. . .] World War II simulated development of DDT; and [. . .] some insecticides were related to nerve gases [such as organophosphates].”28 The idea of American exceptionalism extended, therefore, to an indulgent use of toxic chemicals and synthetic pesticides in order to “tame” and “control” nature as a decisive part of the postwar Modernist narrative. The terrifying culmination of these experiments was in the lethal gases used in Nazi Germany’s concentration camps to exterminate the Jews who were likened to nonhuman enemies as “vermin” and “pests.” The Nazis used poisonous chemicals like “Zyklon B, [a cyanide-based] industrial pesticide, and other chemicals [to] murder millions of Jews during the Holocaust.”29 The same ideology and imagery equating human enemies with insect enemies also shaped the anti-Japanese sentiment which viewed the Japanese as barbaric, insect-like creatures, and resulted in the devastating atomic bombs dropped by America on Hiroshima and Nagasaki in 1945.30 Racism and the idea of “world domination” had been the primary drivers of innovation in chemical warfare, and any difference from the ideal of the “white man” as norm was branded as the “enemy” and systematically dehumanized by association with the “unnatural” and “abnormal,” in need of “extermination.” In her extensively researched book, Oneness vs. the 1%, Vandana Shiva highlights the illicit ties between American and German corporations during

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the war years despite fighting on opposing sides in the Second World War, and their joint role in installing, what can be called, the Global Toxic Economy of today wherein these very corporations continue to circulate wartime poisons as “safe” pesticides. In 1927, I.G. Farben, the German chemicals and pharmaceuticals conglomerate that was a merger of six chemical companies—BASF, Bayer, Hoechst, Agfa, Chemische Fabrik Griesheim-Elektron, and Chemische Fabrik vorm, merged with the biggest American oil refining company, Standard Oil, established by the industrialist John D. Rockefeller, to form Standard I.G. Farben.31 Standard I.G. Farben opened the Auschwitz prison camp in June 1940 to produce artificial rubber and gasoline from coal, and the two companies “exchanged patents to control economies on both sides of the Atlantic.”32 While “Standard Oil and I.G. Farben provided the capital and technology [. . .] Hitler supplied the labor consisting of political enemies and Jews.”33 I.G. Farben supplied Hitler with poisonous gases like Zyklon-B, the poison pesticide used in concentration camps.34 The chemicals and toxic technologies developed in the labs of I.G. Farben to kill people in Hitler’s concentration camps became the “agrichemicals for industrial agriculture when the war ended. This industrial agriculture was then forced on people everywhere.”35 Similarly, as Shiva points out, Monsanto and Bayer, that have now merged, “made explosives and lethally poisonous gases using shared technologies and sold them to both sides, the Allied and the Axis Powers, during the world wars.”36 In 1954, Monsanto and Bayer started a joint venture called MOBAY, which was part of I.G. Farben’s toxic cartel.37 Nearly a decade later, MOBAY and Dow Chemicals were among the chemical companies that “supplied the ingredients for Agent Orange during the Vietnam War (1961–71) [and] 20 million gallons of MOBAY defoliants and herbicides were sprayed over South Vietnam.”38 Recent research has also demonstrated the role played by the multibillion dollar chemical corporation DuPont in enabling the Nazi regime to achieve “technological superiority in components critical for the war,” by supplying synthetic rubber and having stakes in companies responsible for making the poisonous gas Zyklon-B.39 More worryingly, as the research points out, the ties between I.G. Farben and DuPont were not merely based on business interests, but were also ideological.40 Outlining the links between the chemical industry and Nazi Germany enables us to see that not only did the big agrochemical corporations— Monsanto, Dow, DuPont, Bayer, BASF—selling modern-day pesticides under a narrative of “safety” have ties with the Nazi war machine, but also that they actively provided the science and technology, specifically, for the murder of millions of innocent lives by targeted chemical warfare. By the 1940s the first generation of synthetic chemicals had been developed and were being used as pesticides without consideration of their toxic effects on the natural world. Such an anthropocentric understanding of the

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world was the only legitimate paradigm available through which to approach humanity’s relationship with the world beyond the borders of the skin. In fact, before the publication of Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring in 1962, pesticide laws were only concerned with protecting the rights of humans, whereas the well-being of the world beyond the human remained outside their purview. While crop pests and insect-borne diseases had thus far bested every effort expended by humans for their elimination and control, with the introduction of synthetic pesticides, Nature could finally be subdued and controlled by humankind. The earliest and most prolific of these synthetic pesticides was the colorless, odorless, and tasteless organochlorine insecticide DDT. It was considered one of the most successful technologies developed during the war, effectively eradicating life-threatening diseases like malaria, typhus, yellow fever, and the plague among soldier and civilian populations. DDT’s insecticidal properties were first discovered in 1939 by the Swiss chemist Paul Hermann Müller who was later awarded the Nobel Prize in Medicine in 1948 for his discovery. But it was only in the 1940s that the first widespread use of DDT was undertaken by the American military during World War II to protect soldiers from vector-borne diseases such as malaria and typhus, body lice, and bubonic plague. Its uninhibited use by the military led to a “miraculous” reduction in cases of malaria from 400,000 in 1946 to virtually none in 1950.41 It was touted as “mankind’s”42 ultimate protection against all manner of “bad” insect pests, particularly against disease carrying insects like the Anopheles malaria mosquitoes that had posed a bigger threat to the Allied forces during the Second World War than their human enemy. Even before the pesticide was made available for civilian use, the American media had begun singing praises of the “wonder chemical” the successes of which during the war were glorified on radio, TV, and newspapers, effectively doing the job of marketing the chemical for the big agrichemical corporations. DDT became the first synthetic pesticide to be widely used in both agricultural and domestic spraying to curb all manner of “harmful” insects with previously unimaginable success. By the mid-1940s, Time magazine hailed the new wonder chemical as “one of the greatest scientific discoveries of World War II.” Even though, since as early as the mid-1940s, knowledge of DDT’s acute toxicity to fish, birds, and bees was widespread among expert entomologists, scientists, the chemical industry and government agencies, political action and public mobilization against the toxic insecticide was not forthcoming because it posed no known threat to humans. While unabated technical advancement had led to the abundant use of pesticides and the development of hundreds of other daily-use chemicals to improve man’s standard of living by overcoming the daily irritants and dangers posed by nature, the ripple effects of most pesticides were not known and unless a particular toxin was in danger of immediate and palpable harm to humans, it was

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marketed as “safe” for use. Before Carson, there was little awareness of the concept of “potential toxicity” in determining the use of pesticides, and the long-term or slow-acting adverse effects of these synthetic chemicals were not studied, particularly with relation to nonhuman species. After reaping the benefits of DDT’s escalating demand during the war, the highly influential agrochemical companies, foremost among which were Monsanto, Penn Salt Chemicals (later changed to Pennwalt), DuPont, and Montrose, were determined to maintain steady profits from their lucrative pesticide even if that meant putting human and ecological health at risk. They launched an aggressive marketing campaign to appeal to farmers, industries, and households and employed the discourse of modernity to attract their postwar audience. America’s modernist narrative celebrated its technological progress, particularly the weapons developed during the war that gave America an edge over its enemies, and its socioeconomic superiority that had made its citizens one of the most prosperous in the world. While America’s use of the atomic bomb on Japan was widely condemned across the world and at home, America’s possession of weapons of mass destruction had earned her a reputation as a powerful and dangerous country. The ability to tame and destroy the enemy was applauded as part of a worldview that still privileged humans and a belief in the values of individualism, reason, and progress over a more densely entangled epistemology. The chemical industry wove an elaborate tapestry of misrepresentation and deception in the marketing of DDT, which was designed to play on the sustained ignorance of its consumers and the complicity of corrupt government agencies. In exploiting the postwar sentiment of heightened patriotism, marketing campaigns for DDT cleverly employed war imagery, consistently alluding to the victory of brave American soldiers assisted by the revolutionary pesticide DDT. The industry, backed by the American government, lured suburban households by packaging DDT as “family-friendly” and selling the ideal of a bug-free home as the perfect image of the safe, healthy, and happy new American family. Once American citizens could finally purchase DDT off the shelf at their local supermarkets, the insecticide became a staple for use in agriculture on food crops and cotton crops, at dairy farms for treating diseases in livestock and farm animals, and in homes for both indoor and outdoor spraying. And while laboratory tests were yielding mixed results at best and conclusively troubling at worst with regard to the alleged “safety” of the “super” pesticide for the natural world and its numerous inhabitants, DDT’s advertising strategy focused precisely on its safety and ease of use in targeting consumers, foremost among whom were suburban housewives. Brightly colored print ads and TV commercials commonly depicted domestic scenes of a stereotypical smiling suburban housewife with perfectly coiffed hair and painted nails using a DDT based product around the house or in

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the baby’s nursery.43 The message was clear: “DDT is good for me-e-e!”44 As the “easiest-to-use” (so easy even a woman can do it!), it protects the most vulnerable sections of the society, women and children, and comes at a price “anyone can afford!”45 Unmatched in its efficacy against the “dreaded” insects plaguing mankind, and in its affordability, for a time DDT became the preferred weapon of choice for government agencies, farmers, and families in almost every country around the world in the ever-raging war against “pests.” DDT was, in short, hailed as the one-stop solution to the problem of man versus insects. For the first time in human history, man was seen as having the upper hand! Soon, true to the spirit of Sherwin-Williams’s slogan for their popular DDT-based insect-killer, Pestroy, “Let’s put it everywhere!”46 this toxic chemical became ubiquitous in its application, being liberally sprayed in farms, households, offices, gardens, public spaces, and crop lands. No caution or safety protocol was exercised in the aerial spraying and dusting of DDT directly on people or in the environment since the popularity of this seemingly miraculous chemical rested on its reputation of being “safe” for humans, the environment, and “good” insects but a deadly killer to a wide variety of “unwanted” arthropods ravaging crops every year and nearly costing hard-working farmers their livelihood. In fact, in the 1940s, anti-malaria campaigners working in developing countries like Africa and India were so eager to buy the trust of local populations rightly suspicious of and at times downright hostile to this new, synthetic chemical that they frequently ingested small quantities of DDT at public demonstrations as an indication to the “natives” that DDT is “so safe you can eat it!”47 Though various beekeepers, concerned citizens, and ornithologists had already begun to sound the alarm about DDT’s toxicity to bees, birds, and other wildlife, it wasn’t until Carson’s book publicized the mounting evidence against it that local governments and international organizations were forced to sit up and take notice. It was the early signs of the adverse environmental effects of the “anti-nature” and military philosophy adopted by postwar America as the preferred route to national “regeneration” and “prosperity” about which Rachel Carson sounded the alarm in her ground-breaking book Silent Spring. Perhaps Carson’s most significant contribution to the narrative of “safety” through which the agrochemical industry sought to manufacture consent for synthetic chemicals in the consumer market, the science behind which was shaky at best, was to question whether there can be a “safe dose” of poisonous chemicals at all. She did so by drawing attention to the notions of “cumulative poisoning” and “long-term” effects of exposure, and thereby introduced the notions of “futurity” and “intergenerationality” in the consideration of the regulation of toxic chemicals. But furthermore, in sharp contrast to the dominant humanist ideology of 1960s America, Carson demystified the idea of humans as all-knowing by exposing the machinations of other life forms

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within the human body, and upon which the smooth functioning of human being depends. Carson’s Early Posthumanism Over thirty years before posthumanism began to gain prominence as a rigorous and interdisciplinary theoretical practice in the 1990s,48 the American marine biologist and conservationist Rachel Carson had already drawn the blueprint for a “posthumanist” philosophy in her ground-breaking book Silent Spring. Published in 1962, Silent Spring was a visionary text insofar as it performed the function of a prophet for the future, the full import of which is only beginning to be realized in the twenty-first century confronted as our current historicopolitical moment is with the duress of unprecedented climate emergencies, species extinction, the spread of novel diseases, and environmental and marine contamination resulting from toxicants and plastics pollution. Carson’s book became the first piece of writing to draw worldwide censure of and spur legislative action on polluting chemical pesticides and their harmful effects not only on humans but significantly, on the nonhuman world. However, achieving such a monumental feat was no easy task, particularly for an unmarried female scientist writing at the peak of tensions arising from the Cold War between America and the Soviet Union, but perhaps more significantly, at the height of postwar consumerism in America. Nonetheless, within the pages of her book, in her simple yet mesmerizing style, Carson presented a markedly different vision of the world to her readers than was current in the highly nationalist and consumerist culture of post–World War II America. Yet, it was one that closely resembled her own perception of it—as an intricately interwoven web of life. By reorienting a worldview that encouraged individualism and species-supremacy toward one which found value in preserving the “web of life,” Carson offered her readers an alternative “history of life on earth” as “a history of interaction between living things and their surroundings.”49 But more than this, her alternative “history of life on earth” went beyond foregrounding the messy reality of humankind’s variously entangled coexistence with earth’s diverse entities. It recognized the nonhuman world as alive—as living and feeling agents, capable of affecting and not only being affected by human actions, and in doing so Silent Spring articulated a posthumanist philosophy. In what reads like a manifesto for present-day posthumanist thought, Carson interrupted the Western humanist ideal of “the human” as autonomous, self-evident and thereby separable from the natural world, by carefully detailing “man’s” imbrication in infinitely complex and endlessly reverberating nonhuman life worlds. “The ‘control of nature,‘” she wrote, “is a phrase conceived in arrogance, born of the

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Neanderthal age of biology and philosophy, when it was supposed that nature exists for the convenience of man.”50 For Carson, the unmitigated pesticide poisoning of the rivers, land, and air as a result of unmindful human activity spelled the inevitable extinction not only of the natural world and its varied flora and fauna but also, by extension, of man51 himself. Quite contrary to the beliefs of Western liberal humanism which had equated a historically contingent version of man,52 in his guise as white, Western, male, heterosexual, and able-bodied, to the universal “human” and propelled him to his singularly exalted status in the cosmos, Carson made the case for a posthumanist relationality of all life forms, human and other than human. According to this reasoning, humankind’s survival in this world is premised upon the teeming bacteria that colonize the body, the profuse plant and animal life that constitute the cycle of life, and the unique climactic conditions of our planet. Confronted with the entangled reality of being human in a multispecies world, the human body began to lose the impenetrability of its borders, only to be reconfigured as porous materiality, always already open to the threat of infection from without, not only from synthetic chemicals as Carson so verily illustrated but also from foreign organisms such as pathogens. Under humanism, categories such as “agency,” “consciousness,” “choice,” and “rationality,” formed the basis of what separated the “human” from the “nonhuman.” In direct opposition to humans, nonhumans were seen as nonagentive and incapable of consciousness that would enable them to have self-awareness, the capacity for “reason,” or any higher cognitive ability. While the nonhuman world was often recognized as being alive albeit in the limited sense of being “not dead,” it was not supposed in possession of liveliness in the sense of being full of life or vital energy, animated, vivacious. Human thought and action, then, not only materialized but also gave meaning to the nonhuman world, and in this sense, organized it. It was amid such ideas about human exceptionalism that Carson drew attention to the fact that some of the biggest threats to humankind are, in fact, imperceptible to human senses, constituting invisible threats to the human body too small to be perceived by the naked eye. Life, she said, germinates, blooms, and dies in the interstices of human perception. Indeed, there was a whole world, living, breathing, and reproducing, autonomous to human design and ambition. As Carson demonstrated, disease and dangerous chemicals are constant threats to the sanctity of the human body and “the innumerable small-scale exposures to which we are subjected day by day, year after year”53 might ultimately prove “disastrous.” This was because “each of these recurrent exposures, no matter how slight, contributes to the progressive build-up of chemicals in our bodies, and so to cumulative poisoning.”54 Most significantly, as Carson pointed out, not only are human exposures to cancer-producing chemicals, including pesticides, uncontrolled and multiple,

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but also individual exposures to the same chemical might occur via different sources and in varying degrees. And so, while any single exposure might not be sufficient to cause cancer, “any single supposedly ‘safe dose‘ may be enough to tip the scales that are already loaded with other ‘safe doses.’”55 How then, she asked, can we determine a “safe dose”?56 But toxic exposure, as Carson observed, is not only a threat because it is “cumulative.” It also poses a threat in its ability to cause harm intergenerationally and to the nonhuman world. “Synthetic pesticides,” she wrote, “have been so thoroughly distributed throughout the animate and inanimate world that they occur virtually everywhere.”57 As she explained, They have entered and lodged in the bodies of fish, birds, reptiles, and domestic and wild animals [. . .] They have been found in fish in remote mountain lakes, in earthworms burrowing in soil, in the eggs of birds—and in man himself [. . .] They occur in the mother’s milk, and probably in the tissues of the unborn child.58

The slow and silent invasions of dangerous chemicals, then, threaten the very futurity of humanity, and the accumulation of chemical substances in the tissues of plants, animals, and humans “have the potential to alter the genetic structure of organisms.”59 And for this reason, she insisted that “They should not be called ‘insecticides’ but ‘biocides.’”60 Until the publication of Silent Spring in 1962, there had been no widespread public concern about the safety of synthetic chemicals for human and environmental health, or their long-term impacts. Carson drew attention to the inner, invisible life of cells in order to establish the damaging effects of pesticides which might take decades to manifest, yet once within the body continued to wage a silent war. In this way, not only did she point out the enormity of life processes beyond the human and reiterate the symbiosis of humans with nonhumans in the theater of life, but in doing so, she also opposed the war imagery prevalent at the time that was being exploited by the chemical industry to sell their death-making chemicals. While the chemical industry focused on the enemy without like Germany, Japan, and insect pests, Carson directed attention to the enemy within the body—pesticides and chemicals. But furthermore, she also condemned the link between pest control and war, despairing that “so primitive a science [as entomology] has armed itself with the most modern and terrible weapons [and] turned them against the earth.”61 Her biggest complaint against “the practitioners of chemical control” was the “chemical barrage [they had] hurled against the fabric of life [with] no ‘high-minded orientation,’ no humility before the vast forces with which they tamper.”62 As a biologist familiar with the significance of the uninterrupted continuation of the nonhuman life cycle for the prevalence of human being, Carson alerted

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the American public and the world to the ways in which humans are directly implicated in the “chain of poisoning and death”63 which they have unleashed upon the world through the indiscriminate use of synthetic pesticides. Crucially, as Linda Lear writes in the introduction to Silent Spring, “[Carson] insisted that what science conceived and technology made possible must first be judged for its safety and benefit to the ‘whole stream of life.’”64 She argued that scientific knowledge cannot keep pace with industry-backed technological progress, and so we must exercise caution with chemical intervention in the natural world.65 And as a result of these limitations to knowledge, Carson forewarned, “what the public is asked to accept as ‘safe’ today may turn out tomorrow to be extremely dangerous.”66 Foremost among the new toxic pesticides in the 1960s and the one for which Carson reserved the severity of her attack in light of the ubiquity of its residues in the environment and living organisms alike, was DDT. DDT’s adverse environmental impacts resulted from its particular chemical properties of being highly water insoluble, highly mobile, and resistant to breakdown on treated surfaces. In other words, this meant that DDT left a toxic imprint on the environment and living organisms for years to come, as well as affecting aquatic and terrestrial animals, even in those areas which had never been sprayed. Carson drew attention to DDT’s ability to “bioaccumulate” by slowly building up in the fatty tissues of living organisms and to “biomagnify” by increasing in concentration in animals higher up in the food chain. According to Carson, chlorinated hydrocarbons like DDT primarily affect the central nervous system and liver in humans and should be considered a “chemical carcinogen” to humans based on its demonstrated effects on animals.67 Rachel Carson’s early posthumanism occasioned a break with anthropocentric reasoning in placing humans firmly back into nature and exposing their vulnerability to fractures in the ecosystems with which they are inextricably bound. Her stirring and eloquent exposé of the damaging effects on plant, animal, avian, and aquatic life, not to mention on human health and the environment, wrought by the overuse of everyday pesticides such as DDT was an early lesson in the interconnectedness of ecology and the place of humans within it. Unheeded and ongoing food chain contamination and habitat destruction, she had warned, has a trickle-up effect, and humans, comfortably placed at the top of the food chain, will have to face severe repercussions for their culpability in commencing a vicious cycle of pollution and poisoning. In exposing the permeability and vulnerability of the human body to external matter like toxins and thereby shattering the illusion of the fixity of human-made borders she demonstrated that humans did not stand over and above nature but formed one part of it, influenced and shaped by it. Her argument that “Man [sic], however much he may like to pretend the contrary, is part of nature”68 was a timely reminder to the American public and to

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the world that “Man” cannot hope to escape the consequences of his actions toward nature. In essence then, Silent Spring elaborated the reality that humankind’s relationship with the world as it exists beyond the borders of the skin is one of contagion, porosity, mutuality, and, most importantly, kinship. By poisoning nature, we are in effect poisoning ourselves. Our bodies, Carson explained, are not immune to the synthetic chemicals of our own invention because these “synthetic creations” have “no counterparts in nature.”69 Rather, these new chemicals accumulate in and slowly poison human bodies just as they do to animals and the rest of the ecosystem. Carson insisted that humanity’s infractions against the “whole stream of life” are born of man’s greed, arrogance, and ignorance, and she blamed the “modern way of life” for “the contamination of man’s total environment with such substances of incredible potential for harm”70 that they would occasion not only a silent spring in nature but lead to the very silencing of humanity. The publication of Silent Spring sent ripples of concern throughout America and the Western world about the adverse toxic effects of human-made chemicals and led to the establishment of the first laws regulating synthetic pesticides in light of their potentially harmful effects on humans, wildlife, and the environment. She urged the American public “to count the many hidden costs” of an over-reliance on pesticides, and the environmental movement sparked by Silent Spring was pivotal in the establishment of the Stockholm Convention in 2001 to regulate the use of persistent organic pollutants (POPs), so named for their resistance to break down in the environment. In the wake of its publication, polluting human actors were forced to take responsibility for their actions, and for the first time stricter regulations for the use of toxic pesticides were legislated by countries all over the world. Carson’s posthumanist worldview marked a new era of pesticide regulation in the world, calling for consideration of the “long-term” effects and environmental harms caused by the excessive and injudicious use of pesticides.71 The realization of humankind’s imminent contamination from the incessant poisonings they inflict upon the earth and all its inhabitants paved the way for the modern environmental movement and led, in 1970, to the establishment of the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) in the United States with a singular focus on “pollution abatement.” By 1972, the newly created EPA imposed a ban on the “domestic usage” of DDT, barring certain exemptions granted by the federal government for particularly stubborn crop pests, and restricting its use to “Public health, quarantine, and . . . export of the material.”72 Interestingly however, as Claas Kirchhelle points out in his perceptive review of the recent literature on the historiography of toxicity that while the rising tide of the DDT scare led to many developed countries following the United States in severely limiting or withdrawing DDT from domestic use and manufacture, “substances like DDT, which had been banned in the

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West, continued to be legally exported to other parts of the world or were produced there directly.”73 Needless to say, these “other parts of the world” were located in the economically low- to middle-income countries of the non-Western world, and such a provision gestured to a troubling double standard which made allowances for the export of pollution to less developed countries of the Global South in an effort to preserve the health and neighborhoods of wealthier Western populations. Despite her later achievements, however, writing as she was at the height of the Cold War, Carson’s posthumanist perspective of the world jarred with the ideology of postwar America that revered science and viewed “nature” as a threat to be subdued and tamed by man. In her pithy introduction to Silent Spring, Lear effectively captures the sentiment of post–World War II America where “science was god, and science was male,”74 while stating that in posing a challenge to this heteropatriarchal power structure, first as a queer woman and second as a biologist, a field “that was held in low esteem in the nuclear age,”75 Carson had opened herself up to severe criticism. Carson wrote her early articles, working for the newspaper Sun, under the gender-blurring pseudonym “R. L. Carson” in the hope of lending greater credibility to her science with an audience that would be more receptive to controversial scientific news coverage from a male author than a similarly positioned female writer.76 The chemical industry, Lear continues, was one of the main beneficiaries of postwar technology and viewed Carson as an obstacle to unchecked profit-making in the new America. Rather than directly oppose her science, after the publication of Silent Spring, Carson was most notably attacked “in tremendously gendered terms,”77 which served as a conduit to question her credibility as a scientist. As a woman, she was labeled “hysterical,” a cat-loving “spinster,” “a witch,” “over-emotional and irrational,”78 and therefore unqualified to debate matters beyond her comprehension. Chemical corporations such as Monsanto, Pennwalt Chemicals, and Montrose Chemicals, among others that were at the helm of producing highly profitable DDT-based products “spent a quarter of a million dollars” in a concerted effort to dismiss Carson’s laborious research as pseudo-science.79 In their book, Merchants of Doubt, Naomi Oreskes and Erik M. Conway reveal the ways in which science has been used by industry in order to sow the seeds of doubt about a whole “list of environmental and health concerns, including asbestos, secondhand smoke, acid rain, and the ozone hole.”80 The idea behind the spread of disinformation and doubt is “to keep the controversy alive”81 for as long as possible in order to allow industry to conduct business as usual. This was done by hiring “experts with scientific credentials available to comment on any issue about which a think tank or corporation needed a negative sound bite.”82 The attack on Rachel Carson by the chemical industry was motivated by the same intention. As Oreskes and Conway argue, “In

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the demonizing of Rachel Carson, free marketeers realized that if you could convince people that an example of successful government regulation wasn’t, in fact, successful—that it was actually a mistake—you could strengthen the argument against regulation in general.”83 More pressingly, today, these toxic chemicals are being developed, manufactured, and distributed by the same highly influential multibillion dollar agrochemical corporations, namely, Monsanto (acquired by Bayer AG in 2018), DowDupont (Dow, DuPont, and Corteva since 2019), and BASF, that contributed to the growth of the Nazi forces during the years of the wars, and whose spheres of influence spread far and wide to include national and international governments and policy makers, scientific and academic research, media outlets, and pharmaceutical companies, posing a serious deterrent to the initiation of positive legislative change. A recent case in point, which uncovers the insidious military–industrial–information nexus of power, concerns the same agrochemical company that was one of the foremost producers and defenders of DDT in Rachel Carson’s time—Monsanto. This time Monsanto’s glyphosate-based herbicide Roundup, which is the most widely used herbicide in the world, has captured the world’s attention because of its adverse impacts on human health. Since 2018, the agrochemical behemoth Monsanto (now Bayer) has been at the receiving end of thousands of lawsuits in the United States as a result of the suspected carcinogenicity of Roundup. By the end of 2019, reportedly, over 70,000 lawsuits had been filed against Monsanto and Bayer with the corporation having already paid a few billion dollars in landmark verdicts awarding significant compensations to plaintiffs suffering from blood cancer.84 What is most incriminating about the Monsanto trials is the impunity with which the chemical industry continues to operate until today with utter disregard for the health of people and the environment. In what are being called “The Monsanto Papers,” in-house documents and correspondences that were declassified in 2017 as a part of the ongoing trials, there is clear evidence that the company was aware of the adverse health effects of Roundup as early as 1999, and yet issued no public health warnings or consumer advisory notifications about its product.85 On the contrary, Monsanto consistently persisted in “ghostwriting, scientific manipulation, collusion with the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA)” in a conscious effort to veil vital information about “how the human body absorbs glyphosate.”86 Moreover, in a series of planned “actions” orchestrated by Monsanto, which are reminiscent of the attack on Rachel Carson by an omnipotent and dangerous chemical industry, senior Reuters investigative journalist Carey Gillam who published a book in 2017, titled Whitewash: The Story of a Weed Killer, Cancer, and the Corruption of Science, investigating Roundup’s links to cancer, became the target of surveillance and deliberate sabotage by Monsanto. As Gillam states in her book, “For decades, companies have whitewashed many of the facts about

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the crops and chemicals that they have helped make a central part of modern agriculture.”87 In establishing an alternative narrative of Roundup’s “safety” to humans, Monsanto is claimed to have paid Google to remove damaging reports about its cancer-linked weedkiller Roundup from its search engine, and launched a “multi-pronged strategy” to discredit and defame Gillam.88 In early 2020, Bayer AG reportedly agreed to set aside USD 10 billion as compensation payments to thousands of victims of glyphosate poisoning who claimed to have contracted Non-Hodgkin’s Lymphoma (NHL), a cancer of the white blood cells called lymphocytes which form part of the body’s immune system, as a result of their exposure to Roundup over a prolonged period of time.89 What is of particular interest here is that of the USD 10 billion, Bayer is said to have reserved USD 2 billion as settlement for “future claims.”90 The very concept of the intergenerationality and futurity of toxicity is a testament to Carson’s legacy. What bears consideration in this context, however, is the fact that just as the modern environmental movement stemming from the emotive charge of Carson’s advocacy was sweeping across the more affluent populations of the United States, and the countries of the Global North led by the United States were turning away from decidedly hazardous pesticides like DDT, private American organizations like the Ford and Rockefeller Foundations and the American government along with the World Bank were introducing the anti-life practices of the industrial-style agricultural system, ironically called the “Green Revolution,” in the newly independent yet economically weaker nations of the Global South, forcing them to adopt the very chemicals being banned by developed countries. For developing countries, attempting to rebuild their nations in the aftermath of decades of oppressive colonial rule, and where the majority of farmers were small and marginal without the means or know-how to use toxic chemicals, the Green Revolution spelt disaster. The Poisonous Legacy of the Green Revolution It wasn’t a silent spring at first. In those early decades of the new “magic” seeds and vaporous “plant medicines,” the farmers were happy and even dared to dream of prosperous futures that would bring their families opportunities thus far beyond their reach. As the crop yields increased and the hours of labor the fields had previously demanded decreased, the farmers’ dreams got bigger and their futures appeared brighter. But such “magic” must surely be an illusion? And so it was. By the third decade, the “life-giving” magic of the new seeds and pesticides began to wane only to be replaced by its opposite, death. Alarming new diseases appeared and crept through the farming community, the most common being cancer. Soon the word cancer, a once

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unheard of and rare disease in those rural communities, became a familiar shade. Every household told its own personal story of loss and devastation caused by the debilitating disease. Even the children were not spared and suffered in their own way. The “blue-baby syndrome,” a rare disorder of the blood named after the bluish appearance of affected children due to oxygen deprivation in the cells, began to afflict young lives. By the time the spell of the “wondrous” new agricultural technologies had broken, it was already too late. The soil quality had degraded which meant that farmers were bound in a vicious circle of applying more and more of the toxic pesticides to their fields in an endless effort to maintain high yields. The once abundant groundwater, which had been the real life-giver of this fertile land, had been severely depleted as a result of the water-intensive nature of the new agricultural methods. What remained was highly poisoned by the leaching of heavy metals and pesticides, making it unfit for drinking, and yet it was the only source of drinking water for the community. With the steadily rising costs of the “magic” seeds and pesticides as well as the mounting hospital and medicine bills in treatment of the new diseases that accompanied the new style of agriculture, farmers were saddled with debt and death instead of the promise of bright futures. The false magic of the new agricultural practices had left the entire web of life in a state of ruination. From that point onward, the deafening silence of death, disease, and debt was all that remained of this once healthy farming community. This disturbing vignette is no longer a cautionary “fable for tomorrow” from the opening pages of Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring but has become the present-day reality of the small northwestern Indian state of Punjab. When Carson penned her memorable tale of a dystopian future in the opening pages of Silent Spring, in which an unnamed American town is blighted and silenced by the deleterious effects of excessive pesticides use, little could she have imagined that less than forty years later her unsettling vision would come to life on the other side of the world among a rural Indian community that would never have heard her name. Punjab’s is the lesser-known story of a spring without voices and of the life-denying potential of unregulated pesticides use. The fallout of the chemical saturation of Punjab’s total bioecology, from environmental devastation to adverse health problems, is intergenerational and will continue to afflict the lives and landscape of Punjab well into the future. It is a case of local and national regulatory failures but kick-started by the global toxic economy which installed the framework of chemical dependency of poorer developing countries like India on the rich Western nations of the Global North through the Green Revolution. In her classic indictment of the Green Revolution in The Violence of the Green Revolution, Vandana Shiva has revealed the multipronged processes

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by which consent for the Green Revolution was manufactured by the architects of toxicity from as early as the 1950s. The first step in the process was the creation of an alternative, Western knowledge system in place of the existing systems of indigenous knowledge and know-how. To prepare India for the Green Revolution required redrawing the entire archaeology of knowledge capable of encompassing comprehensive political, economic, and social changes. As part of the process of the knowledge revolution, which had to precede the agricultural revolution, “Advisors and experts came from America to shift India’s agricultural research and agricultural policy from an indigenous and ecological model to an exogenous, and high input one, finding, of course, partners in sections of the elite, because the new model suited their political priorities and interests.”91 In her careful analysis, Shiva identifies three international agencies involved in transferring the American model of agriculture to India—the Ford and Rockefeller Foundations, the American government, and the World Bank. Introducing the capital-intensive industrial system of agriculture could only be achieved by transforming the face of Indian agriculture from the ground up, and to do so (re)education and finance worked hand in hand. But the manufacture of consent was limited to the elite segments of the population, whereas those whose lives were to be most intimately affected by the practices of the Green Revolution were left out of consideration. Farmers, agricultural workers, and their communities did not have a say in the introduction of the new chemical farming practices—illiterate, poor, and disadvantaged, they were the marginalized communities whose welfare was subordinated to the ideals of “progress” and “modernity.” While the Ford and Rockefeller Foundations worked toward re-educating Indians in the new style of agriculture, the World Bank financed the introduction of a capital-intensive agricultural model in a poor country—a move bound to generate a one-sided dependency on rich nations.92 As Shiva states, “[The vision of the Green Revolution] was based not on cooperation with nature, but on its conquest. It was based not on the intensification of nature’s processes, but on the intensification of credit and purchased inputs like chemical fertilizers and pesticides. It was based not on self-reliance, but on dependence.”93 In the mid-1960s India was “forced to devalue its currency to the extent of 37.5%” and USAID along with the World Bank put pressure on India for favorable conditions for foreign investments.94 These pressure tactics were intensified in the aftermath of the 1966 drought which had drastically reduced the food production in India and increased India’s food dependency on America.95 It was under these desperate conditions that the United States exploited India’s crisis for capitalist gain by severely restricting food aid to India until it agreed to adopt the Green Revolution.96 This unsustainable model of chemical-based and technology-driven agriculture had not achieved much success in America, where it was first implemented, contributing, in

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large measure, to the creation of the American Dust Bowl of the 1930s.97 This unsustainable agricultural model was then forced onto Mexico, where too it met with resistance, and replaced indigenous seeds and crops better suited to the local climate. In creating an effective marketing strategy for the new hybrid crops, manufactured by the American agronomist Norman Borlaug, the Ford Foundation blamed native Indian crop varieties for poor yield, even though, as Shiva documents, the problem with native seed varieties was not that they were low yielding but that they were unable to withstand the new poisonous chemicals introduced by the Green Revolution, unlike the so-called high-yielding varieties (HYV) that had been specifically designed to resist the pesticides sold by American agrochemical corporations.98 Unmaking Life: The Tragic Tale of the Land of Five Rivers In the mid-1960s, the northwestern state of Punjab, named after the five Himalayan rivers (deriving from the Persian words “punj” meaning “five” and “āb” meaning “water”) that course through its verdant soils, became the first Indian state in which the agricultural experiment of the Green Revolution was launched. Because of its rich fertile soils and abundant natural water sources, Punjab was the natural choice for a highly water-intensive and pesticide-reliant agricultural system. The Green Revolution was based on modern irrigation methods and mechanization and introduced the new synthetic high-yield varieties (HYV) of wheat and rice that had been developed by Norman Borlaug, for which he was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in 1970. While from a purely economic perspective the Green Revolution presents a story of success in propelling India to a food surplus from a food deficient country, and in transforming Punjab into India’s most prosperous state as the “granary of India,” the gains were short-lived but the poisonous legacy it has left behind will have long-term repercussions on the environment and people for generations to come. By the 1990s, crop pests had become resistant to the new pesticides and the crops were once again infested, the soil fertility had degraded, and the first signs of cancer had begun to afflict the people of Punjab. Today, Punjab records one of the highest number of cancer cases in the country and has transformed from “the breadbasket of India” to “the cancer capital of India.” When measured on a per-acre basis, Punjab is the highest consumer of pesticides in India, even though it occupies a mere 1.54 percent of India’s total landmass. In 2019–2020, this small state accounted for over 8 percent of the total pesticide consumption in India,99 and many of the pesticides sprayed on the crops in Punjab are categorized as class I poisons by the World Health Organization because of their acute toxicity and are banned in many countries around the world.100 According to the survey results of a

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report released by the Punjab government in 2015, there are at least 90 cancer patients for every 100,000 people in the state as compared to the national average of 80 out of every 100,000.101 Within Punjab, the southwestern district of Malwa, which is a primarily cotton-growing region, is the worst affected, at 107 cancer patients for every 100,000 of the population, which has led to it being called the “cancer belt of Punjab.” The hybrid Bt cotton crops introduced to India require very high applications of pesticides and the Malwa district consumes 75 percent of the total pesticides used in the state of Punjab.102 Cancer has become so endemic to the state of Punjab that over the years there has been a proliferation of “cancer villages” in the region where every household either has a cancer patient or someone suspected of having cancer. For years now the infamous “cancer train” shuttles over 60 cancer patients daily from Bhatinda railway station in Punjab 325 kilometers away to the city of Bikaner in the Indian state of Rajasthan where medical facilities for cancer treatment are far better than in Punjab. Since official records only account for those already diagnosed with cancer at registered medical facilities, the number of people actually suffering from cancer is likely to be much higher since those who remain undiagnosed for a variety of reasons, ranging from inability to access hospitals equipped to treat cancer, lack of money for treatment, misdiagnosis of illness, and even misrepresentation of the number of cancer patients in official records, remain unrepresented in official statistics. Recent research has revealed that agricultural workers in Punjab are at a greater risk of “genotoxic” damage, which refers to the property of chemical agents to damage the genetic material within a cell causing mutation and leading to serious disorders and illnesses such as cancer.103 But moreover, in the last two years alone, more than 900 Punjabi farmers have committed suicide due to crippling debt, crop failure, bankruptcy, and other farming-related issues.104 Today, in addition to the cancer epidemic, Punjab is also facing the social and economic fallout of the pesticide-laden mechanized agriculture in the form of a drug epidemic. It is estimated that over 73 percent of Punjab’s youth between the ages of fifteen and thirty-five is addicted to some form of drugs, with heroin (also called “chitta”) being the most popular and consumed by 53 percent of all addicts.105 One of the main reasons for such an alarming uptake of drugs among Punjab’s youth has been the unemployment generated, in part, by the agricultural practices of the Green Revolution. Agriculture in the state is stagnating and is no longer lucrative due to the deteriorating soil quality and the declining water tables that have increased the cost of cultivation, the low yield and productivity of major crops, and the declining incomes in agriculture due to falling land holdings.106 Furthermore, increased mechanization has pushed the laborers previously employed in agriculture out of means to a livelihood, and with little industrialization in the state, there are no alternative job opportunities

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for Punjab’s youth. According to a study conducted by All India Institute of Medical Sciences (AIIMS) and the National Drug Dependence Treatment Centre in 2019, Punjab has the second highest users of opioids (heroin, poppy husk, opium, pharmaceuticals) of all the states of India at 720,000 persons, second highest number of cocaine users at approximately 27,000 persons, and also the second highest number of people who inject drugs (PWIDs) at 88,000 of the total 850,000 in the country.107 Unsurprisingly, with such a high prevalence of addiction to synthetic drugs, Punjab also records the highest number of drug-related crime per 100,000 population and the second highest statewise in India.108 Indeed, an entire generation in Punjab has been lost to the drug epidemic. Punjab remains a predominantly agrarian state where 82 percent of the total land is under cultivation and 62.5 percent of its population is rural, employed in agriculture. This agriculturally rich state contributes nearly 12 percent of India’s total food grains and is the highest contributor of wheat at 20 percent and rice at 9 percent to the national total,109 playing a significant role in India’s position as net exporter of food crops and biggest exporter of rice in the world. At the global level, Punjab’s contribution to the world’s cotton and wheat production translates to 2 percent each and to 1 percent of the world’s rice production.110 But according to the principles of the Green Revolution, high agricultural productivity can only be sustained by applying ever increasing quantities of pesticides to the fields and extensive irrigation of the crops, a practice that has already proved to be not only highly unsustainable but also deadly. The high water demand for agriculture is draining the “land of five rivers” of its once abundant water supply. Nearly 99 percent of the cultivated land in the state is irrigated through canals or tube wells, and of the two methods, tube wells are clearly the preferred method of irrigation since they irrigate 73 percent of the total cultivated land.111 The overexploitation of groundwater for irrigation in Punjab has meant that the state has dug so deep that it has breached the ancient water channels containing a high concentration of uranium. A 2018 report prepared jointly by Water Resources and Environment Directorate of Punjab and the Central Groundwater Board, Chandigarh, on the state of Punjab’s diminishing groundwater noted that “groundwater extraction has increased from 149% (of naturally available recharge) in 2013 to 165% in 2018, and the state has maximum percentage of wells showing groundwater depletion among all states in India.”112 If Punjab is facing an acute water crisis today, it is because the Punjab government provided the farmers access to free water and free electricity when the Green Revolution was introduced to Punjab by bearing the costs of digging tube wells and waiving the INR 5000 electricity fee of the time to pull power lines to the tube wells without any mechanisms in place to prevent the overexploitation of these resources.113

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Another study published by Greenpeace in 2009 found that 20 percent of the wells in the city of Faridkot in Punjab contain nitrate levels “above the safety limit of 50 mg per litre for drinking water, established by the World Health Organization (WHO).”114 As the report stated, “nitrate pollution in drinking water can have serious health impact on humans, especially for babies and children. The most significant potential health effects of drinking water contaminated with nitrate are the blue-baby syndrome (methemoglobinemia) and cancer.”115A recent study on nitrogen pollution in the wheatand rice-growing states across the country, found that “While nitrate levels in Punjab and Haryana are 94.3 mg/litre and 72.8 mg/litre, WHO mandates it should not be more than 14 mg/litre. Both states recorded a rise in blue baby syndrome cases in the second half of 2017.”116 Moreover, according to the study, while “Nitrogen pollution is caused by various factors like diesel, poultry and growth of cash crops [. . .] around 70 per cent of the pollution is caused by agriculture, mainly [due to the] growth of rice and wheat.”117 Children have been facing the worst impacts of pesticides pollution. A study conducted to determine intoxication in children of Punjab suffering from physical and mental disorders found that their hair samples contain dangerously high concentrations of the heavy metals barium, cadmium, manganese, lead, and uranium, signifying a long-term buildup due to chronic toxicity.118 While Punjab has “done better” than the rest of India along economic parameters, Shiva points out that “Punjab is also the region most seething with discontent, with a sense of having been exploited and treated with discrimination.”119 She adds, “the largest numbers of killings in peacetime in independent India”120 have been in the state of Punjab. As Shiva has observed in much detail, “Science and politics were wedded together in the very inception of the Green Revolution as a strategy for creating peace and prosperity in rural India.”121 Science, then, is not impartial, unbiased, or purely “rational” as Big Ag and governments would have us believe but dictated to and influenced by politics. Shiva clearly states that it is “Through the process of decontextualization [that] the negative and destructive impacts of science on nature and society are externalized and rendered invisible.”122 Throughout the colonial enterprise, science was employed by colonists to justify the superiority of the white man and the savagery of colored races. Science is viewed as related to “the world of facts” and thus scientific knowledge itself was never questioned or identified as the locus of violence.123 Today, sixty years after the implementation of Green Revolution practices in India, as the country suffers from a deepening agrarian crisis, the neoliberal-style of capitalist imperialism which enacted the chemical dependency of developing countries on developed nations needs first to be addressed before any sustainable and long-term local solutions can be made viable. Numerous scientific studies and research projects have identified Punjab’s shift to high pesticide usage

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since the Green Revolution that has leached into the soil and groundwater as the primary cause for the increase in cancer cases in the region. Interestingly, it is also the cotton-growing areas in Maharashtra that are the worst affected by farmer suicides. The problem of the adverse effects of chronic toxicity is not restricted to Punjab. Today, India is facing a severe agrarian crisis which is compelling thousands of farmers and agricultural labourers dependent on agriculture for their livelihoods to commit suicide. The top six states where farmer suicides are the highest are Maharashtra, Karnataka, Andhra Pradesh, Madhya Pradesh, Chhattisgarh, and Telangana, which collectively account for 83 percent of the suicides in the farming sector.124 According to the State of India’s Environment 2021 report, an annual publication by the nonprofit organization Down to Earth, “more than 28 farmers and farm labourers die by suicide in India every day.”125 The reason why farmer suicides are becoming an endemic problem in India is because of “frequent crop failures due to vagaries of monsoons, lack of assured water, and pest attacks and diseases,”126 problems that are the result of the agricultural practices established by the Green Revolution and compounded by weak governmental policies that support the greater privatization of agriculture. As Shiva states, “This high cost system, which neither the farmers nor the nation can afford, is artificially kept afloat with a huge subsidy burden which only benefits the agrichemical corporations selling toxic chemicals.”127 It is estimated that “nearly 70% of India’s 90 million agricultural households spend more than they earn on average each month,”128 as the costs of purchasing seeds and pesticides rises and pushes them toward debt, which is now “the primary reason in more than half of all suicides by farmers nationwide.”129 Since India is a predominantly agrarian economy, much of the population still depends on agriculture for livelihood. India is the second largest agricultural producer and contributes 7.68 percent of the total agricultural output of the world. The agricultural sector contributes about 17.32 percent of India’s gross value added, and more than two-thirds of the country’s population resides in rural areas of which about 58 percent depends on agriculture as their major livelihood.130 Given the centrality of agriculture in India, the production and use of pesticides has been steadily rising since the Green Revolution and the Indian pesticides market is expected to grow at 8.1 percent during the years 2019–2024. Being a low middle-income country, agriculture in India is still dependent on manual labor rather than technology. But in addition to this, most farmers and agricultural laborers are poor which determines their farming practices, but also makes the unregulated use of pesticides more dangerous. In a desperate attempt at recovering costs of inputs, poor farmers are more easily led into trying untested and harmful pesticides, as well as the practice of injecting growth hormones and dye in vegetables and fruit to make them look more

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appealing. The hormonal drug oxytocin and other chemicals are used by many farmers as a way of avoiding the higher costs of fertilizers.131 In questioning the “safety” of pesticides, Rachel Carson had pointed out that “farmers often exceed the prescribed dosages, use the chemical too close to the time of harvest, use several insecticides where one would do, and in other ways display the common human failure to read the fine print.”132 Today, these very reasons are leading to the extensive toxic poisoning of, not only food produce and the population but also India’s air, land, and water. Moreover, most farmers are uneducated and hence ill-equipped to make informed decisions about the “safe” administration of pesticides—overuse and mixing of pesticides is a common problem. The spurious pesticides industry in India is growing and it is estimated that counterfeit pesticides make up 20–30 percent of the pesticides market in developing countries.133 Millions of Indians consume a toxic cocktail of chemicals through contaminated food and water—a country with a very wide gap between the rich and the poor doesn’t protect the rich from the chemical contamination in the vegetables they buy, though they have greater access to healthcare and means for recovery from toxic poisoning. Studies conducted on pesticides residues in various Indian food products found that “fruits, vegetables, poultry and milk are all laced with high pesticide residues—much above the maximum residue limits (MRL) set by the Prevention of Food Adulteration Act of 1954.”134 The study found traces of banned pesticides like “aldrin, chlordane, chlorfenyinfos [sic] and heptachlor”135 as well as DDT in apples, tomatoes, rice, milk, and butter. Sampled food products in India have been found to have much higher pesticide residues of harmful pesticides than sampled food products in the United States.136 Children are uniquely vulnerable to even extremely low-level exposures to chemicals “in utero and in early childhood [which] can result in lifelong disease, disability, premature death, as well as reduced learning and earning potential.”137 Studies have found that pneumonia and diarrheal disease are the major acute diseases linked to early life exposure to environmental pollution, whereas disorders of neuro-behavioral development, adult and pediatric asthma, hypertension, obesity, diabetes, cardiovascular disease, and cancer are the noncommunicable diseases (NCDs) linked to early environmental exposures.138 This is particularly significant in the context of India which had the second highest rate of mortality of children under five years in 2019, principally caused due to “pneumonia, diarrhoea and malaria, along with pre-term birth, birth asphyxia and trauma, and congenital anomalies.”139 India also has one of the highest rates of child malnourishment in the world today, and as Shiva states, nutrition poverty and food poverty are the result of a chemical-based system of agriculture that only produces high-profit crops instead of nutritious crops. But moreover, children in India have also suffered from unintentional exposure to toxic pesticides.

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In 2013, tragedy struck the already acutely dispossessed families of one of India’s poorest and most populous states, Bihar. As confronting images of the immobile, bony bodies of children no older than twelve lying prone on hospital beds or slumped over their grieving parents’ arms filled the television screens of India’s leisurely middle and upper classes, safely ensconced in their cement and brick houses, news outlets began to uncover yet another instance of the general apathy India’s privileged reserve for the plight of the downtrodden. A devastating lapse in regulation of safety and hygiene standards by both the State and school authorities had led to the immediate deaths of twenty-three primary school children and the hospitalization due to severe poisoning of at least a dozen more on consuming a pesticide laden mid-day meal at school. The government of India introduced its ambitious Mid-Day Meal Scheme (MDMS) in 1995 to tackle the two-headed hydra of illiteracy and malnourishment afflicting India’s youngest and most vulnerable population, its children. Since 2001, under the scheme, all government and government-aided primary schools across the nation provide socioeconomically disadvantaged children a hot meal for 200 days at school. On paper, it is a successful means to improve student enrollment, especially of girl children, as well as lift the nutritional standards of primary school children by addressing “classroom hunger.” In reality, however, the quality of these meals has often made headlines across the nation for all the wrong reasons. July 16, 2013, was one such moment. The subsequent media glare and investigation into the matter in the days following the unnecessary and preventable loss of young lives shed light on some unpalatable realities. Ironically, food which was to be the source of nourishment and life by reducing child fatality rates was the very cause of death. Doctors on call at a local hospital in the area told BBC News that the children were brought in with severe congestion in the chest and dilated pupils, as well as a distinctive smell emitting from their bodies, all of which were sure signs of phosphorous poisoning caused by exposure to pesticides. As per news reports, it was suspected that the oil used in cooking the humble fare of rice and potato curry for the children’s mid-day meal at school had been stored in an old container for a widely used organophosphorus insecticide in India, monocrotophos. Shiva has linked biodiversity and farmer freedoms to the overall health of the society, economy, and ecology. As she has pointed out time and again, agricultural health of a nation cannot be delinked from the overall health of a country’s population or its environment. In one sense, then, Shiva has brought Carson’s unfinished project of modern environmental consciousness to the twenty-first century. Carson passed away before she could see the planetary scale of poisoning caused by toxic chemicals, but her observations are perhaps more relevant to the twenty-first century than they were to her own time. It is now that the slow violence of chemical contamination is becoming

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palpable and visible. Shiva’s abundant oeuvre draws the links which render visible the processes of death and dying that toxicity has enabled in nonWestern countries. Toxicity as a chronic state of war works through a logic of “making available to be poisoned” and debilitated people and places already existing on the margins of globalization. As Shiva has put it, the Green Revolution has seeded death instead of seeding freedoms. The case of Punjab is a prime example of the way in which the Western dualistic “image of thought” poisons the entire web of life—it is not only “anti-nature” but “anti-life” itself and Shiva has called this a “war against life.” Punjab’s “form of life” from its society to its bio-ecology has been left in states of ruination and degradation. It calls to mind Carson’s lessons about the entanglement of all life on earth and how poisoning one part of the earth’s complex and interconnected network will have a ripple effect across the entire ecosystem. The Indian government’s “slow governance” of toxic pesticides is leading to ever greater cases of pesticides poisoning among the farming community and in Indian food products. On August 8, 2018, India enforced a phased ban on 18 hazardous pesticides already banned or restricted for use in several countries for decades.140 This delay in regulating the use of harmful chemicals which most adversely affect India’s poorest communities through the indiscriminate, unregulated, and unknowledgeable handling of them, barely scrapes the surface of a much deeper problem of toxic contamination in India. Acts of chronic violence committed through the everyday poisoning of the world’s poorest and most vulnerable communities, particularly when those communities lie outside the developed Western world, draw little attention both within academia as well as in the popular imagination outside of it. This academic blind spot is surprising given that an estimated 5,000–7,000 people die in India every year as a result of accidental pesticide poisoning.141 These numbers do not even begin to account for other toxicity-related deaths and ailments in India numbering in several thousand every year from differing causes, such as farmers and agricultural workers who commit suicide by consuming dangerous pesticides or those members of the population who are more vulnerable to the slow poisoning of their bodies due to their greater proximity and exposure to harmful chemicals, or even those who are consuming a deadly cocktail of chemicals in their everyday lives in concentrations far greater than prescribed “threshold” limits. In this particular case, an initial sixty-six pesticides that continue to be used in India despite being banned, restricted, or withdrawn from use in other countries were reviewed by an expert committee, the Anupam Varma committee, convened by the government of India in 2013. Two years later, in 2015, the Varma committee submitted its report to the government recommending “a ban on 13 ‘extremely hazardous’ pesticides, phasing out of 6 ‘moderately hazardous’ ones by 2020, and review of 27 pesticides in 2018.”142 Despite being the

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largest review of pesticide use in the country to date, only 66 pesticides were reviewed, whereas “activists estimate that at least 104 pesticides licenced for use [in India] have been banned in other parts of the world.”143 Moreover, after a laborious bureaucratic process, which lasted another three years, only eighteen pesticides were finally held up for a complete ban under the newly instituted Pesticides (Prohibition) Order in 2018.144 There was no review of the other twenty-seven pesticides as recommended by the Varma committee according to which manufacturers were required to submit new safety data on these pesticides to the government by December 31, 2017. The deadline passed with no new information forthcoming from either the government or the manufacturers. As one report rightly observed, “The ban, however, does not represent a substantive change in the regulation of pesticide use or even a new development. It is merely the delayed outcome of a process that should have been completed years ago.”145 The flow of spurious pesticides into the market and the illegal use of banned pesticides by poor and illiterate farmers remains a common practice in India’s rural agricultural communities. Of particular interest here is that some of the most hazardous pesticides do not find mention in the recently implemented Pesticides (Prohibition) Order, 2018 and continue to be used in some capacity in India despite their well-documented devastations on both human and other than human life. Monocroptophs, mancozeb, and oxydemetonmethyl are three of the pesticides implicated in the accidental deaths of eighteen farmers in Maharashatra’s Yavatmal district between July to November of 2017 but have escaped mention in the 2018 Order.146 The new Order only bans seven of the eighteen “extremely hazardous” class 1 listed pesticides (based on the acute toxicity of the active ingredient) by the World Health Organization (WHO) still being used in India.147 The well-known insecticide DDT was not mentioned in the 2018 Order. In the twenty-first century, India is a siege of contraries: while on the one hand there is an increasing incidence of diabetes, obesity, and heart disease, on the other hand, it is home to the largest numbers of malnourished and stunted children. Both crises have their roots in the same circle of poison. Notes 1. David Weir and Mark Schapiro, The Circle of Poison: Pesticides and People in a Hungry World (Oakland: Institute for Food and Development Policy, 1981), 3. 2. Ibid. 3. Circle of Poison, directed by Evan Mascagni and Shannon Post (Passion River Films, 2016), documentary. Transcribed by author from the documentary. 4. Weir and Schapiro, The Circle of Poison, 41. 5. Ibid., 3.

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6. Ibid. 7. Vandana Shiva, “Toxic Culture Leads to Destruction of Ecosystem: Vandana Shiva,” The Economic Times, December 28, 2010, https:​//​economictimes​.indiatimes​ .com​/toxic​-culture​-leads​-to​-destruction​-of​-ecosystem​-vandana​-shiva​/articleshow​ /7178285​.cms​?from​=mdr. 8. Vandana Shiva with Kartikey Shiva, Oneness vs. the 1%: Seeding Illusions, Seeding Freedom (Victoria: Spinifex, 2018), 54–55. 9. Ayanthi Karunarathne et al., “How Many Premature Deaths from Pesticide Suicide Have Occurred since the Agricultural Green Revolution?,” Clinical Toxicology 58, no. 4 (2020): 227, DOI: 10.1080/15563650.2019.1662433. 10. Ibid. 11. Ibid., 227. 12. Toby Bonvoisin et al., “Suicide by Pesticide Poisoning in India: A Review of Pesticide Regulations and Their Impact on Suicide Trends,” BMC Public Health 20, no. 1 (2020): DOI: 10.1186/s12889-020-8339-z (italics mine). 13. Wolfgang Boedeker et al., “The Global Distribution of Acute Unintentional Pesticide Poisoning: Estimations Based on a Systematic Review,” BMC Public Health 20, no. 1875 (2020), doi: 10.1186/s12889-020-09939-0. 14. Mascagni and Post, Circle of Poison. Transcribed by author from the documentary. 15. Shiva with Shiva, Oneness vs. the 1%, 4. 16. Ibid., 10–11. 17. Shiva, “Toxic Culture Leads to Destruction of Ecosystem.” 18. Vandana Shiva, Monocultures of the Mind: Perspectives on Biodiversity and Biotechnology (New York: Zed Books Ltd., 1993), 9. 19. Mascagni and Post, Circle of Poison (emphasis mine). Transcribed by author from documentary. 20. Ibid. 21. Swagata Sarkar et al., The Use of Pesticides in Developing Countries and Their Impact on Health and the Right to Food, Report (Belgium: European Parliament’s Committee on Development, January 8, 2021), 1, The Use of Pesticides in Developing Countries and Their Impact on Health and the Right to Food (europa.eu). 22. Mascagni and Post, Circle of Poison. Transcribed by author from documentary. 23. Ibid. Quote by David Weir in the documentary. 24. Shiva with Shiva, Oneness vs. the 1%, 54. 25. Shiva with Shiva, Oneness vs. the 1%, 58. 26. Edmund P. Russell, “‘Speaking of Annihilation’: Mobilizing for War against Human and Insect Enemies, 1914–1945,” The Journal of American History 82, no. 4 (1996): 1508–1509, https:​//​doi​.org​/10​.2307​/2945309. Italics mine. 27. Ibid., 1509. 28. Ibid. Also see, John H. Perkins, “Reshaping Technology in Wartime: The Effect of Military Goals on Entomological Research and Insect-Control Practices,” Technology and Culture 19, no. 2 (April 1978): 169–86, https:​//​doi​.org​/10​.2307​ /3103719; Charlie Smith, “GMO Critic Vandana Shiva Maintains That Biodiversity, Not Monocultures, Will Feed the World,” The Georgia Straight, July 7, 2016, https:​

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//​www​.straight​.com​/news​/730711​/gmo​-critic​-vandana​-shiva​-maintains​-biodiversity​ -not​-big​-pharmas​-monocultures​-will​-feed. 29. Erin Blakemore, “The History of Chemical Weapons Use Goes Back to the Ancient World,” History Stories, history.com, September 1, 2018, https:​ //​ www​ .history​.com​/news​/syria​-chemical​-weapons​-history​-facts​?li​_source​=LI​&li​_medium​ =m2m​-rcw​-history. 30. Russell, “Speaking of Annihilation,” 1505. 31. Shiva with Shiva, Oneness vs. the 1%, 55. 32. Ibid., and see, Tony Bonn, “The Treason of Rockerfeller Standard Oil (Exxon) during World War II,” The American Chronicle, February 4, 2012, https:​//​ia802603​ .us​ . archive ​ . org ​ / 17 ​ / items​ / pdfy​ - eQ​ - GW5bGFH1vHYJH ​ / The ​ % 20Treason ​ % 20Of​ %20Rockefeller​%20Standard​%20Oil​%20​%28Exxon​ % 29​ % 20During​ % 20World​ %20War​%20II​.pdf. 33. Bonn, “The Treason of Rockerfeller Standard Oil (Exxon) during World War II.” 34. Shiva with Shiva, Oneness vs. the 1%, 56. 35. Ibid., 55. 36. Ibid. 37. Ibid. 38. Ibid., 56. 39. Ofer Aderet, “U.S. Chemical Corporation DuPont Helped Nazi Germany Because of Ideology, Israeli Researcher Says,” HAARETZ, May 2, 2019, https:​//​ www​.haaretz​.com​/us​-news​/​.premium​-researcher​-dupont​-helped​-nazi​-germany​-out​-of​ -ideology​-1​.7186636. 40. Ibid. 41. “DDT: (General Fact Sheet),” National Pesticide Information Center, accessed on May 5, 2018, http:​//​npic​.orst​.edu​/factsheets​/ddtgen​.pdf. 42. My use of the words “man” and “mankind” to stand in for “humanity” is deliberate in following the common usage at the time. 43.“DDT is good for me-e-e!,” Time Magazine, June 30, 1946, Phil Allegretti Pesticide Collection, Science History Institute, Image, DDT Is Good for Me-e-e! Science History Institute Digital Collections. 44. Lisa Wade, “DDT Is Good for Me-e-e!,” Sociological Images, The Society Pages, June 27, 2011, “DDT Is Good for Me-e-e!” Sociological Images (thesocietypages.org). 45. Emily, “Dear Mr. Pruitt, Today We Talked about DDT,” Evolution in a Toxic World, toxicevolution.wordpress.com, March 10, 2017, accessed on July 17, 2018, https:​//​toxicevolution​.wordpress​.com​/2017​/03​/10​/dear​-mr​-pruitt​-today​-we​-talked​ -about​-ddt​/. 46. markdcatlin, “DDT—Let’s put it everywhere!,” YouTube, December 20, 2010, video, https:​//​www​.youtube​.com​/watch​?v​=​-UiCSvQvVys. 47. Ibid. 48. While the contemporary use of the term “posthuman” dates back to Ihab Hassan’s essay “Prometheus as Performer: Toward a Posthumanist Culture?” in 1977, followed by Donna Haraway’s classic work of techno-feminist writing “A Cyborg

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Manifesto” (1985) which was pivotal in introducing the concept of the “cyborg” to the humanities, theorizations of “the posthuman” and “posthumanism” only gained momentum in the late 1990s and early 2000s with the publication of N. Katherine Hayles’s How We Became Posthuman (1999), Francis Fukuyama’s “Our Posthuman Future: Consequences of the Biotechnology Revolution” (2002), and spread in the UK through Neil Badmington’s early attempt at tracing the genealogy of posthumanism in his influential book Posthumanism (2000). I therefore consider the late 1990s as the beginning of Posthumanism’s emergence as a critical theoretical concept within academic thought, and ultimately as an academic discipline. This understanding, however, is not to be confused with “posthumanist” tendencies which can be traced within Western liberal humanism itself, and as some theorists have pointed out, as far back as the philosophies of the ancient Greek and Eastern philosophers. 49. Rachel Carson, “The Obligation to Endure,” in Silent Spring (Boston: Mariner Books, 2002), 4. 50. Ibid., 297. 51. My use of “man” and “mankind” to stand in for “humanity” is deliberate in following Carson’s use of the words. I will follow this terminology throughout the chapter. 52. I make use of “Man” with a capital M in alignment with the philosophy of liberal Western humanism in order to highlight a specific Western-centric version of man as human. 53. Carson, Silent Spring, 172. 54. Ibid. 55. Ibid., 237. 56. Ibid. 57. Ibid., 13. 58. Ibid. 59. Linda Lear, introduction to Silent Spring, Rachel Carson (Boston: Mariner Books, 2002), xvi. 60. Carson, Silent Spring, 6. 61. Ibid., 297. 62. Ibid. 63. Ibid., 5. 64. Lear, introduction, xv. 65. Livia Gershon, “Rachel Carson’s Critics Called Her a Witch,” JSTOR Daily, February 21, 2019, https:​//​daily​.jstor​.org​/rachel​-carsons​-critics​-called​-her​-a​-witch​/. 66. Carson, Silent Spring, 222. 67. Ibid., 223. 68. Carson, Silent Spring, 186. 69. Carson, Silent Spring, 6. 70. Ibid., 7. 71. Emily, “Dear Mr. Pruitt, Today We Talked about DDT.” 72. Data from EPA online archives, accessed on February 27, 2020, https:​//​archive​ .epa​.gov​/epa​/aboutepa​/ddt​-ban​-takes​-effect​.html, (emphasis mine).

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73. Claas Kirchhelle, “Toxic Tales—Recent Histories of Pollution, Poisoning, and Pesticides (ca. 1800–2010),” N.T.M. 26 (2018): 217, https:​//​doi​.org​/10​.1007​/s00048​ -018​-0190​-2. 74. Lear, “introduction,” xi. 75. Ibid. 76. Ibid., xiii. 77. Gershon, “Rachel Carson’s Critics Called Her a Witch.” 78. Ibid. 79. Lear, “introduction,” xvii–xviii. 80. Naomi Oreskes and Erik M. Conway, Merchants of Doubt: How a Handful of Scientists Obscured the Truth on Issues from Tobacco Smoke to Global Warming (New York: Bloomsbury Press, 2010), 6. 81. Ibid., 5. 82. Ibid., 6. 83. Ibid., 217. 84. Carey Gillam, “Monsanto Roundup & Dicamba Trial Tracker,” U.S. Right To Know (blog), August 30, 2021, https:​//​usrtk​.org​/monsanto​-roundup​-trial​-tracker​ -index​/. 85. “Monsanto Papers: Secret Documents,” Monsanto Secret Documents, Baum Hedlund, accessed January 8, 2019, https:​//​www​.baumhedlundlaw​.com​/toxic​-tort​-law​ /monsanto​-roundup​-lawsuit​/monsanto​-secret​-documents​/. 86. Ibid. 87. Carey Gillam, “Preface,” in Whitewash: The Story of a Weed Killer, Cancer, and the Corruption of Science (Washington: Island Press, 2017), xiv. 88. Sam Levin, “Revealed: how Monsanto’s ‘Intelligence Center’ Targeted Journalists and Activists,” The Guardian, August 8, 2019, https:​//​www​.theguardian​.com​/ business​/2019​/aug​/07​/monsanto​-fusion​-center​-journalists​-roundup​-neil​-young. 89. Jef Feeley, Tim Loh, and Bloomberg, “Bayer May Pay $10 Billion to Settle Roundup Cancer Cases from Its Monsanto Deal,” Fortune, January 24, 2020, https:​//​ fortune​.com​/2020​/01​/24​/bayer​-pay​-10​-billion​-roundup​-cancer​-cases​-monsanto​/. 90. Jef Feeley and Tim Loh, “Bayer Is Said to Discuss Settling Roundup Claims for $10 Billion,” Bloomberg, January 24, 2020, https:​//​www​.bloomberg​.com​/news​/ articles​/2020​-01​-23​/bayer​-is​-said​-to​-discuss​-settling​-roundup​-claims​-for​-10​-billion. 91. Vandana Shiva, The Violence of the Green Revolution: Third World Agriculture, Ecology and Politics (London: Zed Books Ltd., 1993), 29. 92. Ibid., 30. 93. Ibid., 29. 94. Ibid., 30. 95. Ibid., 31. 96. Ibid., 31–32. 97. Ibid., 33. 98. Ibid., 36. 99. Anju Agnihotri Chaba, “Explained: How Imminent Ban on 27 Pesticides Will Affect Punjab, and What Alternatives Farmers Have,” The Indian Express,

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August 3, 2020, https:​//​indianexpress​.com​/article​/explained​/how​-imminent​-ban​-on​ -27​-pesticides​-will​-affect​-punjab​-and​-what​-alternatives​-farmers​-have​-6536355​/. 100. Vivek Chaudhary, “The Indian State Where Farmers Sow the Seeds of Death,” The Guardian, July 1, 2019, https:​//​www​.theguardian​.com​/global​-development​/2019​/ jul​/01​/the​-indian​-state​-where​-farmers​-sow​-the​-seeds​-of​-death. 101. Jyotsna Singh, “Punjab, Cancer Capital of India,” Down to Earth, February 2, 2013, https:​//​www​.downtoearth​.org​.in​/news​/punjab​-cancer​-capital​-of​-india​-40255. 102. Tejinder Kaur and Anil Kishore Sinha, “The Poisoned Landscapes of Punjab,” India Water Portal, November 21, 2019, https:​//​www​.indiawaterportal​.org​/articles​/ poisoned​-landscapes​-punjab. 103. Vinod Kumar, “Punjab Farmers at Risk of Genotoxic Damage,” The Times of India, February 22, 2021, https:​//​timesofindia​.indiatimes​.com​/city​/chandigarh​/pb​ -farmers​-at​-risk​-of​-genotoxic​-damage​/articleshow​/81142063​.cms. 104. Chaudhary, “The Indian State Where Farmers Sow the Seeds of Death.” See also, Salimah Shivji, “Burdened by Debt and Unable to Eke Out a Living, Many Farmers in India Turn to Suicide,” CBC News, March 30, 2021, https:​//​www​.cbc​.ca​/ news​/world​/india​-farmers​-suicide​-1​.5968086. 105. Sanjoy Majumder, “Why Has India’s Punjab Fallen into the Grip of Drug Abuse?” BBC News, February 2, 2017, Why Has India’s Punjab Fallen into the Grip of Drug Abuse? BBC News. 106. Himanshu, “What Is the Real Problem in Punjab?” Mint, June 15, 2016, What Is the Real Problem in Punjab? | Mint (livemint.com). 107. Divya Goyal, “Punjab: The Invisible Drug Addicts,” The Indian Express, July 4, 2019, Punjab: The Invisible Drug Addicts | India News,The Indian Express. 108. Dipti Jain, “Six Charts That Show the Seriousness of Punjab’s Drug Problem,” Mint, June 23, 2018, Six Charts That Show the Seriousness of Punjab’s Drug Problem | Mint (livemint.com). 109. Anuj Behal, “The Green Revolution and a Dark Punjab,” Down to Earth, July 16, 2020, https:​//​www​.downtoearth​.org​.in​/blog​/agriculture​/the​-green​-revolution​-and​ -a​-dark​-punjab​-72318. 110. Ibid. 111. “Irrigation—Rainfall, Canals, and Tubewells,” Punjab Data, punjabdata.com, accessed June 18, 2019, https:​//​www​.punjabdata​.com​/Agriculture​-In​-Punjab​.aspx​ #Rainfall​-In​-Punjab. 112. Balsher Singh Sidhu, “Groundwater Depletion in Punjab: Time for a Major Policy Overhaul,” Thrive: the Future of Our Food, Water and Environment, Research Program on Water, Land and Ecosystems, accessed January 4, 2020, https:​//​wle​.cgiar​ .org​/thrive​/2020​/06​/04​/groundwater​-depletion​-punjab​-time​-major​-policy​-overhaul. 113. Asit Jolly, “How Punjab’s Green Revolution in the 1960s Changed India Forever,” Mail Online India, August 18, 2017, How Punjab’s Green Revolution in the 1960s changed India | Daily Mail Online. 114. Sean Gallagher, “The Poisoning of Punjab,” Pulitzer Center, September 2, 2014, https:​//​pulitzercenter​.org​/stories​/poisoning​-punjab. 115. Ibid.

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116. Pushkar Banakar, “High Nitrogen Levels Linked to Excess Urea Use,” New Indian Express, March 18, 2018, https:​//​www​.newindianexpress​.com​/ thesundaystandard​/2018​/mar​/18​/high​-nitrogen​-levels​-linked​-to​-excess​-urea​-use​ -1788715​.html. 117. Ibid. 118. E. Blaurock-Busch et al., “Metal Exposure in the Physically and Mentally Challenged Children of Punjab, India,” Maedica: A Journal of Clinical Medicine 5, no. 2 (2010): 102–110, Metal Exposure in the Physically and Mentally Challenged Children of Punjab, India—PMC (nih.gov). 119. Shiva, The Violence of the Green Revolution, 13. 120. Ibid. 121. Ibid., 14. 122. Ibid., 22. 123. Ibid. 124. Rajit Sengupta, “Every Day, 28 People Dependent on Farming Die by Suicide in India,” Down to Earth, September 3, 2020, https:​//​www​.downtoearth​.org​.in​/ news​/agriculture​/every​-day​-28​-people​-dependent​-on​-farming​-die​-by​-suicide​-in​-india​ -73194. 125. DTE Staff, “State of India’s Environment: Why Farmers Kill Themselves,” Down to Earth, February 24, 2021, https:​//​www​.downtoearth​.org​.in​/blog​/agriculture​/ state​-of​-india​-s​-environment​-why​-farmers​-kill​-themselves​-75648. 126. Ibid. 127. Vandana Shiva, “Vandana Shiva: There Is No Reason Why India Should Face Hunger and Farmers Should Commit Suicide,” EcoWatch, August 14, 2014, https:​//​www​.ecowatch​.com​/vandana​-shiva​-there​-is​-no​-reason​-why​-india​-should​-face​ -hunger​-and​-farm​-1882083425​.html​#toggle​-gdpr. 128. Devanik Saha, “Farmer Suicides: 70% of India’s Farm Families Spend More Than They Earn,” Hindustan Times, July 2, 2017, https:​//​www​.hindustantimes​.com​/ india​-news​/farmer​-suicides​-70​-of​-india​-s​-farm​-families​-spend​-more​-than​-they​-earn​/ story​-GKLoObJeDtbH2Z22csJsxK​.html. 129. Ibid. 130. Kiran Pandey and Rajit Sengupta, “State of Agriculture,” in State of India’s Environment 2021: In Figures (New Delhi: Centre for Science and Environment, 2021), 40–45. 131. Madhuri Kumar, “Steroids, Hormones Make Veggies, Fruits Harmful,” Times of India, June 9, 2016, https:​//​timesofindia​.indiatimes​.com​/city​/patna​/steroids​ -hormones​-make​-veggies​-fruits​-harmful​/articleshow​/52677726​.cms. 132. Carson, Silent Spring, 179. 133. Prabodh Krishna, “Agriculture: Some Pest Killers Have Stings,” BusinessWorld, April 17, 2019, http:​//​www​.businessworld​.in​/article​/Agriculture​-Some​-Pest​ -Killers​-Have​-Stings​/17​-04​-2019​-169465​/. 134. Savy Soumya Misra, “Pesticide-Rich Food,” Down to Earth, February 15, 2011, https:​//​www​.downtoearth​.org​.in​/news​/pesticiderich​-food​-32964. 135. Ibid. 136. Ibid.

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137. See “Pollution” infographic, The Lancet Commission on Pollution and Health, October 19, 2017, https:​//​www​.thelancet​.com​/commissions​/pollution​-and​-health; Patricia Wood, “Children & Pesticides,” in The Fight Against Monsanto’s Roundup: The Politics of Pesticides, ed. Mitchel Cohen (New York: Skyhorse Publishing, 2019), 73–74. 138. Philip J. Landrigan et al., “The Lancet Commission on Pollution and Health,” Lancet 391, no. 10119 (February 2018): 11, doi: 10.1016/S0140-6736(17)32345-0. 139. “Children: Improving Survival and Well-Being,” World Health Organization, updated September 8, 2020, https:​//​www​.who​.int​/news​-room​/fact​-sheets​/detail​ /children​-reducing​-mortality. 140. See, Mridula Chari, “India Finally Bans 18 Toxic Pesticides—but Still Leaves Out Several Dangerous Ones,” Scroll.in, August 15, 2018, https:​//​scroll​.in​/article​ /890509​/india​-finally​-bans​-18​-toxic​-pesticides​-but​-still​-leaves​-out​-several​-dangerous​ -ones; Sonam Taneja, “India Bans 18 Pesticides, Has Many More to Go,” Down to Earth, August 16, 2018, https:​//​www​.downtoearth​.org​.in​/news​/agriculture​/india​-bans​ -18​-pesticides​-has​-many​-more​-to​-go​-61405. 141. Chari, “India Finally Bans 18 Toxic Pesticides.” 142. Aditi Nigam, “Ban 13 Pesticides, Phase Out 6 by 2020, Suggest Verma Panel,” BusinessLine, January 19, 2018, https:​//​www​.thehindubusinessline​.com​/economy​ /ban​-13​-pesticides​-phase​-out​-6​-by​-2020​-suggests​-verma​-panel​/article8184796​.ece. 143. Chari, “India Finally Bans 18 Toxic Pesticides.” 144. Of the eighteen pesticides, only twelve were banned with immediate effect on August 8, 2018, while the remaining six have been subject to a gradual phasing-out by December 31, 2020. 145. Chari, “India Finally Bans 18 Toxic Pesticides.” 146. Sonam Taneja, “Why India Continues to Use Lethal Pesticides,” Down to Earth, November 30, 2017, https:​//​www​.downtoearth​.org​.in​/news​/agriculture​/ vidarbha​-s​-toxic​-trail​-59173. 147. Chari, “India Bans 18 Pesticides.”

Chapter 3

Manufacturing Disaster Bhopal as a Regime of Truth

The purpose of this chapter is to provide possible theoretical frameworks through which we can make sense of the 1984 Bhopal gas disaster’s ongoing tragedy where chronic exposure to toxicity has become a form of life for Bhopali gas survivors. This chapter does not seek to recount the legal, scientific, biomedical, and environmental interpretations of the disaster, but instead draws on these resources very selectively with the purpose of addressing the central question: how does the Indian state allow the Bhopal disaster to continue even though it knows the survivors face an intolerable situation? In posing this question as a “how” rather than a “why” question, I am interested in analyzing the governmental logics that enable the state to neglect the plight of the Bhopali gas survivors and get away with inaction on rehabilitating the survivors and cleaning up the contaminated factory site. One possible way to understand the persistence of the disaster even thirty-six years after the event of the toxic gas leak is, I suggest, by turning to Foucault’s concept of “regime of truth.” Contrary to traditional understandings of “truth,” for Foucault, “truth” isn’t “self-evident” and it “isn’t outside power, or deprived of power.”1 In fact, truth is always “produced” and “induces the regular effects of power.”2 In his 1976 interview “The Political Function of the Intellectual,” he therefore defines “regime of truth” as the types of discourse [each society] harbours and causes to function as true; the mechanisms and instances which enable one to distinguish true from false statements, the way in which each is sanctioned; the techniques and procedures which are valorised for obtaining truth; the status of those who are charged with saying what counts as true.3

As “general politics of truth,” regimes of truth are indifferent to the fact of whether statements are “true” or “false” but rather refer to an entire way of 99

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thinking. Given this, the government of India’s regime of truth has allowed it to delegitimize and disavow the experience of the Bhopal gas survivors. In unpacking the manner in which a “regime” is founded, and in taking up that which is excluded—in this case, the “toxic” body of the Bhopali gas survivors—in this constitution, it becomes imperative to closely inspect this process. It is not that there is first a configuration of the regime which is followed ex post facto by certain elements being excluded. This model seems to grant a “closure” and autonomy to the regime, with the equation then being about how the excluded can be brought in. Such a model has serious ramifications for how this operates in language which is geared toward thinking and articulating ways in which the excluded can be incorporated within a newly “all inclusive” regime. Moving away from the simplistic binary of a given inside and a given outside, what happens when we take on board the following question: “How can the excluded be included when the inclusion of the excluded would put into question the Inside?”4 The hegemonic regime’s constitution relies not only on what it foregrounds and includes, but also on what it excludes and forecloses.5 In line with Chakrabarti, Dhar, and Cullenberg, it becomes significant to direct our critical attention to the constitutive inside of the hegemonic as well as its constitutive outside. As they point out in their investigation of the manner in which the global capitalist machine operates, it is “not simply about the expansion of its territory (the camp of global capital or global capitalism) but is fundamentally founded on the foregroundingforeclosure of the third world-world of the third respectively,”6 where the “third world” as a closed and complete-in-itself totality can only emerge with a disavowal of the world of the third. Given this, “for the hegemonic there is no outside. There are only outsiders: figures of destitution waiting to be included into the hegemonic, into third wordlist discourses of need or into the circuits of global capital.”7 Similarly, the “toxic” is not to be seen as an “aberration” which is an unfortunate “consequence” of an otherwise “nontoxic” regime and the Bhopal tragedy was not merely an “accident.” Rather, these constitute essential components of the regime’s makeup, the “truth” of which relies on foreclosing this constituent feature. From this perspective, any counter hegemonic strategy would necessitate a return of the foreclosed, a “reverse gaze” which would not only lay bare the regime’s machinations but also offer “an alternative conceptualization of existing and possible forms of life.”8 The Making of a Disaster By the morning of December 3, 1984, the relatively unknown city of Bhopal, capital of the state of Madhya Pradesh in the very heart of India, had caught the world’s attention, overnight, as the site of the worst industrial disaster

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in human history. As the city reeled from the events of the night, television screens and newspapers across the world displayed horrifying, grainy images of the despair and destruction unleashed by the poisonous gas leak at the Union Carbide pesticide factory in Bhopal: images of the dead and dying lining the city’s streets, of local hospitals overwhelmed by the sheer numbers of those exposed to the deadly combination of toxic gases and of helpless family members crying inconsolably over the corpses of their loved ones. By the 1980s industrial accidents and chemical exposures had already been accepted as part of the postwar landscape of modernity and progress. As Francis Adeola points out, “Man-made disasters involving severe contamination of communities by previously unregulated toxic waste sites and industrial disasters increased during the 1970s and the 1980s with extensive media coverage,”9 among which, most famously, were the toxic contamination of Love Canal (New York), Woburn (Massachusetts), Times Beach (Missouri), and Three Mile Island (Pennsylvania), in the United States, and Seveso, Italy. Yet, the idea that some people and some places “elsewhere” will be poisoned and polluted as the cost of rapid industrialization through techno-scientific advancement under the deeply inequitable relations established by the globalized neoliberal world order had not received much public attention before Bhopal. Over the course of a single night, Bhopal had exposed deep rents in the fabric of normalcy woven by the world-system of neoliberal capitalism— that it rests on a deeply inequitable world order where the burden of toxic risk, pollution, and poisoning is disproportionately borne by the world’s poorest and most vulnerable communities and environments. What had transpired in those early hours of December 3 had uncovered neoliberalism’s double standards. In Rob Nixon’s words, it brought into sharp relief “three defining characteristics of the contemporary neoliberal order”: first, the widening chasm—within and between nations—that separates the megarich from the destitute; second, the attendant burden of unsustainable ecological degradation that impacts the health and livelihood of the poor most directly; and third, the way powerful transnational corporations exploit under cover of a free market ideology the lopsided universe of deregulation, whereby laws and loopholes are selectively applied in a marketplace a lot freer for some societies and classes than for others.10

The disaster at Bhopal was a consequence of this neoliberal ideology which had already been introduced in independent India through the agricultural reforms of the Green Revolution in the mid-1960s. As Chandana Mathur and Ward Morehouse have stated, “it is not always remembered that the Bhopal gas tragedy has its roots in the [Green Revolution] narrative.”11 While the post-1991 period less ambiguously marks India’s emergence as a neoliberal

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state,12 perhaps reading the pre-1991 period, which set the stage for the Bhopal disaster, as embodying a neoliberal ethic requires brief explication. In their essay “Twice Poisoned Bhopal: Notes on the Continuing Aftermath of the World’s Worst Industrial Disaster,” Mathur and Morehouse point out that while India’s formal entry into the liberalized market took place in July 1991, seven years after the Bhopal disaster, “the writing on the wall had been quite clear in the years preceding.”13 As they have argued, “The Indian State’s unwillingness to discourage foreign private investment has been a crucial factor in the continuing injustice in Bhopal.”14 India’s New Economic Policy of 1991 was part of America’s neoimperialist project post the Second World War of which the agricultural reforms instituted by the Green Revolution in India were the first step. The introduction of the Green Revolution in India had effectively begun the process of privatization and deregulation in the country’s agrarian sector. In one sense, then, the agricultural practices of the Green Revolution (introduced in India under pressure from American-backed international bodies such as the World Bank, American foundations such as the Ford and Rockefeller, and the American government) had already installed an “agricultural neoliberalism” by transferring the farmers’ autonomy over the crop to be sown (and thereby control over how best to utilize their land) into the hands of multinational corporations such as Monsanto, Dow, and Syngenta. Therefore, even before India’s New Economic Policy began catering to the demands of business as the official economic policy through “deregulation of private business; privatization of government-owned businesses, trade liberalization, allowing entry of foreign capital to own business in India; tax cuts and other incentives for business, and withdrawal or reduction of meagre government benefits for the poor”15 from 1991 onward, state support for the agricultural sector had largely been eroded by the Green Revolution “except [as] nationalization of the fertilizers and pesticides industry (now mostly denationalized in favor of multinationals like Monsanto or Syngenta) and planning and support of the Green Revolution.”16 It was under these opportune conditions for foreign investment in the agricultural sector introduced by the Green Revolution that the American chemical giant Union Carbide Corporation (UCC) set up its pesticide factory in Bhopal in 1969 to manufacture its star product, the newer and safer replacement for DDT: the insecticide Sevin. As the previous chapter emphasized, one of the central goals of the Green Revolution’s new agricultural system had been to establish a “chemical dependency” of poor developing countries on wealthy industrialized nations and in effect to recolonize the newly independent yet largely agrarian economies of the Global South by controlling their agricultural sector. Due to these artificially created ties of dependency, the Indian government was eager to attract foreign agricultural investment to the point of allowing multinational corporations to circumvent

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Indian laws and regulations and poison the land and indigenous populations with impunity. The free rein to pollute and poison afforded to foreign corporations enabled them to adopt troubling double standards in developing countries, such as lowering the safety standards at their overseas factories while tightly monitoring the safety protocols at the parent factory and carelessly disposing off toxic wastes in open pits exposed to the surrounding ecosystem while adhering to safer and more expensive waste disposal practices in the home country. The government’s attitude of appeasement and protectionism toward multinational corporations had enabled UCC to build its hazardous pesticide factory within two kilometers of the Bhopal railway station and within a kilometer of the tightly arranged and bustling slum colonies. As Sheila Jasanoff states, “Bhopal’s tragedy was as much about the capacity of powerful institutions selectively to highlight and screen out knowledge as it was about maimed lives and justice denied or delayed.”17 Indeed, the toxic event at Bhopal had rendered visible capitalism’s dark reality, its inconvenient truth. It had exposed to the world the otherwise invisible, toiling and faceless multitudes—capitalism’s reserve army of “disposable” populations. In one sense then, the shock that Bhopal generated in those early days was a consequence of being confronted with these faces, these portraits of despair and realizing that those who paid the price for “progress” were in fact vulnerable humans with lives that should be grieved.18 Those populations who became victims of the toxic gas leak from the Union Carbide pesticide factory constituted what Alain Badiou calls the “void” of the prevailing economic and political discourse of neoliberal capitalism. In order to fully grasp the concept of the void, we must turn to a definition of “situation” within which a void exists. As a pluralist, Badiou understands reality as multiple, inconsistent and infinite, not as unified or self-organizing.19 A situation emerges from this wider reality of multiples, as “sets or groupings” of multiples that are “counted for one”20 or simply, taken as one unit. Furthermore, every situation consists of “elements that are counted as ‘belonging,’ in contradistinction to those that are not.”21 Peter Hallward explains this idea further, “Every situation . . . has its ways of authorizing and qualifying its members as legitimate members of the situation: the void of such a situation includes whatever can only be presented, in the situation, as utterly unqualified or unauthorized. It is precisely these unqualified or indiscernible capacities that make up the very being of the situation.”22 For Badiou, then, the void is the “unpresentable of presentation”23 or in simpler terms, the “unnamed” and the “unthought” of a situation: that which is not counted as belonging to the dominant order of things, and yet is fundamentally constitutive of that order. As Badiou explains in Ethics, “at the heart of every situation, as the foundation of its being, there is a ‘situated’ void, around which is organized the plentitude (or the stable multiples) of the situation in question.”24 The

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void, therefore, occupies the space of exclusion, the outside of the prevailing sociopolitical reality which is still inside a situation. That is to say, the void is the constitutive inside that is seen as outside. Now, in what sense do the Bhopali gas-affected populations constitute the void? As the marginalized communities who provide low paying, daily wage labor to mainstream society, those who were poisoned by the gas leak formed an integral part of society but were not treated as “full citizens” and occupied the space of the disinherited, excluded part of the dominant order. It is hardly surprising that the Bhopal disaster most severely affected the lives of already disadvantaged communities. As S. Ravi Rajan points out, disasters “are but extreme manifestations of embedded structures of environmental and societal violence.”25 That discrimination predates disaster26 was exemplified in the case of Bhopal. The identities of the gas survivors preceding the disaster, as caste and religious minorities, had made them “disproportionately vulnerable to catastrophe.”27 The fact that they had already been marked out as disposable populations before the disaster exponentially increased their risk of exposure by being deprived of the basic infrastructures necessary for safety, health, recuperation, and survival. As Bhopal demonstrates, disasters do not create patterns of injustice and inequality but trace onto preexisting structures of discrimination. The event of the toxic leak foregrounded the reality that for these marginalized communities cohabitation with toxicity had been an everyday reality. In her book The Right to Maim: Debility, Capacity, Disability, Jasbir Puar argues, “Biopolitics deployed through its neoliberal guises is a capacitation machine; biopolitics seeks capacitation for some as a liberal rationale (in some cases) or foil for the debilitation of many others.”28 That capitalism and mainstream society’s excluded part had erupted so suddenly and unexpectedly on to the global stage called into question the prevailing sociopolitical order from an ethical and political standpoint. Bhopal had given a face to the exploitation engendered by Western models of industrialization and technoscientific advancement under global capitalism: “What is the price of progress? Bhopal” and “Who pays the price for progress? Bhopalis.” For a moment, there was a sense that business as usual was no longer possible, that a radical upheaval was at hand, that the existing structure which made the rich richer on the backs of the world’s poorest and most downtrodden, which allowed industry to pollute, contaminate, poison, and intoxicate with impunity will be dismantled. Indeed, for a moment, Bhopal seemed to open up a space for the impossible.

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Manufacturing “Devitalized Bodies” In the very early hours of the cold, wintery morning of December 3, 1984, a few minutes past midnight, over forty metric tons of the highly toxic gas methyl isocyanate (MIC) along with an array of other poisonous gases leaked from the negligently maintained Union Carbide India Ltd. (UCIL) pesticide manufacturing plant in Bhopal, India, a subsidiary of the American multinational chemical company Union Carbide Corporation (UCC) based in Danbury, Connecticut, United States. Methyl isocyanate was a central compound used in the manufacture of Carbide’s “miracle” pesticide Sevin, part of the Green Revolution initiative introduced in India in the mid-1960s, and was known as “liquid dynamite” by Carbide insiders owing to its highly volatile and unstable nature. Moreover, it was also known by Union Carbide’s scientists and top management that MIC could be fatal if inhaled. For these reasons, company policy dictated that MIC should never be stored in large quantities and should be manufactured only as needed. However, as a result of the decline in the demand for pesticides and fertilizers by debt-ridden Indian farmers after two decades of the Green Revolution’s chemical and mechanized agricultural system, the Union Carbide India Limited (UCIL) plant in Bhopal had been written off by the parent company UCC (which was still the seventh largest chemical company in the world in 1984) as an unprofitable venture due to its inability to sell Sevin. Even though the MIC formulation unit at the Bhopal factory had the capacity to manufacture 5,250 tons of MIC-based pesticides per year, by 1984 UCIL was running at a loss, barely producing 1,657 tons as a result of flagging demand for pesticides in the Indian market.29 As even the existing stocks of the insecticide had become impossible to sell, the factory was storing a backlog of unused liquid MIC in three large underground tanks. Since October 26, 1984, production at the factory had been halted and UCC’s senior management had begun the process of dismantling the decommissioned Bhopal plant in order to set up a new factory in a more profitable country. As a result of this, the Bhopal plant had been left in a state of disrepair and all six of the safety mechanisms installed on the factory premises to prevent a catastrophe from occurring became a casualty of these cost-cutting measures. This was a critical failure of decision-making by the management, given that a large quantity of a highly unstable and extremely toxic substance like MIC was being stored at the factory against clearly dictated company policy. On the night of the disaster, there was a total of sixty-three tons of liquid MIC—that a German chemist from Bayer had described as a “real atomic bomb right in the middle of the plant”30—stored across three large underground tanks in clear defiance of a UCC company manual which mandated that no tank should ever be filled to more than half

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its capacity and one tank should always be empty in case of emergencies. As Dominique Lapierre and Javier Moro have documented in Five Past Midnight in Bhopal, tank 610 was almost full with forty-two tons of MIC, tank 611 contained twenty tons, and tank 619, which should have been empty in case of an accident concerning the two other tanks, contained one ton of MIC.31 The accumulation of these oversights and poor decisions led to the series of events which would torment the people of Bhopal for decades to come. When at 11 p.m. on the night of December 2, water began leaking into tank 610 from a rusty pipe and resulted in a violent exothermic reaction, there was no spare tank to transfer the contents of tank 610 in order to contain the reaction. And, since the safety mechanisms were inoperative, there was no way for the factory workers to prevent or limit the expulsion of the deadly reaction from the factory into the open air or warn the nearby densely inhabited settlements. As the poisonous cloud drifted downwind of the factory, it enveloped the bastis (slum colonies) of the poorest communities in Bhopal living in densely packed and poorly insulated make-shift hutments in close proximity to the pesticide factory, only a few hundred meters away. These slum colonies, that included Jaiprakash Nagar (J.P. Nagar), Chola Kenchi, Kazi Camp, and Arif Nagar among others, located in the poorer northern part of Bhopal in the old city, were closest to the pesticide factory and hence the worst affected by Carbide’s deadly gases. The poisonous gas leak precipitated what has often been described as “the Holocaust of industrial accidents” among already dispossessed people who belonged to the lowest rungs of India’s deeply segmented society along caste and religious lines. As either lower-caste Hindus or poor Muslims, these communities were predominantly employed as daily wage laborers in low-paying, insecure, and unsafe working conditions. In her book Surviving Bhopal, Suroopa Mukherjee sketches a profile of these “marginal” communities residing in the old city who found themselves directly in the path of the poisonous cloud: A large section of this population consisted of first/second generation immigrants, who had come from villages in the neighbouring districts, because the chances of earning their livelihood from the land was severely jeopardized by development schemes that introduced more mechanized forms of agriculture. Most of these people earned their living in daily wages for hard, physical labor. The women who belonged to the minority community (Muslims formed 35 percent of the population) did piece-rate work from inside their homes and lived lives in purdah within the strict confinement of their families.32

Being born into the “wrong” caste or the “wrong” religion had already condemned most of the gas-affected communities to a life of hardship, struggle, and misery, before they ever encountered the gas. A 1998 report published

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by Bhopal People’s Health and Documentation Clinic, better known as the charitable trust, Sambhavna Clinic, stated that “Over 70% of the exposed population has been in the unorganized sector, with people earning subsistence wages through day labor or petty trade.”33 In recounting her life before the Carbide leak, Rashida Bee, a gas survivor, presents a picture of poverty and destitution that was only compounded by the irreversible and deadly effects of the gas: From the age of ten, I used to roll beedis [cigarettes] along with the other women in the family, and we used to earn Rs. 2 [0.028 USD by today’s rates] for rolling thousand beedis. Many a time there was not enough food for two meals in a day. I was barely twelve when I was married off to a tailor who came from an equally poor family. I had to continue rolling beedis, otherwise my in-laws refused to give me food. Five years later I had a son who died soon after, because we did not have enough money for his treatment.34

Rashida Bee’s testimonial sheds light on the multiple forms of violence that scaffold and structure the daily lives of poor and marginalized communities. In her book Affliction: Health, Disease, Poverty, Veena Das describes such forms of everyday violence as constituting “the kind of suffering that is ordinary, not dramatic enough to compel attention.”35 This concept of violence as an everyday, ordinary struggle has perhaps been most cogently theorized by Rob Nixon through the notion of “slow violence.” Resting on such theorizations, I offer the term “devitalized bodies” in order to signpost the ways in which certain sections of the population are always already marked out for illness, injury, and even death. Through the concept of devitalized bodies, I find an effective metaphor to capture the state of chronic violence which defines the quotidian existence of the lower castes and Muslim religious minorities in India, to which the survivors of the Bhopal disaster belong. The reason for coining this term is, in part, to counter disturbing trends in the emerging literatures of posthumanism, new materialism, and object-oriented ontology (OOO) which give undue weight to inanimate objects over the subtracted animacies of certain humans. Margaret Davies accurately registers the point in her essay “Material Subjects, Vital Objects,” when she says, “Not only are human subjects objectified and commodified in a multitude of ways, but objects are frequently fetishized, personified, anthropomorphised and valued well over the least powerful subjects.”36 Jasbir Puar, in her book The Right to Maim, takes up the refrain by drawing attention to this selective interest in the inanimate within posthumanism in saying that “Objects are vaunted unless they are humans who are considered objects (slaves, ‘vegetables’).”37 In this context, the concept of “devitalized bodies” or people as things tracks the making “nonvital” of certain bodies. In other words, in order to make

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certain social groups “available to be poisoned,” they need to be constituted as “devitalized bodies,” as those who lack agency and autonomy. However, the concept of “devitalized bodies” does not mean that such communities are passive victims of governmental subjection. On the contrary, the Bhopal gas survivors have consistently resisted and contested the forms of subjectivity imposed on them by the government, whether it be that of helpless “victims” or a “threat” to the progress of the nation. Many other women who were later exposed to the poisonous Carbide gas lived lives of precarity and desperation similar to Rashida Bee’s. Most had never worked outside their homes. Rolling beedis in the privacy of the home, no matter how exploitative, was one of the few options available to women who were forced to observe purdah according to traditional religious and social norms. Moreover, most of the women belonging to these communities, like Rasheeda Bee, had never been to school. Along with poverty, the shackles of illiteracy bound these communities in ties of dependency to an oppressive state apparatus that exploited their labor for material gain while in exchange allowing them to carve out their livelihoods in spaces of illegality. As already displaced persons, migrants from India’s villages to her urban centers in search of jobs and a better life, these marginalized communities were often forced to become squatters on government land, invariably without legal access to basic amenities like electricity, drinking water, and sanitation. Without proper documentation or even the means of attaining such documentation, the threat of eviction loomed large in their daily horizon of struggles. But crucially, for these disenfranchised inhabitants of Bhopal’s old city the denial of avenues for attaining knowledge that was definitional of their identities as lower castes, adivasis (India’s indigenous tribes), and poor Muslims had also foreclosed the possibility of gaining knowledge/information about matters unrelated to their daily struggles of survival. Most of the poor residents of the old city had no idea what the Carbide factory produced and many had never heard the name of Union Carbide despite living in the vicinity of the factory. In short, they had no means to perceive the imminent danger lurking just a few feet away. For them, the only dangers that had to be contended with in their everyday lives were starvation, homelessness, joblessness, debt, domestic violence, illness, and exploitation. Reading the ritual and material levels of contamination together in “devitalized” bodies brings forth new understandings of the multilayered disadvantages at work in the case of the Bhopal gas tragedy survivors. The lower caste and outcaste “nonagential” and “devitalized” bodies suffered further dispossession when severe health problems resulting from toxic exposure led to life-long disabilities. Moreover, the site of the gas tragedy, even thirty-six years later, remains contaminated with harmful toxins that continue to pollute the soil and groundwater which is consumed by the gas survivors living in

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the surrounding slums. The absence of government efforts to decontaminate the environment can be explained by the fact that those who suffer as a result of such intoxication are the bodies who have already been marked “disposable,” as available for maiming. For American philosopher Judith Butler, “An ungrievable life is one that cannot be mourned because it has never lived, that is, it has never counted as a life at all.”38 Bhopal’s gas survivors, as “devitalized bodies” are ungrievable lives because according to the caste hierarchy of “humanness,” they are only seen as “half-lives,” and therefore as lives that do not matter. As Butler states, “Only under conditions in which loss would matter does the value of the life appear. Thus, grievability is a presupposition for the life that matters.”39 ‌‌‌‌ These were the communities, neglected by the state and society, who awoke in a poisonous gas chamber, coughing, convulsing, and struggling to breathe as the lethal MIC, a “tearing agent,” seared their eyes, throats and lungs. The pain was excruciating. “Each breath felt as if I was breathing in fire,”40 remembers Aziza Sultan, a gas survivor. To Champa Devi Shukla, another survivor, “it felt like somebody had filled our bodies up with red chillies, tears coming out of our eyes, our noses were watering, we had froth in our mouths.”41 As in the time prior to the gas disaster, illiteracy and a lack of access to information proved formidable enemies of the poor in the aftermath of the leak. The gas spread over an area of approximately forty square kilometers, seriously afflicting those five to eight kilometres downwind of the factory which primarily included the slum dwellings of the old city.42 When the gas descended on their bastis, the poor inhabitants of the affected slums had no idea what it was or how to save themselves. Rashida Bee recalls waking up that night to a burning sensation in her eyes and thinking that someone in the neighborhood was burning chillies.43 Union Carbide had not bothered to give the local communities safety protocols to follow in case of an emergency, as it had done for the neighborhoods surrounding its sister plant in Institute, Virginia. The government, for its part, had not bothered to ensure that Carbide had met the safety standards. In a blind haze and choking from the poisonous gas, terrified families poured out onto the streets to escape the gas chamber. On every street of the old city, chaos, panic, and mayhem reigned. Some people were vomiting, others lay unconscious, yellow froth issuing from their mouth and still others had their own excreta and urine running down their legs. Pregnant women suffered spontaneous miscarriages on the street, “losing their unborn children as their wombs opened and bled out.”44 In the stampede that ensued, entire families were separated from one another, and many were simply trampled to death in the narrow alleyways which had become death traps. Since methyl isocyanate is heavier than air, the dense toxic cloud settled close to the ground and poisoned nearly every

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life form it encountered—animals, birds, humans. Even the trees and vegetation turned yellow and withered. About 200,000 children were seriously impacted as their shorter stature meant that they inhaled greater quantities of MIC. Within hours the streets were littered with dead bodies of people and animals, precisely “790 buffalo, 18 bullocks, 84 calves, 270 cows, 483 goats, 90 dogs, and 23 horses (Varma, 1986).”45 Unfortunately, such precision with data was not forthcoming in the calculation of the number of human deaths. As Ahmed Khan, a resident of Bhopal, recalls, “Mothers didn’t know their children had died, children didn’t know their mothers had died and men didn’t know their whole families had died.”46 In their blind panic, many abandoned members of their family in an effort to save their own lives by clambering on to any mode of transportation they could find—bullock carts, trucks, cars, scooters—to get as far away from the gas as they possibly could. From 1:15 a.m. onward, poisoned people began pouring into Bhopal’s 1,200-bed Hamidia Hospital which proved grossly inadequate when, by 2:30 a.m., it was confronting 4,000 patients of an unknown poisoning.47 In those initial hours nobody, including the doctors and nurses, knew which gases had escaped from the factory and so the doctors began symptomatic treatments for the victims, which continue to be the main course of treatment today. When Union Carbide officials issued an official response to the news of the gas leak, instead of enacting emergency protocols and quickly disseminating life-saving information about the gas, they chose to spread misinformation calling MIC harmless and telling hospitals that it was “like tear gas and could be treated with oxygen, antacids, and water washing of eyes.”48 By morning, Bhopal was, as India Today magazine described it, “a city of death.”49 In 1984, the population of Bhopal was nearly one million and of that over half a million people, that is more than half the city, had been exposed to the cocktail of poisonous gases. For the overworked and understaffed doctors and nurses, maintaining proper documentation and records of all the deaths and illnesses, the symptoms and causes presented an impossible task. The Madhya Pradesh government’s emergency response system was so deficient that the army had to be called in to aid with the health emergency that arose in the aftermath of the leak. As rotting, distended corpses began piling up on the streets and the hospital grounds began to be used as open graveyards, the threat of disease became imminent, and the disposal of the corpses became the top priority of the city’s administrative services. This sense of urgency resulted in “countless unnamed victims [being] hastily buried in mass graves and cremated on huge pyres. Indian army trucks transported corpses to forests and rivers and dumped them there or took them for mass burial in other cities.”50 Faced with this monumental task, those charged with the disposal of the corpses had no time to check for signs of life. Sunil, who was a child at the time of the disaster, remembers waking

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up “to find himself in a pile of corpses in a town about 20 miles [thirty-two kilometres] away from Bhopal. He was lucky not to be burned alive.”51 Until today, the actual number of deaths and injuries remains unknown because entire families and communities had perished without anyone to give an account of their names or who they were.52 But also because those who were worst affected belonged to the poorest sections of society and did not possess the required identity documents, neither for themselves nor for the deceased family member, to present as proof of whom they had lost for the purposes of official record-keeping. These “undocumented” citizens of the state who had been forced to carve out a living on the fringes of society and of the law, in the aftermath of the gas leak had also become “unrepresentable” victims of the disaster. Moreover, those who had died after fleeing Bhopal city and even those who had managed to survive after fleeing the city but continued to suffer life-long gas-related ailments were never counted as part of Bhopal’s gas-affected population. Nonetheless, arriving at close estimates of the death toll and the number of injuries was crucial for determining the extent and severity of the disaster, and based on which reparations would be made to the survivors and their families. Unfortunately, the precise death toll became a point of intense contestation between survivors’ groups, the government of India, and UCC, and remains so to this day. Volunteer organizations aiding the gas survivors estimate that about 8,000 people had died in the first seventy-two hours following the leak and about 15,000 people died in the first week. These figures are more reliable estimates based on the testimony of municipal workers and volunteers who were charged with disposal of corpses, the number of funeral shrouds that were sold, and the amount of firewood that was used for cremation in the aftermath of the leak. Mohammed Karim, who drove a municipal waste-disposal truck, was one of the people tasked with shifting corpses from the city to disposal sites. According to him “at least 15–20,000 people died in the first few days,”53 and if his estimates are an accurate representation of the loss of lives, as many as 20,000 people might have died in the first few days itself. Testimonies such as his are vital for arriving at the realization that the real number of deaths most likely far exceeded the conservative estimates given by the survivors’ organizations: Many bodies were burnt unidentified—Muslims were burnt and Hindus were buried. [Following religious rites, Muslims should be buried and Hindus burned after death.] . . . We would fit 120 bodies in one truck and this we would fill and empty five times a day. There were eight trucks on duty [so that is 4,800 bodies a day]. It carried on for exactly the same intensity for three to four days, and after 12:00 am the military took over.54

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Along with accounting for these “unidentified” and “unclaimed” bodies, we must also make allowances for there being a modicum of truth to “rumours” of the kind Kim Fortun has documented, “that the police had started dumping bodies in the river in a conspiratorial effort to hide the devastation.”55 This would not be too far-fetched given the government’s interest in manipulating the “truth.” Of those who survived, over 100,000 had suffered severe long-term multisystemic damage, causing lifelong illnesses, injuries, and disabilities. But the persistence and presentness of the decades-old tragedy is most keenly felt in the case of the third generation of children born in the gas-affected communities, who suffer from all manner of birth defects and cognitive disabilities. Yet even the conservative estimates put forth by the survivors’ organizations were dismissed by UCC and the government of India. In fact, both profoundly underrepresented the figures of deaths, injuries, and illnesses related to the gas leak. UCC, unsurprisingly, was only interested in protecting its interests and paying as little compensation as it could get away with. It therefore claimed that only 3,800 deaths had resulted from the leak. For its part, the government of India also chose to protect its own interests by protecting UCC, and therefore claimed that 5,295 people had died. The Second Poisoning Thirty-six years later, the toxic legacy of Bhopal continues in what has been called the “second disaster” and the “second poisoning,” generated in the aftermath of the MIC leak. In the intervening years, neither the government of India nor Union Carbide Corporation (or Dow Chemicals which bought UCC in 2001) has offered the survivors adequate compensation for social and medical rehabilitation or taken steps toward the remediation of the defunct pesticide factory site which has continued to leach toxic chemicals into the surrounding soil and groundwater, slowly poisoning the communities for whom the heavily contaminated groundwater is the only source of water. Today, forty-two communities surrounding the factory site are officially recognized by the Supreme Court of India as impacted by the toxic effluents in the soil and groundwater, with another six settlements having been identified as affected since 2019.56 Every year, the survivors organize a public protest against the government of India and Dow Chemicals on the anniversary of the disaster, accusing them of evading their responsibility toward the gas-affected communities and for failing to give them justice. Even today the story of Bhopal stands as an exemplary case of the consequences of neoliberal globalization which places profits over people and lends legitimacy to “toxic colonialism” as “good business sense,” while the ongoing “slow genocide” of the victim survivors goes unnoticed by the government, India’s elites, and even

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the media. In their paper of the same title, Martha Cottam et al. define “slow genocide” as “the emotional and physical harm done to survivors of violence over time that leads to extreme hardship and premature death for many. The emotional and physical harm resulting from witnessing or participating in violence and the continuing experiences of living in unsafe and violent communities, perpetuates a cycle of violence that oftentimes affects multiple generations.”57 For the gas survivors, the initial event of toxic exposure set in motion “a cycle of violence” by delimiting the body’s capabilities, or, in Deleuze and Guattari’s terminology, the range of what a body can do and thereby pushing the incapacitated body out of the marketplace as productive labor. The body’s entanglement with toxicity has resulted in loss of income, driving thousands of families to the brink of chronic starvation and debt, and devastating the entire “form of life” of these communities. But more than this, the survivors and their children carry the body burden of a double poisoning, from the gas leak and the poisoned land and water, which forecloses possibilities for recovering states of health and well-being as the repeated exposure to toxic chemicals from the land and water constitute a recurring poisoning. According to gas survivors’ organizations, in the years since the disaster at least 25,000 people have died owing to health complications incurred due to toxic exposure to the gas, and approximately thirty people continue to die every month as a result of illnesses contracted due to their exposure to the deadly gas. As Satinath Sarangi of the Sambhavna Charitable Trust states, “Because these people are poor or from a minority or lower caste no one seems to care. Their lives and their children are being sacrificed for the cause of industrial progress.”58 The continued neglect of Bhopal’s gas survivors by the state is because “The Bhopal disaster was asking for rehabilitation of a section of society that was already entrenched in poverty and with whom the rest of the city had arrived at an uneasy truce.”59 The Bhopal Gas Disaster Did Not Take Place The question of “why” the disaster occurred in the first place and its consequent legal, medical, and socioeconomic repercussions have commanded ample academic as well as popular attention. Over the years, these questions have inspired an entire “archive of suffering,”60 as Pramod Nayar has called it, through films, documentaries, books both fiction and first-person accounts of “that night,” children’s books, photography series, and numerous reports by the media and non-governmental as well as international organizations aiding the survivors. And yet, the alarming reality of the persistence of the disaster raises one overwhelming question, which rather surprisingly has not received much critical consideration in academic scholarship on Bhopal even

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though it is repeatedly posed in popular discussions of the disaster: How is the disaster allowed to perpetuate? Or, in other words, how does the ongoing poisoning of the Bhopali gas survivors continue even thirty-six years after the event of disaster? How has a state that proclaims to ensure the welfare of its citizens in its Constitution neglected the well-being of the “victims” of the “world’s worst industrial disaster”? An effective way of framing a response to this question, but one which has escaped theorization thus far, is to say that Bhopal’s disaster continues because in one sense, neither the government of India nor UCC (or Dow Chemicals) have acknowledged the “disaster” as having occurred in the first place. While on the face of it such a response might sound needlessly provocative, let us try approaching the matter from another angle by briefly giving flight to our imagination and asking instead, “What would an acknowledgement of Bhopal’s disaster by the government of India and UCC look like? Or, what would it have meant to prevent the second disaster of Bhopal?” In such a scenario, first and foremost, ensuring justice for the gas survivors would have meant that the government of India, in its “protective” role as parens patriae, should have placed the welfare of its citizens before the welfare of UCC. Even before settling the matter of compensation for the survivors, the government of India would have had to produce an honest assessment of the numbers of deaths and injuries as well as the extent of those injuries in alignment with the realistic figures given by survivors’ organizations and volunteers. In conjunction with this preliminary analysis of the numbers of deaths, injuries, and illnesses, the government would have required a full disclosure of Carbide’s internal research about MIC’s toxicity to and long-term health effects on humans: research that Carbide had undertaken before the Bhopal factory began manufacturing MIC and research that it has consistently refused to disclose to the government of India or external health experts and researchers under the excuse of “trade secrecy.” Compensation to the survivors and their families for temporary and permanent damage to health would have to be based on such extensive and thorough research. But more than this, the compensation amount would have had to account for intergenerational and future harm encompassing both gas-affected future generations as well as premature and untimely deaths through the sudden eruption of health complications arising from the slow poisoning of MIC exposure. Future and intergenerational harm was never factored into the “full and final” out-of-court settlement of USD 470 million reached between the government of India and UCC in 1989. According to the government’s initial compensation suit against UCC, filed in the US federal court in April 1985, the compensation amount demanded by the government of India on behalf of the victims was USD 3 billion. If anything, realistic estimations of the numbers, intensity, and long-term effects of the damage resulting from MIC toxicity in the body would have only pushed this initial

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figure up. To put this into perspective, activists fighting for the rights of the survivors claim that in view of “the lasting and widespread health impacts felt by hundreds of thousands in the city”61 the amount of compensation required today would be close to USD 8.1 billion. Added to this cost of bodily harm would have to be the cost of remediation for environmental harm, another factor that was excluded from the clandestine out-of-court settlement of 1989. The government of India would have had to include, in the final compensation amount, the real cost of environmental remediation of the factory site and the areas surrounding it where the toxic effluents leached by the factory’s solar evaporation ponds have been carried by the groundwater over the decades. To arrive at an estimation of the intensity and scale of environmental contamination would have required rigorous scientific research and analysis. Equally importantly, of course, the government of India would have to criminally prosecute UCIL, UCC, UCC’s then chief executive officer (CEO) Warren Anderson, and the eight Indian senior management of UCIL, all of whom would have to be held responsible for jeopardizing the intergenerational lives of an entire city. That Warren Anderson, who was arrested on his arrival to Bhopal on December 7, 1984, was allowed to return to the United States a couple of hours after his arrest aided by senior members of the Indian government and later died in comfort in his home in the United States in September 2014, without ever having been tried or sentenced for his crimes in a court of law, has been a particularly hard reality for the gas survivors to come to terms with given that their own suffering seems unending. And finally, the government would not only have to introduce tightened regulations governing industrial safety and disaster management but also implement those laws strictly and without exception. That Bhopal’s gas survivors and the organizations representing them have been demanding these very conditions be met by the government of India for the last thirty-six years as reparations for grievous harms incurred without acknowledgment from the government lends further credence to the position that Bhopal’s toxic tragedy continues because the government of India has not considered the Bhopal gas disaster as having taken place. Undoubtedly, pursuing “justice” for the Bhopali survivors would have meant that the government would have risked alienating foreign investment in the Indian economy by other transnational corporations as well. As a developing country that was on the verge of joining the “free market” as part of the global circuit of neoliberalism in 1984, truly acknowledging Bhopal as the “worst industrial disaster in the world” would have meant jeopardizing the growth of India’s economy in favor of the health and growth of the population. Quite tellingly, the government of India and UCC have sought to “manage” the aftermath of the disaster through the lens of an “accident” instead of a “disaster,” which serves to dilute intentionality and nullify the questions

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of “blame” and responsibility. It was with the aim of deflecting responsibility from the parent company, soon after news about the disaster received international attention, that UCC adopted what has been called the “sabotage theory,” which it continues to maintain to this day despite being unable to provide any admissible proof to substantiate the claim. In an attempt at absolving themselves of blame, UCC’s senior management claimed that the gas leak was the result of a deliberate act of sabotage by a disgruntled employee who had recently been fired from the Bhopal plant. For its part, the government of India agreed to dismiss all present and future criminal liabilities accruing to UCC in the Bhopal case as part of the terms of the 1989 settlement. Had the event of the toxic leak and its aftermath been approached as a human-made disaster, it would have elicited a markedly different response, one where the reality of grievous harm to life would have demanded punishment equal to the crime as a first point of order. Clearly, acknowledging that the disaster did in fact take place by taking responsibility for the remediation of the environment and rehabilitation of the poisoned communities would have been a much costlier affair than allowing it to continue. Therefore, as I have argued here “the Bhopal gas disaster did not take place” insofar as the steps needed to ameliorate the suffering of the gas survivors and mitigate the environmental and epidemiological damage caused by it were never undertaken by a government that has refused to acknowledge the severity of the disaster in dismissing it as “accident.” In this sense, we can say that Bhopal’s toxic legacy continues because for the government of India and the UCC the Bhopal gas disaster did not take place. The aftermath of Bhopal gave birth to robust and resilient survivors’ activist organizations which have received immense support and funding from the international public space. Furthermore, in the aftermath of Bhopal, several new legislations governing industrial process safety and risk management were introduced in India and the United States. In response to Bhopal, the Emergency Planning and Community Right to Know Act (EPCRA) was passed in the US Congress in 1986, which focuses on the two main goals of emergency planning and response for chemical accidents and the public’s right to know of toxic threats in their neighborhoods via effective and timely reporting of incidents as well as dissemination of important information regarding health and safety protocols.62 Bhopal as a Regime of Truth This section will claim, rather controversially and contra existing theorizations of Bhopal, that the ongoing “slow genocide” of the gas survivors is not an accident or oversight by an overwhelmed state machinery and neither is

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it evidence of a failed state. Furthermore, while endemic state corruption, growing apathy of the state toward the poor, and bureaucratic inefficiency are most frequently proffered as reasons to explain Bhopal’s unending tragedy, these must be read as symptoms of the prevailing sociopolitical rationality and not as its causes. In and of themselves, these reasons do not go far enough in helping us understand the means by which a modern democracy like India can justify the ongoing suffering of Bhopali survivors. Indeed, why hasn’t the government of India been able to alleviate the suffering of the victims despite instituting an entire governmental department dedicated to managing the aftermath of the gas disaster? Foucault’s notions of biopolitics and governmentality will be instructive here in unpacking the specific “logics” of government or rather the governmental reason that not only allows the suffering of the gas survivors to continue but also simultaneously normalizes the situation. The question we need to ask is, under what conditions and with what effects are the already marginalized Bhopal gas survivors exposed to chronic toxic violence? Analyzed thus, the continuance of Bhopal appears as the deliberate production of, in an inversion of Foucault’s “abilities-machine,”63 “dis-ability machines” by a ruthlessly calculative and rapidly neoliberalizing biopolitical governmental machinery. The normalization of Bhopal’s ongoing disaster effectively renders the victims invisible in terms of effective legal measures and policy directed toward protecting their well-being, but also in terms of an erasure from collective public memory such that it is only on the occasion of the anniversary of the gas disaster that the media, the state, and the public awaken to the plight of the victims, whereas they are forgotten for the rest of the year. In other words, of primary concern here are the techniques of governance by which such a forgetting and erasure are effected by the sociopolitical machinery of the state. A disaster of this magnitude which has resulted in the loss of thousands of lives and permanently debilitated many more should be seen as an exceptional situation, a national tragedy, provoking the governmental machinery to expedite the rehabilitation and welfare of the gas survivors, but it is not; it should elicit feelings of shock and outrage among national publics willing to take strident action to demand justice on behalf of the survivors, but it does not. Instead, as we know by now, the government’s reaction to the disaster in the intervening thirty-six years has been contrary to “what is expected of it” and what counts as “good governance.” A significant element for the successful functioning of a debilitating biopolitics of toxicity is the complicity of the dominant class. If the aim of government, according to Foucault, is to control populations by directing their conduct to a “convenient end,”64 then the Indian state has repeatedly attempted to make the gas survivors “governable” by transforming them into “victims” in the eyes of the state. Giving them this “governable

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identity” has enabled the government and Dow Chemicals to achieve a “convenient end.” In the Bhopal case, the government of India established itself as the official representative of the gas survivors for all legal purposes as parens patriae (legal protector), and thereby reduced the gas survivors to juridical silence. A victim, according to French philosopher Jean-François Lyotard, is not just someone who has been wronged, but someone who has also lost the power to present this wrong. But more importantly, disempowerment of the victim “is signalled by [the] inability to prove. The one who lodges a complaint is heard, but the one who is a victim, and who is perhaps the same one, is reduced to silence.”65 As Lyotard argues, “It is in the nature of a victim not to be able to prove that one has been done a wrong.”66 The legal means to prove the wrong done to them was taken away from Bhopal’s gas-affected populations by the Indian government. This point is crucial in approaching an understanding of how the Indian government can unleash a slow genocide on its poorest citizens, to which the gas-affected of Bhopal belong, in order to protect the interests of one of the richest corporations in the world and yet, to borrow Arundhati Roy’s turn of phrase, “emerge smelling sweet,”67 or, in other words, maintain the legitimacy of its right to govern. State-sanctioned violence and killing is justified through narratives of the state’s protection of life. In the immediate aftermath of the gas disaster, as early as March 1985, the government of India enacted the Bhopal Gas Leak Disaster (Processing of Claims) Act, 1985 through which it gave itself the sole power to represent the gas-affected populations in civil litigation against Union Carbide Corporation. The constant demand for “proof” of their exposure to the toxic gas by both the government of India in order to provide compensation, as well as by the UCC in a bid to avoid admission of wrongdoing, and furthermore not providing medical records of treatment and illness to the poisoned populations takes away their means to signify the wrong they have suffered and hence consigns them to silence in legal matters. Since the gas is an invisible threat, without medical records detailing the effects of exposure on health, in the eyes of the law, the causes and effects of illnesses among gas-affected populations are clouded by ambiguity and thereby open to (mis)interpretation. Bhopal has always raised the question of “the too much and the too little”68 of government. Insofar as Bhopal consistently frames the problem of governance and regulation by foregrounding the question of the role of government in the “management” of toxicity, it becomes a problem of governmentality. What Foucault encourages us to think about is what constitutes “good” government. In this context, Foucault’s question needs to be more precisely framed as, “what is the level of toxicity governments are ready to accept or tolerate as acceptable?” That is, we can approach an understanding of what counts as good governance by considering, in this instance, the degree to which the government is prepared to tolerate toxicity. Unfortunately, in

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reviewing the case of Bhopal, it is clear that the Indian government is willing to tolerate the extensive and intergenerational poisoning of people and the environment, so long as it can protect its own interests as business interests. The government’s approach to the management of the Bhopal disaster has only been through a cost-benefit analysis, that is, from an economic perspective. Indeed, the foremost question for the government of India in responding to the disaster has been, “how much will this cost the state?” However, as Ian Buchanan points out, there is no reason in principle why the economy should be the only measure of government. Certainly, “there are other ways we could evaluate government as various social, environmental, and juridical report cards have tried to do.”69 While on the face of it, the lack of effective policy and the failure of legislature to remedy the body burden of prolonged illness, injury, and death borne by the victim survivors and their children or to punish the perpetrators of this chronic violence, or even to decontaminate the site of the factory seems to suggest an absence or even abandonment of governance and any notion of a biopolitical management of the population. On the contrary, the question of whether biopolitics is an effective prism through which to understand the persistence of the Bhopal gas disaster is not at issue. That Bhopal’s ongoing poisoning can only be explained as the machinations of a biopolitical regime instead of the workings of a sovereign state is first and foremost evidenced by the government’s repeated declarations of concern for the welfare, life, and health of the exposed communities, even as it engages in forms of control which make these communities “available to be poisoned.” That forms of death and dying are packaged as life, health, and security under biopolitical forms of social control is central to Foucault’s conceptualization of the biopolitical regime. Furthermore, the gas-affected populations and the nongovernmental organizations representing them have repeatedly accused the Indian government of “neglecting” its duty to its citizens, of being a corrupt and apathetic government and prioritizing corporate interests over the interests of its own people. Indeed, there is an expectation that the government should, rather must intervene in the life of its citizens—that it must uphold its contract of care by fulfilling its duty to govern. The survivors of the 1984 Bhopal gas tragedy mark the anniversary of the world’s worst industrial disaster by holding an annual protest outside the walls of the now defunct and decaying pesticide plant. Every year the gas survivors organize a protest against the government of India and Dow Chemical (which bought Union Carbide Corporation in 2001) for evading their responsibility toward the gas-affected. And yet, the soil and groundwater around the factory remain contaminated with toxic effluents, and a fourth generation of congenitally deformed children continue to be born to gas-affected mothers. However, there is a shift

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in the strategies as well as quality of biopolitical management of Bhopal’s “devitalized bodies.” One way of theorizing what went wrong with the disaster management of the Bhopal leak is to recognize that the government of India and UCC’s management of the disaster was through the establishment of, what Foucault has called, a “regime of truth.” According to Foucault, “the regime of veridiction [or truth], in fact, is not a law (loi) of truth, [but] the set of rules enabling one to establish which statements in a given discourse can be described as true or false.”70 In other words, he describes it as “the constitution of a particular right (droit) of truth on the basis of a legal situation, the law (droit) and truth relationship finding its privileged expression in discourse, the discourse in which law is formulated and in which what can be true or false is formulated.”71 In this respect, a regime of truth constitutes one of the techniques used by governments to maintain hegemony. The primary mode by which the Indian government established a regime of truth was by, as Rob Nixon has noted, contesting the science of damage which “further compounds the challenge, as varied scientific methodologies may be mobilized to demonstrate or discount etiologies, creating rival regimes of truth, manipulable by political and economic interests.”72 One case in point, as Rahul Mukherjee notes in his essay “Toxic Lunch in Bhopal,” is the “scientific” risk assessment report released by governmental scientific institutions, the Defense Research and Development Establishment (DRDE) and the National Environmental Research Institute (NEERI) which suggested, in mocking the claims of the victims that the environment around the factory site on which they have been forced to live is contaminated, that “the effects of the chemicals found in the factory’s vicinity were benign.”73 It is within the frameworks of doubt, unknowability, and misinformation that the biopolitical state produces debilitation. In this context, I want to suggest that the governmentality of toxicity, at its core, functions by different modes of governmentality than usually recognized in the vast literature on the concept. In his recent article, “What Type of Governmentality Is This? Or, How Do We Govern Unknowns,” Robert D. Smith offers a reappraisal of the notion of biopolitical governmentality in the present moment of the global coronavirus pandemic and notes that “Part of the state’s production of power can be intentionally foregoing measuring populations or measuring inaccurately.”74 Smith continues, Key to the concept of biopolitics is measurement, and principally measurement of the population and the non-human when it is co-constitutive of the population. Within measurement there is the assumption that data is 1) comprehensive and 2) accurate. However, this assumption is not always true within biopolitics;

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part of the state’s production of power can be intentionally foregoing measuring populations or measuring inaccurately.75

​​​​​​​ Such an analysis is borne out by numerous studies of developmental governance in non-Western developing countries. For instance, Akhil Gupta’s study of the biopolitics of poverty in India demonstrates the ways in which approximations and absences in practices of enumeration and census-taking from poor population groups is more common than accuracy. The primary tactic of ambivalence in “measuring” the population as a way to regulate it is precisely what is left unaccounted for in the analyses of the Indian government’s response to the disaster. Measuring, in the case of toxicity, is “neither comprehensive nor accurate” and often, entirely absent. I suggest that this lack of accurate data and the deliberate production of the “unknown” is itself a “tactic” employed by the neoliberal developmental state to “manage” certain population groups. By producing unknowns and unknowables of a section of the population that is in “excess,” the state enacts a form of “slow governance” and ensures the healthful continuation of the dominant population. But furthermore, this ambivalence of measuring is not restricted to the realm of the populace or the social, but it is also the evacuation of the regular technologies of governance from the realm of “things” in so far as they affect/co-constitute the population, in this case toxicity. Such a system is only productive if sites of toxic threat, and thereby exposure to “toxicity,” are strategically located near the neighborhoods of the marginalized. In India then, governmentality is often most effective in those instances when it is seemingly entirely absent. The governmental tactic of manipulating data, whether it be through the presentation of alternative facts, a contestation of existing facts or the absence of facts, is another method employed by the state in building what Foucault called, the “savoir” or “knowledge of the state.” Based on the data generated and presented by such means, the state has continued to formulate responses to the ongoing suffering of the gas-affected, most often by using “scientific evidence,” to disavow the legitimacy of the lived experience of Bhopali gas survivors. The problem of reliable data is one that has plagued the Bhopal disaster since its inception and has been one of the central challenges to demanding affirmative action and justice. In her anthropological research of Bhopal, Veena Das attests to the challenges of accurate data for an actionable politics, “I also realized that anthropological evidence of the kind that could be used for serious advocacy on such issues as sanitation, healthcare, or everyday forms of violence was simply not available. Even in the legal case against Union Carbide in the Bhopal disaster, we (a loose configuration of activists) were stumped by the fact that we could not show what the morbidity patterns were among the poor under normal

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circumstances—so our claim that the increased morbidity among the poor as a result of exposure to methyl isocyanate was not easy to demonstrate in court.”76 Living with Bhopal’s Toxic Legacy In the immediate aftermath and the years following the disaster, the Indian government passed several laws to ensure better standards of industrial safety and limit the possibility of future disasters. These can be summarized as: (1) Bhopal Gas Leak Disaster (Processing of Claims) Act (1985), (2) The Environment (Protection) Act (1986), which created the Ministry of Environment and Forests (MoEF), (3) criminal liability provisions of the Environment Protection Act, (1986), (4) The Factories Act, 1948 (Amended in 1987) (5) The National Environment Appellate Authority Act (1987), (6) The Hazardous Wastes (Management and Handling) Rules (1989), (7) Manufacture, Storage and Import of Hazardous Chemicals (MSIHC) Rules (1989), (8) The Public Liability Insurance Act (1991), (9) The National Environment Tribunal Act (1995), (10) Chemical Accidents (Emergency Planning, Preparedness and Response) Rules (1996), (11) provision in Chemical Accidents Rules (1996), and (12) National Green Tribunal Act (2010).77 And yet, if asked “Has Bhopal taught the nation how to ensure industrial safety?,”78 one need only glance at the state of India’s environment in the twenty-first century and the frequency with which industrial accidents continue to mar the landscape of contemporary India to realize that the answer is a resounding no. The political “mishandling” of the Bhopal case has set a troubling precedent in India for the repetition of industrial poisoning of marginalized communities and their environments by industry with impunity. What escapes public attention is that since Bhopal, fatal industrial accidents have become endemic to the landscape of India. While for developed countries fatal industrial disasters might properly be considered a thing of the past, “exceptional” events requiring urgent intervention, India continues to suffer “little Bhopals” daily. In India, occupational “accidents” and injuries remain part of the tacitly accepted terms of operation of hazardous industries like the chemical industry even thirty-six years after Bhopal. As recently as May 7, 2020, another deadly gas leak claimed the lives of twelve people while more than 1,000 fell sick after styrene gas leaked from the LG Chemical’s (a Korean chemical company headquartered in Seoul, Korea) plant near the city of Visakhapatnam in the southeastern state of Andhra Pradesh. Styrene, a colorless, oily liquid, is most commonly used to make plastics and rubber which are then used in the manufacture of a variety of products that support our modern lifestyles.

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But if inhaled, styrene gas can “cause cancer and neurological damage. It can also harm reproduction and its impacts may go unnoticed for years after exposure.”79 Unfortunately, this was not an isolated event—thirty-six years after Bhopal, industrial “accidents” continue to be an everyday reality affecting the lives and livelihoods of thousands of people in twenty-first-century India. Some of the other major gas-related industrial disasters in twenty-first century India are as follows: the 2014 Gas Authority of India Ltd. (GAIL) pipeline blast in the East Godavari district of Andhra Pradesh, which claimed at least fifteen lives and injured over forty others. In the same month in 2014, another industrial accident was reported, this time related to the Bhilai Steel Plant in Chhattisgarh’s Durg district where six people lost their lives and over forty were injured due to leakage in a methane gas pipeline. Then in 2017, around 470 schoolchildren were hospitalized after inhaling poisonous fumes from a chemical leak at a container depot near two schools in Delhi, the country’s capital city. More recently in 2018, nine people were killed and fourteen injured due to a blast, once again, at the Bhilai Steel Plant.80 According to data on industrial accidents from 2014–2016 released by the Labour and Employment Ministry of India, forty-seven factory workers are injured and three die in industrial accidents every day. This means fatal industrial accidents occur every day in India as per data from 2014–2016. The total loss of lives for those three years amounted to 3,562 workers while 51,124 were injured in accidents that occurred in factories across the country.81 Quite evidently, safety standards for industry have not been tightened within India since Bhopal. If anything, industrial “accidents” have become so routinized today that they fail to elicit public outrage or even garner national attention and concern. According to a report on hazardous wastes released in 2019 by the Central Pollution Control Board, India’s central pollution control and monitoring agency, India has 134 contaminated hazardous sites and another 192 “probable” contaminated hazardous sites, which includes seven sites around the abandoned Union Carbide plant in Bhopal.82 In the three years from 2015 to 2018, the country on an average recorded over four major chemical accidents every month and reported a total of 152 chemical plant accidents that injured over 1,100 people.83 However, as Gopal Krishna of the Delhi-based nonprofit organization ToxicsWatch importantly points out, “The 152 recorded accidents are underestimated as most cases go unregistered.”84 Even more pressingly, it was only in 2018 that India finally, and with reluctance, banned carbaryl Sevin, the insecticide that was being produced by the Union Carbide factory in Bhopal. But methyl isocyanate (MIC), responsible for the ongoing debilitation and deaths of thousands, has still not been banned by the Indian government and continues to be used in the country to make polyurethane, a form of plastic.85 India’s proposed national chemical policy has been pending

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in Parliament since 2012 and the country lacks a comprehensive law that regulates chemical use, production and safety.86 Surprisingly, “India still does not have an exhaustive inventory on the chemicals being used and their associated risks”!87 In addition to the ongoing issue of accidents and the lack of a comprehensive regulatory framework governing chemical substances, the chemical industry in India produces 7.7 million tons of hazardous waste every year and of this “over 100,000 tonnes of waste is not disposed [properly, but] kept inside the [industrial] units” that produce them.88 India’s National Chemical Management Profile states that the “weakest factors” plaguing the proper management of the chemical industry are the lack of “inspection, vigilance and public awareness.”89 Today, India’s thriving chemical industry contributes about 3 percent to the country’s gross domestic product (GDP) and is set to expand to a USD 304 billion industry by 2025 from the current USD 163 billion.90 It is clear, given the regulatory failures, that this uninhibited growth of the sector will only lead to more Bhopal-like events. And unfortunately, since those who are most severely affected by such toxic events are the ones belonging to the “devitalized” sections of Indian society, those who are already seen as disposable, whether due to their caste, religion, class, gender, or some combination of these factors there is little hope that governmental action to safeguard communities and environments will be forthcoming with any sense of urgency. In his essay, Edward Broughton observes that while “the Bhopal disaster could have changed the nature of the chemical industry and caused a re-examination of the necessity to produce such potentially harmful products in the first place,”91 it has not. As the previous chapter demonstrated, hazardous pesticides continue to lead to thousands of farmer deaths every year in the country. Indeed, “Bhopal and its aftermath were a warning that the path to industrialization, for developing countries in general and India in particular, is fraught with human, environmental and economic perils,”92 yet India has not heeded this warning and continues down the self-destructive path of slow poisoning. While the name “Bhopal” has become synonymous with the “world’s worst industrial disaster” and is likened to a holocaust of industrial accidents, the everyday holocausts suffered by the poor and marginalized community of survivors receives little attention both in the media and the collective public imagination. And perhaps the recurrence of little Bhopals across the country gestures to the need for a better understanding of the sociocultural and political structures which continue to nourish not only the myriad little Bhopals but the ongoing tragedy of “that night.”

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The Birth of “Corpo-politics”? In conclusion, I will suggest another way of approaching the problem of the ongoing disaster in Bhopal. As this chapter has demonstrated, producing knowledge of the “unknown” and “unknowable” or even relying on forms of unknowledge whereby the state shirks its responsibility of providing care to the population has been part of the biopolitical governance of toxicity in response to the poisoning of devitalized bodies. Over the past thirty-six years, the gas survivors and the organizations fighting for their rights have repeatedly blamed the government for “ignoring” and “neglecting” the right of gas survivors to rehabilitation and justice. The fact that Bhopal’s poison gas survivors continue to fight for compensation, medical aid, cleanup of the environment, and punishing the perpetrators is seen as a “failure” of the Indian government. In this sense, what the survivors are demanding is greater government intervention in their rehabilitation, not less. In other words, they want the government to fulfill its responsibility of care toward its citizens by intervening in their lives, rather than neglecting their health and welfare. By producing accurate knowledge about the long-term health effects on gas-affected populations and the degree of soil and groundwater contamination in the forty-two affected localities, the government will be seen as validating instead of delegitimizing the lived experiences of the gas survivors. Yet, the overarching question that underlies an analysis of biopolitical modes of governmentality is, “how much government interference into the lives of populations is desirable?” Upon examining the case of Bhopal and new techniques of biopolitical governance adopted by the Indian government toward Bhopal’s gas-affected, I do not believe the answer to the question can be decided prior to context. Whether we make an argument for a withdrawal of biopolitics (as a negative power) or an intensification of it (as a positive and productive power), what requires attention is the state’s protection of corporations over people. Foucault’s untimely demise in 1984, the same year the Bhopal gas tragedy occurred, meant that his project of biopolitics and governmentality remained unfinished. However, if biopolitics takes the population as its object, as the basis on which it is formed and through which it functions, then the case of Bhopal seems to suggest the emergence of a new political power which does not take the population as its object of operation, but rather corporations. This new form of political power concerns itself with “optimizing the life of corporations” and is invested in the cost-benefit analysis of the economy insofar as it is a part of the global market. Populations are important in their co-constitution with corporations, the role they play in prolonging the financial health of corporations and in this sense, become secondary to

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corporations. The primary role of the neoliberal postcolonial state is redefined as managing corporate health and well-being by calculating the growth of the economy as a result of direct investments by various organizations. With the advent of neoliberalism, the task for biopolitics should be to protect populations from the profit driven motives of industry. To “optimize the life” of populations in the age of global neoliberalism, a biopolitics 2.0 needs to replace its target of “control” from populations to corporations. In repeated interviews, Bhopal’s gas survivors have made the same complaint about the government’s collusion with industry and its repeated efforts at safeguarding the interests of Dow Chemicals instead of ensuring the health and welfare of its population. Notes 1. Michel Foucault, “The Political Function of the Intellectual,” Radical Philosophy 17 (1977): 13. 2. Ibid. 3. Ibid. 4. Anjan Chakrabarti, Anup Dhar, and Stephen Cullenberg, World of the Third and Global Capitalism (Delhi: Worldview Publications, 2012), 1. I am indebted to Neerav Dwivedi for drawing my attention to the work of Chakrabarti, Dhar and Cullenberg. 5. Chakrabarti, Dhar and Cullenberg, World of the Third, 3. 6. Ibid., 33. 7. Ibid. 8. Ibid., 4. 9. Francis O. Adeola, “Sociology of Hazardous Wastes, Disasters, and Risk,” in Hazardous Wastes, Industrial Disasters, and Environmental Health Risks: Local and Global Environmental Struggles (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011), 4. 10. Rob Nixon, Slow Violence and the Environmentalism of the Poor (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2011), 46. 11. Chandana Mathur and Ward Morehouse, “Twice Poisoned Bhopal: Notes on the Continuing Aftermath of the World’s Worst Industrial Disaster,” International Labor and Working-Class History, no. 62 (Fall 2002): 69, https:​//​www​.jstor​.org​/stable​ /27672806. 12. The form that neoliberalism has taken is India is not directly comparable with American neoliberalism. 13. Mathur and Morehouse, “Twice Poisoned Bhopal,” 69. 14. Ibid. 15. Raju J. Das, “The Dirty Picture of Neoliberalism: India’s New Economic Policy,” Links International Journal of Socialist Renewal, April 11, 2012, http:​//​links​ .org​.au​/node​/2818. 16. Saheli Chowdhury, “Farmers’ Protests in India: Fight of a People Against Neoliberalism’s Killing Machine (Part 1),” Orinoco Tribune, online news outlet,

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December 28, 2020, https:​//​orinocotribune​.com​/farmers​-protests​-in​-india​-fight​-of​-a​ -people​-against​-neoliberalisms​-killing​-machine​/. 17. Sheila Jasanoff, “Bhopal’s Trials of Knowledge and Ignorance,” Isis 98, no. 2 (June 2007): 344, https:​//​doi​.org​/10​.1086​/518194. 18. There is a stress on “should be” because the question of whether their lives “are” grieved is a point I will take up later in the chapter. 19. David R. Brockman, “A Crash Course in Alain Badiou’s Philosophy,” in No Longer the Same: Religious Others and the Liberation of Christian Theology (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011), 146. 20. Ibid., 147. 21. Ibid. 22. Ibid., 147. 23. Alain Badiou, Being and Event, trans. Oliver Feltham (London: Continuum, 2007), 57. 24. Alain Badiou, Ethics: An Essay on the Understanding of Evil, trans. Peter Hallward (London: Verso, 2013), 68. 25. S. Ravi Rajan, “Toward a Metaphysic of Environmental Violence: The Case of the Bhopal Gas Disaster,” in Violent Environments, eds. Nancy Lee Peluso and Michael Watts (New York: Cornell University Press, 2001), 380. 26. Nixon, Slow Violence, 59. 27. Ibid., 59. 28. Ibid., xviii. 29. Suroopa Mukherjee, Surviving Bhopal: Dancing Bodies, Written Texts, and Oral Testimonials of Women in the Wake of an Industrial Disaster (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2010), 18. 30. Quoted in Dominique Lapierre and Javier Moro, Five Past Midnight in Bhopal: The Epic Story of the World’s Deadliest Industrial Disaster (New York: Warner Books, 2002), 241. 31. Ibid., 241. 32. Mukherjee, Surviving Bhopal, 2–3. 33. The Sambhavna Trust Clinic, a charitable organization that provides free medical care to those poisoned by Carbide and conducts independent epidemiological and environmental research on the long-term effects of the disaster. Quoted in Mathur and Morehouse, “Twice Poisoned Bhopal,” 70. 34. Mukherjee, Surviving Bhopal, 85. 35. Veena Das, Affliction: Health, Disease, Poverty (New York: Fordham University Press, 2015), 4. 36. Margaret Davies, “Material Subjects, Vital Objects—Prefiguring Property and Rights for an Entangled World,” Australian Journal of Human Rights 22, no. 2 (2016): 41. 37. Puar, The Right to Maim, 26. 38. Judith Butler, Frames of War: When Is Life Grievable? (London: Verso, 2010), 38. 39. Ibid., 14.

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40. Qtd. in “Reliving ‘That Night,’” International Campaign for Justice in Bhopal, online coverage, accessed November 13, 2018, https:​ //​ www​ .bhopal​ .net​ /what​ -happened​/that​-night​-december​-3​-1984​/reliving​-that​-night​/. 41. Ibid. 42. Anil Agarwal, “35 Years of Bhopal Gas Tragedy: Anil Agarwal on What Happened That Fateful Night,” Down to Earth magazine, December 3, 2019, https:​//​www​ .downtoearth​.org​.in​/news​/environment​/35​-years​-of​-bhopal​-gas​-tragedy​-anil​-agarwal​ -on​-what​-happened​-that​-fateful​-night​-68232. 43. Akshai Jain, “Their Story Is the Story of Bhopal,” www​.livemint​.com, November 23, 2009, https:​//​www​.livemint​.com​/Home​-Page​/NF2hSpGZJ5HWUVY1nsrRsK​ /Their​-story​-is​-the​-story​-of​-Bhopal​.html. 44. “Reliving ‘That Night,’” International Campaign for Justice in Bhopal, online coverage, n.pag, accessed November 13, 2018, https:​//​www​.bhopal​.net​/what​ -happened​/that​-night​-december​-3​-1984​/reliving​-that​-night​/. 45. Daya R. Varma and Shree Mulay, “Methyl Isocyanate: The Bhopal Gas,” in Handbook of Toxicology of Chemical Warfare Agents, ed. Ramesh C. Gupta (London: Academic Press, 2015), 292. 46. “1984: Hundreds Die in Bhopal Chemical Accident,” On This Day 1950–2005, BBC News, December 3, 1984, http:​//​news​.bbc​.co​.uk​/onthisday​/hi​/dates​/stories​/ december​/3​/newsid​_2698000​/2698709​.stm. 47. Agarwal, “35 Years of Bhopal Gas Tragedy.” 48. Kim Fortun, Advocacy after Bhopal: Environmentalism, Disaster and New Global Orders (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 2001), 164. 49. Varma and Mulay, “Methyl Isocyanate: The Bhopal Gas,” 287. 50. “The Death Toll,” International Campaign for Justice (ICJB), accessed September 4, 2018, https:​//​www​.bhopal​.net​/what​-happened​/that​-night​-december​-3​-1984​ /the​-death​-toll​/. 51. Ibid. 52. Ibid. 53. Ibid. 54. Ibid. 55. Fortun, Advocacy after Bhopal, 165. 56. Joe Jackson, “Ongoing Spread of Contamination and Roadmap to Remediation,” in “Bhopal’s Endless Disaster in the Time of Covid-19,” YouTube, Webinar on thirty-sixth anniversary of Bhopal Gas Tragedy by The Bhopal Medical Appeal, December 3, 2020, https:​//​www​.youtube​.com​/watch​?v​=apdy7OzVKlE​&t​=18s​&ab​ _channel​=TheBhopalMedicalAppeal. 57. Martha Cottam, Joe Huseby, and Faith Lutz, “Slow Genocide: The Dynamics of Violence and Oppression in Refugee Camps and American Ghettos,” CORE (December 11, 2014): 2, https:​//​web​.archive​.org​/web​/20160220191747​/http:​//​libarts​.wsu​.edu​ /isic​/research​/pdf​/slow​-genocide​.pdf. 58. Randeep Ramesh, “True Legacy of Bhopal Disaster Comes to Light,” Mail & Guardian, May 5, 2008, https:​//​mg​.co​.za​/article​/2008​-05​-05​-true​-legacy​-of​-bhopal​ -disaster​-comes​-to​-light​/. 59. Mukherjee, Surviving Bhopal, 84.

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60. Pramod K. Nayar, “Introduction: Bhopal, Disaster, Precarity,” in Bhopal’s Ecological Gothic: Disaster, Precarity and the Biopolitical Uncanny (New York: Lexington Books, 2017), xiii. 61. Adam Withnall, “Bhopal Gas Leak: 30 Years Later and after Nearly 600,000 Were Poisoned, Victims Still Wait for Justice,” Independent, February 14, 2019, https:​//​www​.independent​.co​.uk​/news​/world​/asia​/bhopal​-gas​-leak​-anniversary​-poison​ -deaths​-compensation​-union​-carbide​-dow​-chemical​-a8780126​.html. 62. “Lessons of Bhopal: 25 Years Later, U.S. Chemical Laws Need Strengthening,” Centre for Effective Government, November 24, 2009, https:​//​www​.foreffectivegov​ .org​/node​/10585. 63. Michel Foucault, “17 January 1979,” in The Birth of Biopolitics: Lectures at the Collège de France 1978–1979, ed. Michel Senellart, trans. Graham Burchell (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2010), 229. 64. Michel Foucault, “Governmentality,” in The Foucault Effect: Studies in Governmentality, eds. Graham Burchell, Colin Gordon, and Peter Miller (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1991), 95. 65. Jean-François Lyotard, The Differend: Phrases in Dispute, trans. Georges Van Den Abbeele (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1988), 10. 66. Ibid., 8–9. 67. Arundhati Roy, “The Greater Common Good,” in My Seditious Heart: Collected Non-Fiction (UK: Hamish Hamilton, 2019), 36. 68. Foucault, The Birth of Biopolitics, 28. 69. Ian Buchanan, “Biopolitics, Discipline and Governmentality,” Unpublished Chapter, 2021. 70. Foucault, The Birth of Biopolitics, 35. 71. Ibid. 72. Nixon, Slow Violence, 47. 73. Rahul Mukherjee, “Toxic Lunch in Bhopal and Chemical Publics,” Science, Technology, & Human Values 41, no. 5 (2016): 850–51, DOI: 10.1177/0162243916645196. 74. Robert D. Smith, “What Type of Governmentality Is This? Or, How Do We Govern Unknowns,” Somatosphere: Science, Medicine, and Anthropology, May 26, 2020, http:​//​somatosphere​.net​/2020​/governmentality​-covid19​.html​/. 75. Ibid. 76. Das, Affliction: Health, Disease, Poverty, 5–6 (italics mine). 77. Rajkumar S., “Safety Security and Risk Management—Aftermath Bhopal Disaster,” International Journal of Biosensors & Bioelectronics 2, no. 6 (June 2017): 181, https:​//​medcraveonline​.com​/IJBSBE​/IJBSBE​-02​-00044​.pdf. 78. “New Laws Were Written,” Down to Earth, July 15, 2010, https:​ //​ www​ .downtoearth​.org​.in​/coverage​/environment​/new​-laws​-were​-written​-1457. 79. Hannah Ellis-Petersen et al., “Hundreds Exposed to Gas after Deadly Leak at Indian Chemical Factory,” The Guardian, May 8, 2020, https:​//​www​.theguardian​ .com​/world​/2020​/may​/07​/gas​-leak​-at​-chemical​-factory​-in​-india​-kills​-hospitalises​-lg​ -polymers; Hannah Ellis-Petersen et al., “Factory Behind India gas Leak Operated Illegally until 2019,” The Guardian, May 11, 2020, https:​//​www​.theguardian​.com​/ world​/2020​/may​/11​/indian​-chemical​-factory​-behind​-deadly​-gas​-leak​-was​-operating​

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-illegally.; “India Gas Leak: Culpable Homicide Charges after 11 Die,” BBC News, May 8, 2020, https:​//​www​.bbc​.com​/news​/world​-asia​-india​-52586999. 80. Correspondents, “It’s Not Just Vizag and Bhopal: Past Major Gas Leaks in India,” Outlook magazine, May 7, 2020, https:​//​www​.outlookindia​.com​/website​/story​ /india​-news​-its​-not​-just​-vizag​-and​-bhopal​-past​-major​-gas​-leaks​-in​-india​/352243. 81. Radheshyam Jadhav, “3 Workers Die, 47 Are Injured Every Day in Factory Accidents,” The Hindu Business Line, February 26, 2019, https:​ //​ www​ .thehindubusinessline​.com​/companies​/3​-workers​-die​-47​-are​-injured​-every​-day​-in​ -factory​-accidents​/article26378544​.ece. 82. Vivek Mishra, “Lethal Landscape,” Down to Earth, January 9, 2020, https:​//​ www​.downtoearth​.org​.in​/factsheet​/lethal​-landscape​-68499. 83. Ibid. 84. Vivek Mishra, “Poison, Unlimited: India’s Chemicals Industry Remains Dangerously,” Down to Earth, January 9, 2020, https:​//​www​.downtoearth​.org​.in​/news​ /environment​/poison​-unlimited​-india​-s​-chemicals​-industry​-remains​-dangerously​ -68718. 85. Ibid. 86. Ibid. 87. Ibid. 88. Ibid. 89. Ibid. 90. Ibid. 91. Edward Broughton, “The Bhopal Disaster and Its Aftermath: A Review,” Environmental Health: A Global Access Science Source 4, no. 6 (2005): 4, https:​//​doi​.org​ /10​.1186​/1476​-069X​-4​-6. 92. Ibid., 5.

Chapter 4

Creating Ecological Death-Worlds Pandemic Politics and Repeating the Toxic Past

The emergence and spread of the novel COVID-19 pandemic since March 2020 has revealed something vital about governmental attitudes toward the regulation of toxicity in India. As the pandemic progressed in India, I couldn’t help but notice the recurrence of a recognizable pattern in the government’s official responses to this new health and environmental threat: a familiar pattern of apathy, neglect, and economic self-interest. The pandemic has brought into sharp relief all the issues and concerns that the problem of toxicity raises but that have thus far either been ignored or denied by the successive governments of India and the powerful corporations that have a vested interest in the poisoning and pollution of “other” places and people. As it appears, India’s response to the pandemic has been formulated along the lines of its response to other forms of environmental toxicity in the past. Indeed, the lines of inquiry which have animated my book thus far have been reiterated and amplified during the pandemic, lending further credence to my central thesis in this book that in contemporary India, toxicity has become a form of life. The pandemic has heightened the visibility of the link among environmental contamination, declining human health, and economic regress more effectively and with greater immediacy than the more threatening and persistent issues of climate change and the regulation of toxicity have been able to achieve. In this context, the COVID-19 pandemic can be read as an instance of, what Saskia Sassen in her book Expulsions: Brutality and Complexity in the Global Economy calls, “extreme cases.” According to Sassen, “extreme cases . . . make sharply visible what might otherwise remain confusingly vague.”1 By doing so, extreme cases draw attention to “the emergence of a new logics of expulsion.”2 Sassen prefers the term “expulsion” in place of the well-worn and familiar term “growing inequality” as a way of “capturing 131

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the pathologies of today’s global capitalism”3 which is causing ever larger numbers of “people, enterprises, and places [to be] expelled from the core social and economic orders of our time.”4 As an extreme case, COVID19 has helped visiblize these everyday “expulsions” in India. One such unmissable expulsion during the pandemic was the exodus of poor migrant workers from India’s wealthy urban centers as a result of the strict nationwide lockdown imposed by the government on March 25, 2020, at the start of the pandemic. This expulsion, which pushed millions of India’s poor into still greater poverty through unemployment only attracted media attention because it was sharply visiblized against the backdrop of restrictions on mobility during the pandemic. Even though millions of people continue to be displaced every month in India, and still more exist in unlivable conditions of extreme poverty, the extent of this desperation is invisiblized as a condition of the “normal” functioning of society. While in a prepandemic world where “business-as-usual” and “normalcy” meant that the grinding weight of the global capitalist machinery continued to pauperize still larger sections of the world’s poor in relative silence and out of sight, the pandemic has provided a new grammar through which these preexisting injustices can once again be articulated. It is in disrupting the “normal” order of things that the pandemic also responds to one of the central problems encountered by the demand for the stricter regulation of toxicity: the problem of “representation.” How can we represent the slow violence of toxicity when other urgent, life-threatening, and more intimate struggles for food, shelter, and water plague the vast majority of the country’s population? Sixty years ago, Rachel Carson had also voiced her concern about the difficulties of raising awareness about a form of violence that is slow-acting and therefore invisible, “It is human nature to shrug off what may seem to us a vague threat of future disaster.”5 In this regard, the spread of COVID-19 has unambiguously represented how crucial a healthy environment is to human health and longevity by compressing the time scale of cause and effect. Furthermore, the global spread of the pandemic has been a stark reminder of Carson’s immortal words in Silent Spring, “Man [sic], however much he may like to pretend the contrary, is part of nature.” In other words, even during the pandemic, we would do well to remember that humankind cannot hope to escape the devastating ripple effects of poisoning our ecosystems and destroying the fecundity of our natural resources through the toxic colonialism of the planet. The ongoing novel severe acute respiratory syndrome— coronavirus-2 (SARS-CoV-2), better known as coronavirus disease 2019 or COVID-19, is one such ripple effect. As Sunita Narain, director of the Indian public interest research and advocacy organization Centre for Science and Environment (CSE) points out, the outbreak of COVID-19 is not unrelated to the issues of toxic contamination and our highly unethical and unsustainable

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modern, industrial systems that are responsible for planetary-scale poisoning and pollution, but is, in fact, a direct result of these problems. According to Narain: On the one hand, we are pushing all kinds of chemicals and toxins into our food, which is making food a source of disease, not just nutrition. Antibiotics are being shoved into animals, even crops, not for disease control but to make them gain weight or grow more, so that business profits. As a result, resistance to drugs needed for human survival is on the rise. On the other hand, we are growing our food in ways that favour disease growth—industrial farms, which are vertically integrated, are fast becoming the source of contagion. This breaking of the boundaries between animal and human habitats will lead to more such outbreaks. In a world that is more interconnected and globalised than ever, this will make the infection wildly contagious.6

When we consider the ways in which our globalized world-systems have disrupted, modified, and destroyed ecosystems, species’ populations, and the overall biodiversity of the planet, not to mention human health, by pumping the earth with all manner of toxicants and pollutants, COVID-19 appears less as a natural phenomenon and more as yet another human-made calamity. From this perspective, COVID-19 is simply another indication of humankind’s toxic legacy on the planet. And the underlying cause of these unnatural planetary events, from viral pandemics to climate change and planetary toxic contamination, remains the same, as we have seen in the previous chapters: slow-moving, insufficient, and often ineffective global regulatory mechanisms and policies (that is, in those instances where such mechanisms even exist) governing public health and environmental decision-making. This situation has only worsened under a global neoliberal regime directed toward protecting economic growth and the “ease of doing business” at all costs, even when those costs imperil the survival of human and other than human beings and their habitats. The pandemic has allowed us to better see and therefore reassess the merits of our dominant consumption-based economic models that force the world’s poor to pay (economically, environmentally, and with their health) for the subsidies and incentives afforded to the biggest polluters of the planet. India’s unfolding COVID-19 related humanitarian and environmental crises must, therefore, be read as the direct consequence of the country’s long history of deprioritizing public health and the associated neglect of the regulation of environmental toxification and degradation. As the deadly “second wave” of the pandemic swept across rural and urban India in April and May 2021, wreaking havoc on lives and livelihoods in the absence of life-enhancing governmental intervention, the government’s response to the

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pandemic was a continuation of a mode of necropolitical governmentality that manifested in the first days of the Green Revolution and has since defined independent India’s attitude toward environmental toxicity and shaped its environmental policy. The magnitude of India’s COVID-19 tragedy (humanitarian, environmental, and economic), then, is the heavy cost of the version of modernity independent India has adopted for itself, where the notions of “progress” and “development” are equivalent to unsustainable and heavily polluting models of agriculture, unchecked and rapid expansion of industries and corporations that inundate the air, land, and water with all manner of toxics, and a rapidly retreating state from all avenues of public and social welfare in its deference to the violent profiteering enabled by global market forces. It is this political attitude, what Shanna H. Swan in her recent book Countdown calls the “politics of inattention” in which “manufacturers have largely shirked responsibility for ensuring the safety of the chemicals in their products—and our regulatory system has allowed this to happen,”7 that has resulted in the slow buildup of hazardous levels of toxicity in India’s total environment, posing serious threats to the health and continued existence of every living species in the country today. Amid the pandemic, the damaging effects of this long-standing political indifference to the health of the population and the country’s once abundant natural resources in the population’s declining health and susceptibility to new infections, chronic illnesses, and diseases, such as COVID-19, have been more clearly visiblized. In fact, the severity of India’s unprecedented humanitarian crisis has once again drawn attention to the harmful effects of ongoing exposure to a cocktail of toxic chemicals and substances in our bodies and our natural habitats. That there can be no guarantee of human health in the absence of environmental health has been amply demonstrated by the sudden onset of the pandemic and new scientific research suggesting that populations inhabiting more toxic and polluted environments face a greater risk of COVID-19 morbidity and mortality, such as populations exposed to chronic air pollution in India. But even if we approach the issue of poor governance of environmental toxicity from an economic angle, which after all is the primary concern of modern governments (it is all about the bottom line), having a largely unhealthy and sick population, whether this be due to toxic environments, poor lifestyles, or poverty (and today we encounter varying combinations of the three), increases the government’s expenditure on health care and other remediation efforts while decreasing its revenue from the loss of productive workers and ultimately results in economic losses to the nation. In other words, an unhealthy population, as Foucault was well aware, is simply bad business sense. However, it isn’t only a matter of India’s toxic past come back to haunt it that is of concern but equally, or perhaps more critically, it is the evidence of the country’s unchanging toxic habits in the present and their potential

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intergenerational effects in the future that also require immediate attention. As we can already see, a growing humanitarian crisis during COVID-19 has further deteriorated the state of India’s already strained environment by significantly adding to the existing toxic burden on the country’s land, water, and air, and by extension on the health of human and other than human beings. Indeed, human health and environmental health reinforce one another. While the ecological and human health impact of the additional COVID-19 related hazardous waste and pollution is one the full weight of which we do not at present understand, we can be certain, as is characteristic of highly toxic chemicals and pollutants, its effects will continue to reverberate across the generations long after the disease itself has disappeared from our lives. As it appears for the moment, we seem not to have learned the lessons of the past—that even after the immediate threat of the virus is no longer a risk, the heavy metals, plastics, and toxic chemicals we are pushing into the environment in an effort at protecting our health today will only persist in our natural world and through the web of life make their way back to poison our bodies tomorrow. Unfortunately, in this regard, COVID-19 has simultaneously invisiblized the problems of the (not too distant) future in terms of the longterm deleterious effects of the mountains of toxic waste and pollution the world is generating during the pandemic, through a hyperfocus on the present and the immediate problems pertaining to the containment and treatment of the disease. Without urgent political intervention, COVID-19 is in danger of beginning a new circle of poison even in the few short years it will take to combat its threat. But in this context, the reality exposed by the pandemic, at least in India, is not promising. Necro-Governmentality and the Making of Ecological Death-Worlds The various policies, laws and governmental decisions enacted by the Indian government during the pandemic reveal a state entirely disciplined by the market such that it is willing to sacrifice all segments of its population, including the privileged upper classes and castes who are used to being insulated by the fortune of wealth and birth, as “disposable lives” for the sake of profit. Indeed, in this form of collective rather than selective exposure to the pandemic during the second wave, emerged a “new viral necropolitics,”8 as Nikhil Pandhi calls it in his recent article “COVID-19 and India’s New Viral Necropolitics.” What became evident in the government’s response to the pandemic, then, were the overt signs of a state that no longer orientates itself toward a biopolitical “care for individual life” as its “duty”9 and instead, as Dilip M. Menon notes in a recent essay, “allow[s] the market to determine

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the value of care, stripping itself to a bare performance of rule.”10 In other words, the pandemic has exposed the necropolitical logics underpinning the government’s biopolitical rhetoric of care. For even as the Indian government repeatedly declared the “health” and well-being of the population as its primary concern, it chose to ignore timely warnings by national and international medical experts and did not intervene in fostering the life of its population by taking the urgent and necessary steps to prevent the onset of the “second wave.” Instead, the government knowingly exacerbated the virus’s spread across the country by encouraging mass public gatherings for political and religious purposes even as the number of active cases in the country were on the rise and thereby “making available” the entire population across the deep segmentations of caste, class, and religion to exposure, infection, and ultimately death. In the months of April and May 2021, as India began recording one of the highest numbers of daily new COVID-19 infections and deaths globally,11 and an acute shortage of hospital beds, oxygen cylinders, life-saving drugs, ventilators, ambulances, medical staff, and crematoriums instituted warlike conditions not only in rural areas where the provision of even basic medical infrastructure has been entirely neglected by the government but also in India’s wealthy capital, Delhi, it made visible the extent of the government’s disinvestment in public service infrastructures of care, most prominently the anemic state of health care services, sanitation, and welfare provisions for the poor. As many commentators have rightly noted, the enormity of the suffering and loss of lives and livelihoods that has followed the outbreak of the pandemic in India is entirely human-made and was therefore preventable. But even though it is the decisive actions taken (or the need for them ignored) by the current government that have been criticized for precipitating India’s COVID-19 disaster, and quite understandably so, there is a need to take a step back and recognize that the current political dispensation is carrying on the toxic lineage of its predecessors. As Narain points out, “we are in our current predicament because of the years lost when we could have invested in public health and build a more equitable society, where the poor are not doubly hit.”12 According to Cameroonian philosopher Achille Mbembe, Michel Foucault’s concept of “biopolitics” is insufficient to capture the various “contemporary forms of subjugating life to the power of death,”13 that Mbembe calls “necropolitics.” For him, necropower consists in “the power to manufacture an entire crowd of people who specifically live at the edge of life, or even on its outer edge—people for whom living means continually standing up to death.”14 Such state-sanctioned violence proceeds on a large scale by either adopting the “strategy of small massacres inflicted one day at a time” or through spectacular displays of “organized destruction” aimed at “extermination” rather than “separation.”15 As Pandhi puts it, such “a slow haemorrhaging, a

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gradual exposure to death by means of enslavement, exploitation, everyday forms of pain, injury and debility—then becomes the very fabric of political order.”16 While necropolitics does not negate Foucault’s concept of biopolitics, it emphasizes “a sort of inversion between life and death, as if life was somehow death’s medium”17 and therefore as a concept serves to foreground the degree to which terror, violence, instability, insecurity, and death are deployed in the neoliberal era as technologies of state control, increasingly becoming the normal mode of governmental operation in place of the government’s interest in “administering life.” For Mbembe, who drew inspiration from Frantz Fanon’s work on colonial occupation as war and contemporary forms of settler-colonial occupation such as the prevailing situation in Israel– Palestine, necropower becomes a useful tool to describe “the political making of spaces and subjectivities in an in-between of life and death”18 where the sovereign power of direct “killing” does not define power’s limit, but is extended in the creation of “death-worlds” that Mbembe describes as “new and unique forms of social existence in which vast populations are subjected to living conditions that confer upon them the status of the living dead.”19 At this stage, it is worth noting that while Achille Mbembe’s notion of necropolitics has emerged as one of the primary theoretical frameworks, along with Foucault’s bio/thanatopolitics and Giorgio Agamben’s state of exception, to describe the ways in which governments have prioritized economic risks over health risks during the pandemic,20 the concept has been largely overlooked in theorizations of the accompanying crisis of environmental toxicity caused by COVID-19. While Mbembe recognizes “infrastructural warfare” which, as he explains, involves “demolishing houses and cities, uprooting olive trees, riddling water tanks with bullets, bombing and jamming electronic communications, digging up roads, destroying electricity transformers . . . ,”21 that is “bulldozing” urban civic infrastructure as a critical “technique of disabling the enemy”22 exercised by late modern necropolitical regimes, I want to suggest that an equally powerful tool for the control and disabling of populations is what we can call “environmental warfare” through the making of “ecological death-worlds.” The concept of ecological death-worlds is useful for capturing the ways in which modern governments, in the pursuit of economic maximization, readily weaponize toxicity in the making of ever larger zones of dead land, dead water, and noxious air by allowing the ongoing contamination of environments, such that the populations dependent on these environments for survival are condemned to a slow death. However, this goal of profit maximization might not always mean an additional economic benefit but, for our globalized and capitalism-driven political regimes that function according to a cost-benefit analysis, might simply be a strategy for preventing additional expenditure. The making of ecological death-worlds then, has become one of the most insidious forms

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of “invisible killing” exercised by the state because the slow withdrawal of life-sustaining and livelihood-building natural resources and environments from populations, which deprive opportunities for flourishing in life or even for life itself to flourish, are not immediately perceptible or intelligible as a technique of modern warfare. Within our global capitalist orders, one recognizable mechanism of controlling environments as a way of excluding undesirable populations has been the privatizing and/or taxing access to common land and water sources as multinational corporations and corrupt governments have done across the world. These death-making practices have extended to the biopiracy of native crop varieties and the copyrighting of new hybrid seeds and crops (the very produce of the land) at a ruinous cost to agricultural farmers and workers but also to the land and natural water sources, as the multibillion-dollar Bayer-owned Monsanto has done for decades in economically weaker countries like India. As we have seen in a previous chapter, one prominent example of state sanctioned ecological death-making is the case of the Bhopal gas victims who have been subjected to, what Mbembe calls, a permanent “state of injury” due to the reticence of the state machinery in enacting environmental remediation of the toxic disaster site for the last thirty-six years. Other examples include the toxic and polluted livelihoods to which India’s e-waste workers and waste pickers, who invariably arise from the lower castes and outcaste Dalit communities and the poor Muslim minority, are condemned to ensure a steady supply of cheap and disposable labor for the nation. While there certainly exists a positive correlation between poverty and ecological death-worlds, once the cycle of toxicity and pollution has been set in motion, like climate change, it will make its way up the hierarchy of inequality and reach the very top, as the severe crisis of air pollution in India, particularly in the capital city Delhi, demonstrates. ‌‌‌‌ light of this, it is imperative to recognize that while the pandemic has In led to global setbacks in achieving all three dimensions of Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) according to the 2030 United Nation’s Agenda, that is, economic, social, and environmental, the steps taken by the national governments of low- and middle-income countries now to reverse the negative socioeconomic and environmental impacts of the pandemic will be decisive in determining the future trajectory of these countries in terms of their ability to foster economic growth without increasing environmental and human harms. Unfortunately, the outbreak of COVID-19 in India has shed light on the ways or, more precisely, the tactics used by the government in making death-worlds, both social and ecological, and suspending certain populations in between life and death. More precisely, the government’s COVID-19 policies and decisions align with the extractive economic model of growth and

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development followed by India which has continued to fuel ever greater corporate control of human and natural resources and uphold, as Vandana Shiva puts it in her recent book Oneness vs. the 1%, “the illusory model of limitless growth, on a planet with ecological limits, as well as of the exercise of limitless power by the powerful.”23 What the government has called “relief” and “recovery” measures have only served to aggravate the existing crises faced by the socioeconomically marginalized sections of the country’s population. In the Sustainable Development Report 2021, India’s overall rank, which determines a country’s preparedness for achieving the seventeen Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) by 2030, has already slipped by two places since 2020 to 120 out of the 165 UN member states.24 Of the seventeen SDGs, India faces “major challenges” (the most severe rating) in achieving eleven goals, “significant challenges” in three goals, and still faces “challenges” in two others.25 This further regress in India’s overall rank in the last year alone is most notably due to India’s failure in mitigating the rise in poverty (SDG 1) and environmental offences, which have had a direct impact on growing hunger and food insecurity (SDG 2), rising inequality in access to education and of gender (SDGs 4 and 5), decline in the availability of decent work and economic growth (SDG 8), and increasing environmental degradation both under water (SDG 14) and on land (SDG 15). But a look at the other goals in which India faces major challenges enables us to get a better understanding of the fact that India’s chosen path for development is neither sustainable nor inclusive: Good health and well-being (SDG 3); clean water and sanitation (SDG 6); industry, innovation and infrastructure (SDG 9); reduced inequalities (SDG 10); sustainable cities and communities (SDG 11); peace, justice and strong institutions (SDG 16); and partnerships for the goals (SDG 17).26 In fact, the government has used the pandemic to exercise an increasingly authoritarian control over the population by eroding democratic principles enshrined in India’s constitution, and to ease the pathway for exploiting the environment by modifying existing laws which guarantee environmental protections. The making of social and ecological death-worlds, then, are simply two sides of the same coin or the different working parts of the same corrupt machine that Vandana Shiva aptly calls “the money machine,” which is “programmed to bulldoze, destroy, aggregate and accumulate, externalise and excavate.”27 For Shiva, “the money machine” names our dominant market-led economic models wherein, ​​​​​​​ The 1% controls the wealth and power to destroy our planet and our common lives, with no responsibility or accountability for their actions, because they have found clever ways to create illusions—of the separation of humans from the earth, and of the 1% from the rest of society, as if we share no common wealth, and no common future.28

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In maintaining its hegemony, the money machine recycles “the methods of colonisation” by “convert[ing] the displaced into cheap slave labour”29 and plundering the planet’s natural resources to guarantee a steady supply of raw materials. This colonization of people and nature occurs simultaneously, and we therefore need to stay vigilant for its symptoms. A large wealth inequality in a country is a sure sign of the conquest of the money machine and therefore of a system heavily skewed in favor of the few at the expense of the many. According to the Credit Suisse Global Wealth Report 2021, India’s wealth inequality according to the Gini coefficient, which measures the inequality in income distribution, has risen to 82.3 out of a 100 at the end of 2020, and the wealth share of India’s top 1 percent rose to 40.5 percent of the total wealth in the country during the same period.30 Just like the 2008 global financial crash during which “billionaires consolidated their ownership of industry across the world”31 while the other 99 percent lost their homes and jobs, the pandemic has provided yet another opportunity for a consolidation of power and wealth by the “haves” while the “have nots” continue to perish and the planet continues to be polluted. The COVID-19 Money Machine: On the Brink of Social and Ecological Collapse Social Dimensions Throughout the pandemic, the government has prioritized a divisive politics of religion and communalism for its own self-interest, and the interests of big businesses over the health and well-being of the population.32 The rise in the country’s wealth inequality has been exacerbated by governmental policies which have shielded India’s wealthiest businessmen from the adverse economic fallout of the pandemic while penalizing the desperately poor in need of urgent aid. Across the world, the pandemic has reiterated that it is the poor and marginalized who suffer the most adverse consequences of crises, whether they be natural or human-made. Indeed, it is in the infrastructurally and economically weaker regions of the world, that already lack access to basic life-necessities of clean water, healthy food, sanitation, medical care, and proper housing, where the disease is most likely to fester, causing disproportionate loss of lives and livelihoods, as was the case in India. According to the State of India’s Environment: In Figures 2021 (SoE), an annual report published by the environmental research and advocacy organization based in New Delhi, Centre for Science and Environment (CSE), during India’s devastating “second wave” of COVID-19 in 2021, the month of May was the most tragic as “India accounted for every other new COVID-19 case and every

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third death due to the infection recorded globally.”33 But the point that needs to be noted here is that of the total new cases and deaths recorded in India in the month of May 2021, rural districts accounted for 53 percent of new cases and 52 percent of total deaths.34 This is not only because the virus spread at a much faster rate in India’s villages where large families are crammed into one room huts and the availability of clean water is intermittent at best but also because India’s public health infrastructure is grossly underfunded and weak, more so in rural areas. The State of India’s Environment Report states that rural districts need at least 38 percent more community health centers (CHCs) which are the first level of health infrastructure for rural populations to access specialist doctors and radiographers.35 But within these CHCs, there was a 76 percent shortfall of specialist doctors like surgeons, physicians, and pediatricians, as well as skilled staff such as lab technicians and radiographers.36 Moreover, India has the fourth lowest health budget in the world in terms of its share of total government expenditure, only half of its population has access to even the most essential health services, and “more than 70% of health spending is being met by people themselves, one of the highest levels in the world.”37 Nearly 90 percent of outpatient department (OPD) services are carried out by private-sector hospitals in the country, and yet the cost of treatment is prohibitive for the poor. For instance, the treatment for COVID-19 at “super-specialty” private hospitals “can go up to 83 times the monthly income of the thirteen-crore people in India that are living in extreme poverty and 31 times the average monthly income of an Indian citizen.”38 This simply means that in India, health is a luxury the poor can ill afford. While the consequences of this long-term governmental neglect of public health was felt most adversely by the poor in rural areas who did not even have access to COVID-19 tests39 much less to specialized treatment in the event of contracting the virus, even the wealthy in India’s capital city of Delhi were not immune to the fallout of the state’s underinvestment in health and “life” by having to wait in long queues and pay exorbitant fees for basic life-saving services such as hospital beds, oxygen cylinders, and essential medicines. In March 2020, the necropolitics of the Indian government’s stringent nationwide lockdown, which included a moratorium on all forms of public transport, specifically targeted India’s already destitute lower caste and Muslim informal economy migrant workers, who travel from rural districts to urban centers in search of a means of livelihood, by abandoning them without the state support they needed for survival. This murderous intent of the state was captured by numerous media reports and surveys conducted by NGOs that recorded the indignity, humiliation, and brutality meted out to the country’s vulnerable “un-citizens”40 by the state and state authorities such as the police. The state’s treatment of the poorest segments of the society was

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an organized form of death-making constituted as structural violence. As daily wage earners “in construction sites, factory manufacturing units and other services activities”41 earning meagre salaries (averaging USD 5 and less per day) that preclude the ability to make savings, the closure of industries and businesses during the lockdown, and the shamefully slow and woefully inadequate government disbursement of relief packages, rations, or cash, left millions of seasonal migrant workers on the brink of starvation and death. According to a report released by the Stranded Workers Action Network (SWAN) in April 2020, after the first phase of the lockdown which lasted for twenty-one days, despite “over 350 government orders detailing relief measures”42 for migrant workers, 96 percent of the migrants interviewed for the study had not received rations from the government and 70 percent had not received any cooked food from any source.43 Furthermore, around 98 percent had not received any cash relief from the government and many workers were eating only one meal a day to conserve what little resources they had left, while others had not eaten any food for as long as four days.44 Stranded without access to food, means to an income, or any government provision of transportation for getting back home to their villages, most migrant workers were forced to start walking, often hundreds of kilometers away, to their villages in rural districts. This mass exodus of India’s invisible poor from its “shining” cities has been called the biggest displacement of people in India since the partition of the country into India and Pakistan at the time of independence from British colonial rule in 1947. It took the government two months before it began delegating the responsibility of organizing special trains and buses for the migrant workers to individual state governments, by which time hundreds of poor migrants had died in road accidents on route to their home states or due to starvation and dehydration.45 And even then, the already in-debt and penniless migrant workers were asked to pay a full fare for their train and bus tickets back to their villages, while the government had sent emergency Air India flights across the world to “rescue” the wealthiest Indian citizens stranded in other countries at the nation’s expense.46 Other impoverished and marginalized sections of the population such as sweepers and sanitation workers (called “safai karamcharis” in Hindi), hospital ward attendants, and mortuary and cremation-ground workers, performing essential tasks as frontline workers during the pandemic, also failed to receive any “uniform insurance or compensation schemes”47 from the government. Sanitation workers, who are engaged in hazardous and “dirty” tasks like garbage collection and manual scavenging due to their “untouchable” status as outcaste Dalits according to the Hindu caste system, were forced to sort through highly contagious COVID-19 wastes and perform other COVID19–related sanitation work with their bare hands in the absence of any provision of personal protective equipment (PPE) such as masks and gloves

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by the government. Despite the high percentage of deaths among sanitation workers in cities like Delhi and Chennai due to COVID-19,48 the families of the deceased struggled to receive the government-promised compensation amount because most of these deaths had not been registered as COVID-19 deaths.49 Resorting to denial, delay, and distortion of data has been a consistent trope of the Indian state in dealing with matters pertaining to the lives and livelihoods of the poor, as we have seen with the government’s handling of the demands put forth by Bhopal’s gas victims. As preexisting disposable lives, these marginalized sections of the population were the first to be marked out for “letting die,” but now doubly stigmatized due to caste and as spreaders of infection. What little the government did announce as COVID19 relief packages for the poor and vulnerable were grossly insufficient, and according to one study the “total additional public spending promised by all the relief measures announced by the end of May [2020] amounted to only around 1% of GDP, and much of this had not yet reached people.”50 But in a further attack on poor workers’ rights and the conditions of their livelihood, many state governments of India used the reasons of “kick-start[ing] economic activities, attract[ing] foreign investment and boost[ing] growth prospects”51 as a pretext for diluting the country’s existing labor laws and instituting slave-like working conditions for already-disadvantaged workers. For instance, many states like the central Indian state of Uttar Pradesh, Madhya Pradesh, Gujarat, and Odisha, increased the working hours from eight to twelve per day, six days a week, in clear defiance of the established standards of the International Labour Organization (ILO) which sets a forty-eight-hour week as the global standard.52 While the Uttar Pradesh government later withdrew the twelve-hour work shift when faced with mounting public pressure, many other state governments did not.53 Some of the other changes passed as ordinances and amendments to the labor laws included the hiring of workers at lower wages, curbing the right to form trade unions and suspending as many as thirty-five of the thirty-eight labor laws for a period of three years.54 These changes are in violation of constitutionally guaranteed rights to workers and citizens, and only add to their already precarious working conditions where “Most workers [in India already] earn less than half of the minimum wage; 71% do not have any written job contract and 54% do not get paid leave [and] only about 10% of the workforce in India is formal, with safe working conditions and social security.”55 The parsimony of the government’s relief packages for the poor and its failure to implement policies aimed at protecting their livelihoods and providing financial security only pushed the poor into deeper distress and vulnerability. As a study conducted by the Azim Premji University declared, “the number of individuals who lie below the national minimum wage threshold (₹375 [i.e. USD 5] per day as recommended by the Anoop Satpathy

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committee) increased by 230 million during the pandemic.”56 And according to a Pew Research Center analysis, India accounted for 60 percent of the global increase in poverty (defined as those with incomes of USD 2 or less a day) as well as 60 percent of the global retreat in the number of people in the middle-income tier in 2020.57 Noting these disparities is important not only because it demonstrates the ways in which the government manufactured India’s COVID-19 crises but it also highlights the operational logics of a state machinery that only measures “growth” through the well-being of the corporate sector and the powerful 1 percent of the population. While governmental intervention in marginalized lives worked to further exploit the death-like conditions in which millions of poor Indians found themselves during the pandemic, it did the very opposite for India’s elite businesses by actively subsidizing the corporate sector and encouraging greater private sector investment in eight key industries, namely, coal, defense production, civil aviation, power distribution, mining for minerals, space, atomic energy, and social infrastructure. In other words, the government used the pandemic to secure a more extensive neoliberalization of India’s economy by facilitating a huge transfer of wealth and resources into private hands and prioritizing the corporatization of nearly every sector of the economy. According to Saurabh Mukherjea, founder of Marcellus Investment Managers, an Indian investment firm, “almost every major sector in India is now ruled by one or two incredibly powerful corporate houses.”58 He further adds that the disturbing reality in India today is, “the top 15 business houses account for 90% of the country’s profits.”59 This means India has followed the same template for capitalism as America, where a few corporate tycoons like John D. Rockefeller and Andrew Carnegie have dominated the country’s economy and reaped the largest shares of the country’s profits.60 And indeed, the catastrophic socioeconomic consequences of the American model of market capitalism are evident in India during the pandemic. According to the India Supplement of the Oxfam Report “The Inequality Virus,” released in January 2021, the wealth of Indian billionaires increased by 35 percent during the lockdown,61 even as unemployment in the country reached record levels, the numbers of poor increased by 15 percent in rural areas and nearly 20 percent in urban areas,62 and India’s economy “plunged into recession for the first time in nearly a quarter of a century.”63 For instance, amongst the biggest beneficiaries during the pandemic and of the government’s COVID-19 economic recovery measures were Asia’s first and fourth richest billionaires: Mukesh Ambani, chairman of Reliance Industries Limited (RIL), an extensive conglomerate that includes everything from oil, energy, and textiles to mobile and broadband, digital platforms, retail, electronics, and more, and Gautam Adani of the Adani Group, which is another diversified corporation controlling companies ranging from ports and aerospace to thermal energy

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and coal.64 According to an Oxfam Report, “Mukesh Ambani was making INR 90 crore [USD 900 million] per hour during the pandemic when around 24 percent of the people in the country were earning under INR 3000 [USD 40] per month during the lockdown.”65 And while millions more were pushed into extreme poverty and were struggling to survive on USD 2 per day, Mukesh Ambani’s wealth grew to USD 80 billion from about USD 15 billion before the pandemic and Gautam Adani’s wealth grew to USD 55 billion from USD 13 billion within the year.66 These figures once again give lie to neoliberal globalization’s big promise of “trickle-down” economics. Quite contrary to the presumed benefits of tax cuts and incentives for big businesses reaching the bottom-most tier in society, the only thing that has trickled down to the poor in the last decade is mass pauperization and degraded land, water, and air. In the opening pages of her recent book, Vandana Shiva draws attention to the rapid escalation of wealth inequality between the world’s 1 percent and the rest: “In 2010, 388 billionaires controlled as much wealth as the bottom half of humanity; this number came down to 177 in 2011; to 159 in 2012; 92 in 2013; 80 in 2014; and 62 in 2016; it shrivelled to a mere 8 in 2017. By 2020, it seems, there will be only ONE.”67 Unfortunately, as we have seen, India has already joined the ranks of countries who cater to the “economy of the 1%” by creating an obscene wealth inequality between the rich and the poor. As an Oxfam report from 2016 noted, “One of the key trends underlying this huge concentration of wealth and incomes is the increasing return to capital versus labour.”68 This means, the share of national income going to workers has been steadily falling and labor is capturing ever fewer gains from growth, whereas in contrast, “the owners of capital have seen their capital consistently grow (through interest payments, dividends, or retained profits) faster than the rate the economy has been growing.”69 But it is just as important to know that the income and wealth generated by the elite does not find its way back into the national or world economy as the majority is funneled into inaccessible “tax havens” such as off-shore accounts. For instance, according to one estimate, around “$7.6 trillion of individual wealth—more than the combined gross domestic product (GDP) of the UK and Germany—is currently held offshore.”70 Equally importantly, the economy of the 1 percent (or even 10 percent) should be a matter of urgent concern to us not only because of the immediately perceptible socioeconomic damages it occasions but also because of its more invisible and quiet assaults on the environment, and most ruinously on the environments of the poor. Even though these assaults might be stealthy, they are certainly not unknown. For instance, we know that “the average footprint of the richest 1% globally could be as much as 175 times that of the poorest 10%”71 and “that while the poorest people live in areas most vulnerable to climate change, the poorest half of the global population

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are responsible for only around 10% of total global emissions.”72 In short, while the top tier of the money machine, ruthlessly extract, shamelessly consume, and indiscriminately pollute, it is us, the common citizens of the world who are left to breathe, eat and sleep in a toxic planet not of our own making. Environmental Dimensions In favoring a fossil fuel-based and corporate-led economic growth model, in its fourth tranche of COVID-19 economic recovery packages, the government lifted its long-standing monopoly in the coal sector and announced the auctioning of nearly fifty coal mining blocks to the private sector as a way of reducing national expenditure from coal imports and increasing “self-reliance” in coal production. In order to aid this goal, the government announced an investment of USD 500 billion to facilitate the process of the transfer of coal production from the government-owned Coal India Limited (CIL), which is one of the biggest polluters in the world, to big private sector companies like the Adani Group and Vedanta Limited.73 There are several problems with this move the least of which is the timing for this massive new investment in coal when the government failed to provide COVID-19 relief packages to the vast majority of the country and even failed to make an additional investment in expanding the country’s woeful public health infrastructure. On paper India’s move to privatize coal mining seems to align with its global environmental commitments under the Bonn Challenge, the Kyoto Protocol, and the Paris Agreement, to reduce its CO2 emissions, transition to clean and renewable energy, and mitigate the causes of climate change. It is argued that private-sector competitiveness will rejuvenate the coal sector and enable the retirement or upgrading of older, more polluting coal units as well as the introduction of cleaner high-tech mining technology while also providing jobs to millions, infusing much-needed diversification of revenue sources in states, and fulfilling India’s domestic demand for coal which is set to grow in the next few years.74 In other words, the corporatization of the coal sector will have social, economic, and environmental benefits. But a brief look at the environmental track record of these multibillion-dollar corporations that have profited from the denationalization of coal in India should give us sufficient reason to doubt any claim of the social and ecological benefits of corporatization. As a recent report in Bloomberg Green revealed, Indian coal magnate Gautam Adani’s Adani Group has entered into global partnerships to double its coal-fired power capacity to twenty-four gigawatts with plans to begin operating new coal mines and thereby increasing its fossil fuels footprint despite making pledges to turn the power conglomerate carbon negative.75 The Adani Group is notorious for its multiple environmental offences not

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only in India but also globally and has repeatedly demonstrated a complete disregard for both environmental conservation and the rule of law. The history of the Adani Group is one rife with instances of massive corruption, destruction of the environment and exploitation of workers. On August 4, 2011, an “unseaworthy” Adani-owned coal ship, M.V. Rak, sank off the coast of Mumbai in the Arabian Sea resulting in a massive oil spill that spread to a distance of seven nautical miles and the simultaneous dumping of 60,054 metric tons (MT) of coal which led to extensive marine pollution and damage to marine life. The Adani Group did nothing to clean up the polluted site for five years, and when in 2016 the National Green Tribunal (NGT), a special judicial body established for the purpose of adjudicating environmental cases in India, imposed a fine of AUD 975,000 on the defaulting corporation for its inaction, Adani Group employed delaying tactics by appealing the decision in court.76 In another incident, in the Indian coastal town of Mundra in the state of Gujarat, where Adani owns one of the world’s largest coal-fired power plants, the corporation was found responsible for illegally clearing “75 hectares of protected mangroves, flattened sand dunes, dredg[ing] the ocean, and blocked waterways”77 causing “diminished and diseased fish population,” salination of groundwater, and the devastation of a local fishing village that relied on fishing and farming for its livelihood.78 The Adani Group resorted to bribery and intimidation to silence the villagers and other forces of opposition.79 And in yet another incident, a high-ranking official of the Adani Group was involved in the poisoning and polluting of the River Kafue in Zambia which led to illnesses and death in the local community that relied on the river water for cooking, cleaning, and bathing.80 Scores of similar cases against the Adani Group have found the company routinely engaged in the flagrant violation of environmental law and human rights. And most recently, the Adani Group is embroiled in controversy in Australia over its plans to build the biggest coal mine in the world at the Galilee Basin in Queensland. The infamous Carmichael Project, as it is called, plans to drain 297 billion liters of groundwater over the lifetime of the Carmichael mine which will cause irreversible damage to local aquifers and effectively steal the water needed by local communities and farmers for survival.81 In addition to this, thirteen out of the twenty-six subsidiaries of the Adani Group registered in Australia are owned in the Cayman Islands where the company is known to have tax havens to conceal the real value of its assets and revenue.82 Similarly, Vedanta Limited, owned by Indian billionaire Anil Agarwal and a subsidiary of the London-based Vedanta Resources Limited, is a leading global mining company in India with operations in oil and gas, zinc, lead, silver, copper, iron ore, steel, aluminum, and power, and contributes 1 percent to India’s GDP, according to the company’s website. In 2018, Vedanta’s sterlite copper plant in Tuticorin, Tamil Nadu, was denied a continuation

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of its license to operate by the Tamil Nadu Pollution Control Board due to the plant’s noncompliance with local environmental laws. According to the board, the plant had been dumping copper slag in the local Uppar River leading to groundwater pollution but had not submitted reports of groundwater analysis near the plant.83 Affected communities had been protesting the plant for over 100 days due to the air and water pollution caused by the copper smelter. However, in an open display of collusion between the state and industry, the plant was ordered to be shut down by the Tamil Nadu Pollution Control Board only after the police had opened fire against civilian protesters, including women and children, killing thirteen and injuring many others who had gathered outside the plant demanding justice against the big polluter. But this wasn’t the company’s first environmental offence. In 2016, the Punjab Pollution Control Board imposed a fine of INR 5 lakhs [approximately USD 6,714 at today’s rates] on Vedanta’s newly operational thermal power plant that was found to be using 34 percent more ash to generate power resulting in fly ash pollution.84 In 2012, Vedanta’s mining operations at its coke oven unit near Panjim, Goa, led local villagers to protest against the water pollution and black soot emanating from the plant that had entered their homes. The Goa State Pollution Control Board directed the closure of the coke unit in light of these complaints, accusing Vedanta of not monitoring the ambient air quality.85 In 2006, Vedanta’s leaching plant (an industrial mining process used to extract precious metals) in Zambia was guilty of discharging toxic effluents in the Mushishima stream in the Chingola region.86 And in 1997, a poisonous gas leak from the same sterlite copper plant in Tamil Nadu had caused around 133 people to lose consciousness and later develop severe health conditions such as kidney failure, lung disease, and miscarriages in pregnant women.87 However, much of the blatant corruption, fraudulent behavior, and environmental transgressions that mega corporations are prone to indulge in as a means of maximizing profits can be kept in check by countries with a strong and reliable internal law and order machinery. But when we turn to the history of environmental governance in India and the country’s track record for enforcing compliance with existing environmental safeguards, a different, less optimistic picture begins to emerge. And as we know by now, industry pollutes more and not less in countries with a weak and ineffective internal regulatory system. Considering this, let us turn to India’s management of coal and the efficacy of its environmental laws, which will further illustrate that the privatization of coal by India is unlikely to result in a more effective management of coal reserves or a transition to clean energy but will only result in the repetition of old patterns of toxic behavior. ‌‌‌‌ According to the International Energy Agency (IEA), India is the third-largest energy-consuming country in the world as a result of rapid economic growth,

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rising incomes, and improving standards of living. But 80 percent of this demand is met by three polluting fuels: coal, oil, and solid biomass.88 Coal also accounts for 70 percent of India’s electricity demand.89 But of greater concern is the fact that as India’s economy recovers from the coronavirus pandemic, coal demand is expected to increase by almost 9 percent90 and to result in a three times higher reliance on coal-fired electricity than cleaner sources of electricity generation.91 Given this over-reliance of the country on coal, it is unsurprising that India is the third-largest emitter of greenhouse gases (GHGs) in the world after China and the United States, and coal power plants along with rice paddies and cattle are a major sources of these emissions, which are sharply rising.92 According to one study, coal combustion contributed to 67 percent of total fossil CO2 emissions in 2015,93 and coalbased thermal power stations are one of the biggest sources of air pollution in India which today has one of the worst air qualities in the world. A recent study conducted by the International Energy Agency’s Clean Coal Centre (IEACCC) announced that “Coal-based thermal power stations with no pollution control technology are responsible for over half sulphur dioxide (SO2), 30 per cent oxides of nitrogen (NOx), about 20 per cent particulate matter (PM), among other man-made emissions in the country.”94 Furthermore, the report found that “Unabated burning of coal in thermal power stations” in the absence of the implementation of emissions norms and a delay in introduction of latest clean coal technologies are the main reasons for air pollution in India.95 The IEACCC report also states that because of India’s high reliance on coal for energy generation, its abundant local reserves of coal will continue to be used, and therefore it is imperative that India focus on generating clean coal, tighten its regulatory framework and comply with emissions standards.96 But for years, even as Indian cities became the most polluted in the world, the Indian government has resisted imposing stringent air pollution norms for thermal power plants, and in 2020, it went a step further and lowered the emissions tolerance for nitrogen oxides (NOx), toxic compounds that can cause severe respiratory diseases such as chronic lung disease that are on the rise across India, to be met by thermal power plants.97 The norms introduced in 2015, capped emissions for NOx to 300 milligram per cubic meter (mg/m3) and power plants commissioned between 2003 and 2016 (which accounted for 65 percent of India’s total installed capacity) were required to comply with these new norms.98 However, in October 2020, India increased the emissions cap by 50 percent to 450 mg/m3 and pushed ahead the deadline to meet the 2015 emission norms from 2017 to 2022.99 In this regard, the IEACCC study made a note of India’s “lip-service stand” on clean coal, remarking that even though India has made commitments to transition to cleaner coal through advanced technology, it continues to be “legally feasible for businesses in India to use less efficient technologies to burn coal.”100

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India’s laxity in regulating industrial pollution has meant that toxic effluents from industries have worsened the quality of the air, land, and water in the last decade. According to data collected by the Comprehensive Environmental Pollution Index (CEPI), designed to measure the environmental quality of polluted industrial areas by India’s apex environmental agency, the Central Pollution Control Board (CPCB) in 2009, of the eighty-eight industrial areas monitored between 2009 and 2018, thirty-five of the industrial clusters demonstrated a rise in overall environmental degradation, thirty-three clusters indicated a rise in air pollution, forty-five measured higher levels of water pollution, and seventeen of the clusters revealed an increase in land pollution over the decade.101 This data highlights a broken and highly corrupt system where flouting existing environmental laws and policies is the rule, rather than the exception. But the magnitude of the rot in India’s regulatory machinery was revealed by the State of India’s Environment (SoE) Report 2021, according to which the government’s approval rate for granting environmental clearance (EC) to project proposals made by industry is as high as 79.4 percent!102 And furthermore, even though it normally takes a year to get an environmental clearance, 88 percent of projects from 2014 to 2020 were given clearance in under a year.103 These figures point toward a lack of scrutiny and rigour in granting environmental clearances in a system that is rigged against the environment and the people and in favor of industry and profit-making. Unfortunately, far from attempting to strengthen an already ailing environmental clearance (EC) system, in a further consolidation of its pro-business stance the government has recently proposed extensive changes to the country’s existing Environmental Impact Assessment (EIA) notification of 2006, which would legally clear the pathway for unchecked rapid and destructive industrialization and urbanization by removing the system of critical environmental checks and balances under the current notification that are viewed by the government and industry as an impediment to progress and growth. As it had done with labor laws, the government used the pandemic as cover to push for a dilution of environmental protections in its Draft Environmental Impact Assessment (EIA) Notification 2020, cleverly published on March 23, 2020, one day before India’s strict nationwide lockdown in anticipation of public protests of the proposal. Nonetheless, the draft notification attracted millions of comments from the concerned public in opposition to the suggested changes, and the filing of petitions in four state high courts in India demanding more time for public comments and the translation of the draft notification into regional languages for greater public participation.104 Some of the most notable objections to the Draft Notification 2020 are: the provision to apply for ex-post-facto environmental clearance by industrial projects that have been operating in violation of Environment Protection Act (EPA) 1986, under

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which the Environment Impact Assessment is enshrined; exempting several key industries from the process of public consultation (PC); diluting rigorous public participation by reducing the notice period allowed for public consultation and delimiting the powers of public inquiry; increasing the Centre’s control by granting the Union government absolute power in appointing state EIA Authority; relaxing the necessity of “compliance reports” from twice a year to once a year. Such provisions do not only seek to weaken the process of environmental assessment but in fact, go against the very principle of EIA, and if passed, will effectively render the process redundant. ‌‌‌‌ Environmental Impact Assessment (EIA) was first introduced in 1970 as a mandatory regulatory procedure along with the National Environment Policy Act (NEPA), 1969, in America, to effectively evaluate and predict the adverse environmental impacts of development projects prior to their commencement. By doing so, the EIA process fosters transparency and accountability in political decision-making through the active participation of local communities most likely to be affected by the detrimental long-term effects of unimpeded development and industrialization. In measuring the costs and benefits of the various alternatives for a project, EIA seeks to identify the optimal combination of the economic and environmental in view of public consultation and therefore ensures that “growth” occurs sustainably. The EIA was part of the first generation of environmental laws instituted in the United States that had been occasioned by the modern environmental movement pioneered by Rachel Carson in the 1960s and seeks to uphold the “precautionary principle” in environmental governance. Australia, New Zealand, and Canada became the first countries to adopt the EIA in 1973–1974 and it wasn’t until the mid-1980s that EIA spread in Asia. India took another half a decade to institute the EIA in 1994 under the Environment (Protection) Act of 1986 which had been formulated in the immediate aftermath of and in response to the 1984 Bhopal gas disaster. The 1994 notification made it mandatory for projects beyond a certain size to obtain EIA clearance as a precondition to their approval. However, the 1994 notification underwent as many as twelve amendments,105 and in 2006, the Indian government introduced a new EIA notification that decentralized the process of granting environmental clearance to the state governments, made it mandatory for various other projects thus far left out of the EIA process to obtain clearances, as well as created appraisal committees at the center and state levels, the recommendations of which were crucial in the decision to sanction a project.106 And yet, India’s EIA process has remained mired in controversy, lacked transparency, and principally operated through a dishonest system of favoritism with, as we have already seen, little to no scrutiny in the granting of environmental clearances. Although the government maintains no comprehensive record

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of amendments to environmental policies, according to one evaluation by a team of investigative journalists, the 2006 notification has been subject to fifty-three amendments and over 200 office orders between 2006 and 2020, and even though the rules of the Environment (Protection) Act 1986 make it mandatory for most amendments to EIA notifications to be placed before the public for comments, all fifty-three amendments were passed without public consultation.107 However, in this case, as in many others, the ambiguity of the law itself makes it legally feasible for the government to trespass on social and environmental protections. While the Environment (Protection) Rules 1986 make public scrutiny mandatory for most EIA Notification amendments, this directive can be ignored “whenever it appears to the Central government that it is in public interest to do so,” thereby placing the decision of what constitutes public interest in the government’s hands.108 In fact, in the last year alone, even as a final decision on the Draft EIA notification 2020 lies pending, the 2006 notification has been altered thirty-three times.109 Interestingly, seven of the thirty-three alterations made to the 2006 EIA notification between March 23, 2020 and May 19, 2021, were made on the pretext of the pandemic to grant exemptions and relaxations of required environmental permissions to key heavily polluting industries such as pharmaceuticals, “thermal power plants, manufacturing and mining of coal, minerals and ordinary earth for linear projects”110 (the very industries extensively privatized by the government in its fourth tranche of COVID-19 relief packages) with the proposed aim of facilitating economic recovery. The government’s decision to denationalize and therefore privatize the coal industry in India, then, needs to be read in this background. The new Draft Notification 2020 is a route to legalize illegality in issues pertaining to the health and welfare of people and the environment by encouraging heavily polluting industries to take “the easy way out” of polluting first and cleaning up after. While in twenty-first-century India, industrial accidents and disasters continue to mar the landscape of “development” with uncomfortable frequency, the passing of the Draft EIA Notification 2020 will only lead to a rise in the frequency of such industry-made human and environmental catastrophes and add to the country’s rising environmental toxicity. According to data compiled by IndustriAll, a global union of workers, India has made no progress in improving occupational health and safety of workers employed in various industries or made any conscious effort to prevent industrial disasters like the Bhopal gas tragedy from reoccurring and causing irreparable damage to the environment and human communities. As one of the reports by IndustriAll notes, India has already witnessed fourteen industrial accidents in 2021 which have claimed the lives of forty-two workers and injured 100 more.111 Furthermore, after the lifting of the COVID-19 lockdown restrictions, from May to December 2020, sixty-four industrial accidents claimed the lives of

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118 workers and injured 682. The defaulting industries are the severely polluting chemical and pharmaceutical manufacturing companies and steel and coal companies, the very industries that are being allowed environmental clearance exemptions, relaxed parameters, and extended deadlines to meet emissions norms by amendments made to the EIA notification of 2006 and under the Draft EIA Notification 2020. Doubtless, this sharp rise in the frequency of industrial accidents is also the result of the weakening and suspension of India’s labor laws by the government during the pandemic. That most of the companies involved in such accidents had defaulted on environmental clearance checks should come as no surprise. For instance, the leak of styrene gas, used in the manufacture of plastics and rubber, from LG Polymer’s chemical plant on May 7, 2020, in Vishakapatnam, a port city in the southern state of Andhra Pradesh, which led to the death of twelve people and made hundreds of others seriously ill, was one of the worst gas leaks since the Bhopal gas tragedy. Upon investigation by a state government appointed committee it was found that LG Polymer had expanded its operations six times between 2004 and 2018 without seeking valid environmental clearance and therefore bypassing the process of rigorous appraisal and scrutiny.112 In putting forth the Draft EIA Notification 2020 India also effectively backtracks on its global pledges to reduce reliance on unclean energy, transition to renewable energies, reduce the negative environmental costs of development, and actively participate in preventing climate change. Given this background, it is clear to see that today, one of the biggest challenges to environmental protection in India is the yawning gulf between its political commitments on paper and their on-the-ground implementation, between promises and practice. In following, what Vandana Shiva calls, “the greed economy” of a ruthless global capitalism, India has abdicated its responsibility of care to its citizens by bartering life itself, human and more than human, in the global marketplace and causing the collective ruination of people and the places they inhabit. India’s dismal performance in sustainable environmental practices as indicated in the Environmental Performance Index (EPI) Report 2020 shed light on the extent of the problem of environmental toxicity faced by the country today. According to the report, India occupies a position at the bottom with a rank of 168 (shared with Ghana) out of 180 nations globally, rated on environmental health and ecosystem vitality across eleven issue categories such as air quality, sanitation and drinking water, heavy metals, biodiversity, and climate change. While India’s overall EPI score stands at a poor 27.6,113 its even worse score of 13.4 for air quality, which is based on the measurement of PM2.5 (fine particulate matter of a diameter equal to or smaller than 2.5 micrometers) exposure, household solid fuels, and ground-level ozone (O3) exposure, places it in the second to last position at 179 out of 180 countries (Pakistan holds the last position at 180 and a score

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of 9.9).114 This places India among the two worst countries in the world for exposure to dirty and toxic air, and while this fact is sufficient cause for alarm in itself, India’s less-than-desirable performance on other environmental metrics indicates the inefficiency of the nation’s environmental regulatory framework. For instance, India’s score for meeting the challenges of unsafe drinking water and access to sanitation is 19.4; for pollution emissions (which measures adjusted emission growth rates for SO2, NOx) is 37.1; for climate change (measured by emission growth rates for four greenhouse gases, greenhouse gas emissions per capita, and six others) it is 45; for the state of fisheries (which measures fish stock status, marine trophic index, and fish caught by trawling) it is a weak 16.9; for ecosystem services (measured according to tree cover loss, grassland loss, and wetland loss) it is 33.8; and the nation’s score for biodiversity and habitat protection (measured according to terrestrial biome protection, marine protected areas, and seven others) is 33.7.115 In short, on every environmental metric, India is witnessing the consequences of embracing a definition of “development” that has systematically excluded, ignored and denied environmental and human health in an accelerated path to industrialization, urbanization, and economic growth. The Other Airborne Pandemic Today, during the COVID-19 pandemic, India’s history of political inaction in safeguarding the environment has emerged as another contributing factor for the rise in the country’s COVID-19 infections and deaths, once again reinforcing our interconnection with the natural world and the cost of neglecting its well-being. In this case, the culprit is India’s poor air quality, a long-standing environmental problem that the country has consistently failed to regulate. According to the State of Global Air/2020 report, air pollution was the fourth leading risk factor for premature death worldwide in 2019, surpassed only by high blood pressure, tobacco use, and poor diet, and has progressed to the top environmental concerns worldwide, claiming a total of 6.67 million116 lives globally, including the premature death of 500,000 babies in 2019 alone. To put this into perspective, since its emergence at the end of 2019 (over a year and a half ago at the time of this writing), COVID-19 has caused a little over four million deaths worldwide.117 Air pollution then, is the other, more serious and persistent, airborne pandemic that continues to be ignored in countries like India where air pollution-related deaths increased by almost 150 percent between 1990 and 2015,118 and on which “little or no progress has been made.”119 But what is worrying for India is that of the total 6.67 million deaths due to air pollution, India accounted for 1.67 million deaths, that is, one out of every four deaths due to air pollution in 2019 occurred in India.120 It is alarming that even though we know the severe and

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long-term adverse health impacts of air pollution, we have refused to tackle this major toxic threat with the same urgency and seriousness as we are the COVID-19 pandemic. The lack of political will on this issue has resulted in avoidable COVID-19 deaths, as we are beginning to discover. New scientific and epidemiological research has begun to reveal that prolonged exposure to air pollution, especially to high concentrations of ambient PM2.5 (fine particulate matter in air pollution with a diameter of 2.5 micrometers and less and the most harmful to human health) which is “emitted from vehicles, coal-burning power plants, industrial activities, waste burning, and many other human and natural sources”121 and is capable of entering the bloodstream, significantly increases the severity of COVID-19 symptoms as well as the risk of death. This is primarily because long-term exposure to atmospheric pollution (which is a mixture of fine particulate matter like PM2.5 and PM10 and noxious gases such as nitrogen oxide (NOx), sulphur dioxide (SO2), tropospheric ozone (O3)) is known to cause a variety of chronic diseases such as cardiovascular ailments, asthma, diabetes, obesity, cancer, chronic obstructive pulmonary disease (COPD), and bronchiolitis, as well as neurocognitive diseases, which weaken the body’s immune response, “thus facilitating viral penetration and replication.”122 Since COVID-19 infection poses “an invisible threat to our respiratory and cardiovascular health carried through the air we breathe,”123 it acts as a double threat to populations inhabiting regions with highly toxic air and already suffering from these underlying health conditions. A recent study published in the journal Cardiovascular Research estimates that anthropogenic air pollution, of which fossil fuel use is the biggest contributor, accounts for approximately 15 percent of global COVID-19 mortality, which, as the study importantly concludes, “could have been largely prevented, for example by adopting the air quality regulations applied in Australia (annual PM2.5 limit of 8 µg/m3).”124 Unsurprisingly, relatively low levels of air pollution correspond with a very low air-pollution-related COVID-19 mortality rate, whereas countries with poor air quality regulations and standards demonstrate much higher air pollution related COVID-19 fatalities.125 Another study focusing on the spread of COVID-19 in India and long-term exposure to PM2.5 also found a positive correlation between high levels of PM2.5 and the risk of death from COVID-19, stating that even “a 1% increase in long-term exposure to PM2.5 leads to an increase in COVID-19 deaths by 5.7 percentage points and an increase in the COVID-19 fatality rate by 0.027 percentage point.”126 Perhaps the clearest evidence of the link between higher vulnerability to COVID-19 mortality and air-pollutionrelated chronic illnesses is provided by the case of the 1984 Bhopal gas tragedy survivors who contracted COVID-19. According to the Bhopal Gas Tragedy Relief and Rehabilitation department of the Madhya Pradesh state

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government, until December 2, 2020, 518 people have died due to COVID-19 in Bhopal district, out of which 102 were Bhopal gas tragedy survivors. However, nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) such as Bhopal Group for Information and Action (BGIA) and other survivors groups who have been fighting for the rights of the Bhopal victims for thirty-six years have claimed that the number of COVID-19 deaths of Bhopal gas leak survivors were much higher—they accounted for at least 254 of the total 518 deaths in Bhopal,127 that is, half the COVID-19 related deaths in Bhopal were among gas leak survivors as a result of their life-long ailments contracted from exposure to the toxic gas leak at the Union Carbide pesticide factory in 1984. Naturally, these findings are highly significant for India which was home to twenty-two of the thirty most polluted cities in the world in 2020,128 while Delhi remained the most polluted capital city in the world for the third year consecutively, and this despite the city’s air quality improving by approximately 15 percent between 2019 and 2020129 due to the COVID-19 lockdowns! The fact that even during “the year of the pandemic,” when industrial activity and vehicular traffic had seen a sharp decline resulting in the residents of Delhi rejoicing at the sight of blue skies and birdsong in the air after years, air pollution still claimed 54,000 lives prematurely in India’s capital at an estimated cost of USD 8.1 billion130 to the country’s economy should give us pause about the scale of the predicament before us. A research paper published in the Lancet Planet Health journal revealed that in 2019 lost output from premature deaths and morbidity attributable to air pollution in India accounted for a total loss of USD 36.8 billion to India’s economy, which was 1.36 percent of India’s gross domestic product (GDP) for that year.131 In the winter of 2019, air quality in India’s capital city reached the “emergency” category according to the country’s National Air Quality Index (AQI). According to the AQI, a rating of 0–50 is “good,” 51–100 is “satisfactory,” 101–200 is “moderate,” 201–300 is “poor,” 301–400 is “very poor,” and 401–500 is “severe.” A rating above 500 is considered the “emergency” category, and Delhi’s air quality received an AQI score of 999, which according to doctors and medical experts is the equivalent of smoking fifty cigarettes a day!132 The thick, deathly pall that shrouds Delhi in a haze of toxicity in the winter months has earned the city the moniker of “gas chamber” and is costing the average Delhi resident an estimated 9.4 years of life, which could be prevented if the city were to follow the air quality standards set by the World Health Organization (WHO).133 Indeed today, India’s air quality rivals that of Victorian England 150 years ago. Given these alarming figures, it is little wonder that Delhi was the epicenter of the pandemic’s “second wave” in the country. The real question is, why hasn’t India done anything to fix this persistent public health emergency even though it is evident that ignoring the problem

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of air pollution results in considerable annual economic losses to the country and has already diminished the life expectancy of Indians? The answer to this question is simple. The short-term gains to India’s economy from its biggest polluters outweigh the losses incurred from pollution. For instance, the corporation owned by Indian billionaire and Asia’s richest man, Mukesh Ambani’s Reliance Industries, makes the highest contribution of 6.8 percent to India’s total merchandise exports.134 Indeed, the situation in India today is akin to what Gilles Deleuze perceptively called “societies of control,” where the corporation has replaced disciplinary institutions of enclosure such as the army, factory, school, and prison in exercising continuous, imperceptible forms of control over the population and the state machinery. In finding the “paths of least resistance,” the corporatized state has unleashed a toxic war against nature that has poisoned the very circle of life. ‌‌‌‌ us, then, take a closer look at the main sources of air pollution in Delhi. Let According to one study, the major factors (other contributing factors include “open waste burning, combustion of fuels for cooking, lighting, and heating, and in-situ power generation via diesel generator sets . . . seasonal emissions from dust storms, forest fires, and open field fires during harvest season”135) causing Delhi’s poor air quality are “the city’s landlocked geographical location, crop burning in neighbouring states (Punjab, Haryana and Rajasthan), vehicular emissions, industrial pollution, and large-scale construction activities.”136 While stubble burning by farmers in neighboring states is frequently and most vocally blamed for Delhi’s elevated levels of pollution during winter months, of these sources, industrial emissions account for 18.6 percent of Delhi’s air pollution, vehicular fumes are responsible for 41 percent of the city’s total air pollution, and dust from construction activities (which results in the noxious mixture called “smog”) causes 30 percent of this pollution.137 From this data it is apparent that the industrial and construction sectors are responsible for nearly 50 percent of Delhi’s air pollution crisis. The Delhi–National Capital Region (NCR) has as many as 3,182 industries spread across it and yet neither the center nor the Delhi state governments have enforced compliance with existing environmental policies, as a result of which emissions as high as 200–1000 tons/year are encountered over industrial zones in the region.138 Similarly, the construction industry routinely flouts environmental mandates such as “covering up debris and waste management.”139 As for the other single major cause of air quality decline, the only way to check vehicular pollution is to develop a robust and green public transportation system, enforce strict vehicular emissions norms, and limit the number of vehicles allowed on Delhi’s roads. Interestingly, truck and tractors, two-wheelers, and three-wheelers are the major polluters on Delhi’s roads, contributing 9 percent, 7 percent, and 5 percent to the overall emissions in

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the city, while cars and buses contribute 3 percent each.140 While the state government, since 2016, has introduced various measures to check vehicular pollution, these have proven ineffective. Though it lies beyond the scope of the present study to present a detailed account of these measures and the reasons for their failure, suffice it to say here that once again corruption in the system, poorly designed policies, and the gap between policy and practice have been the reasons for the nonperformance of these policies. Even though air pollution in Indian cities has been steadily rising since the economic liberalization of the country in 1991, there has been no comprehensive and sustained effort at curbing the problem and most policies introduced to check air pollution in the last decade have been sporadically implemented as knee-jerk reactions to public outrage against hazardous air quality. Indeed, the pursuit of profit, whether economic or political, has been the underlying factor driving such policymaking. Unsurprisingly then, India has been reluctant to hold its most influential policy-makers accountable for the airborne crisis and address the real causes of air pollution in cities like Delhi. Instead of targeting industry, India has resorted to temporary, piece-meal, and therefore ultimately ineffectual gestures to pacify voices of opposition. For instance, in 2020, the Delhi government installed three “mini smog towers” across the city costing INR 7 lakhs [USD 9,405] to combat the dangerous levels of air pollution during the winter months. But the sheer inadequacy of the measure was highlighted in the media, and as one report pointed out, “If Delhi were to clean its open air through smog towers such as the one in Lajpat Nagar [a residential and commercial neighbourhood in Southeast Delhi], it would need 5 million such towers during winters, with an outlay of ₹3.5 trillion.”141 Then, in October 2020, the Delhi government repeated the narrative in declaring an allocation of INR 20 crore [approximately USD 3 million] for the installation of one “smog tower” in central Delhi.142 Similarly, the Supreme Court’s ban on the bursting of firecrackers during the Hindu festival of Diwali in 2019 (which falls in the winter months and contributes to a deterioration of the city’s air) and the permission instead for the manufacture, sale, and use of only “green firecrackers” in the city, failed to improve the toxic air. Green firecrackers generate about 30 percent less emissions and do not contain toxic chemicals such as barium and strontium. And yet, despite the Supreme Court order, the illegal manufacture and sale of banned firecrackers continued unabated in the Delhi–NCR region in the absence of diligent enforcement of the new regulations, and simultaneously a severe shortage in the availability of “green firecrackers” in the market ensured the continued sales of banned firecrackers.143 The existing problem of India’s toxic air has been compounded by the detrimental socioeconomic effects of COVID-19, and this will further jeopardize the health of India’s people. The increase in levels of poverty means more

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poor Indians will turn to burning polluting biomass fuels such wood, dung, crop waste, or coal in order to meet their cooking and heating needs. Solid fuels when burned on an open hearth or in inefficient and poorly ventilated stoves in poor households are a source of indoor air pollution leading to “the development of acute lower respiratory disease, chronic obstructive pulmonary disease, cancers, and other illnesses.”144 According to the World Health Organization, inefficient burning of solid fuels is responsible for an estimated 1.6 million deaths per year globally and “more than half of these deaths occur among children under five years of age.”145 In India, an estimated 13 percent of the population still does not have access to a “supply” of electricity, even as the government announced in 2019 that all Indian homes have been “connected” with electricity.146 Moreover, more than half of the country’s population was reliant on biomass fuels for cooking before the pandemic.147 These disparities will only grow in the wake of the pandemic. Having said this however, as Sunita Narain crucially points out, we need to “distinguish between the ‘survival’ emissions of the poorest—for example, their use of polluting cookstoves which cause severe health damage—and the ‘luxury’ emissions generated by rich and powerful elites to maintain their consumer lifestyles.”148 Even though cooking on biomass stoves pollutes locally and is detrimental to the health of the women who use them, unlike carbon dioxide, it has a relatively short life in the atmosphere and disappears in a few weeks.149 The answer then lies in using energy that is renewable but in ways that is clean for the poorest of the world and the planet. And finally, the rise in unemployment and the subsequent store of excess labor will compel poor Indians to increasingly (re)turn to toxic trades such as informal e-waste management, waste-picking, and working in hazardous factories and industries in an effort at securing means to a livelihood. Repeating the Toxic Past: COVID19 and the New Circle of Poison Land Across the world, the spread of COVID-19 has led to a sharp rise in the consumption of single-use plastics and in the generation of biomedical waste (BMW). The extensive dependence on personal protective equipment (PPE) such as hazmat suits, disposable masks and gloves, and other health-related single-use plastics, but also the increased consumer demand for food takeaway and home-delivered groceries invariably packaged in disposable plastics have reversed years of hard-won gains in combating plastic pollution. Furthermore, a steep decline in oil prices due to global lockdowns have

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made it more cost-effective to manufacture virgin plastics from fossil fuels than recycling used plastics, and this “cost incentive” has given a boost to plastics manufacturers, fueling an increase in the production of plastics.150 In India, this additional load of toxic wastes has overwhelmed the country’s already inadequate waste treatment infrastructure and has resulted in a rise in improper disposal practices such as open dumping and unsafe incineration that lead to known environmental and human harms. Simply ignoring the problem of waste and pretending it no longer exists after we dump it in a landfill and forget about it or burn it, does not make it disappear and certainly does not ensure that we will remain “safe” from its toxic effects. As we are well aware, matter does not disappear—it simply changes form. And most often, as it happens with toxic chemicals and contaminated wastes, the new forms into which contaminated substances break down are more toxic and pose a greater risk to the health and longevity of the human and natural worlds, as is the situation encountered in India. However, ensuring proper segregation and safe management and disposal of hazardous biomedical waste is not the only challenge confronting the country. The evidence of data manipulation by government agencies to conceal the real infrastructural and management shortfalls as well as the failure to ensure compliance with the Bio-Medical Waste Management Rules 2016 are serious impediments to environmental remediation measures and future policymaking as they distort the scale and nature of the problem. According to data collected by the Indian government’s primary pollution control and monitoring agency, the Central Pollution Control Board (CPCB), the country has generated approximately 45,954 tons of COVID19 waste from May 1, 2020 to May 10, 2021.151 This amounts to 126 tons of COVID-19 waste per day which is in addition to the 614 tons of nonCOVID-19 biomedical waste generated in the country per day, indicating a 20 percent rise in the total biomedical waste generation in the country.152 Therefore, India has been generating approximately 740 tons of biomedical waste daily during COVID-19. Furthermore, according to a CPCB report submitted to the National Green Tribunal (NGT) in January 2021, the country has the capacity to treat 826 tons of biomedical waste a day across its 198 common biomedical waste treatment facilities (CBMWFs) and other captive waste disposal facilities in hospitals.153 This seems to suggest that the country has sufficient waste treatment capacity to handle the new influx of COVID-19 biomedical wastes. However, a study conducted by the Centre for Science and Environment (CSE) found contradictory and erroneous data in CPCB’s own records which suggest that the country’s actual biomedical waste treatment capacity is 754 tons a day and not 826 tons, and in terms of ground realities this capacity too is most likely an overestimation. This data illustrates that the country is ill-prepared to handle any surge in COVID-19

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waste production, as India encountered during its “second wave” in May 2021 when the total biomedical waste generated reached 800 tons a day.154 This infrastructural deficit exists across India where as many as “22 of the 35 states and union territories generated more biomedical waste than their treatment capacity.”155 The significant infrastructural deficit combined with the lack of regulatory oversight in ensuring compliance with safe waste segregation rules and the poor dissemination of information regarding new COVID-19 waste handling and disposal guidelines has triggered a toxic overflow in India’s already contaminated natural world. Once again, failures and corruption in political decision-making have set in motion a chain reaction of toxicity where the effects of poisoning the land can be felt in breathing in more toxic air and drinking more heavily contaminated water. The BMW Management Rules 2016 direct health care facilities to follow a color-coded waste segregation system for biomedical wastes, which must be sent for treatment to an authorized waste disposal and treatment facility within forty-eight hours. According to the color-coded system, “yellow” wastes are highly infectious anatomical or chemical wastes that are to be incinerated at very high temperatures of 800–1,050 degrees Celsius, or subject to plasma pyrolysis, a thermal process using high temperature in an oxygen-starved environment to dissociate waste, or deep burial in rural or remote places; “red” wastes are contaminated recyclable plastic wastes and should be sterilized before “autoclaving,” a process using high-pressured boiling water, and finally, recycled; “blue” wastes are broken and contaminated glassware; and “white” wastes are waste sharps (usually metal) such as needles and fixed syringes. All COVID-19 related wastes are considered biomedical wastes due to their highly toxic and infectious nature and must therefore be disposed in the correct colored bag for proper management by the waste disposal and treatment facilities. While the government issued special guidelines for PPE kits, goggles, and other COVID-19–related disposable plastics to be discarded in the “red” bin in hospitals, it makes no mention of how such waste is to be segregated at home and in quarantine centers. COVID-19 wastes from households, in the absence of clear guidelines and monitoring, remains unsegregated and mixed with other household municipal solid wastes, while quarantine centers are provided only with “yellow” bags as a result of which “everything from food waste and disposable cutlery to masks, PPE kits and gloves” is discarded in yellow bags, which are then sent for incineration.156 Fear, superstition, panic, and rampant mismanagement during COVID-19 have played a major role in most COVID-19 wastes being sent for incineration, which is widely regarded as the safest way of killing the infection.157 Due to such a high volume of unsegregated wastes including mixed “yellow” biomedical waste (Y-BMW) being sent for incineration, the quantity of plastics being burned has risen sharply.

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According to one study, 28 percent of hospitals in India do not segregate biomedical waste properly and 40 percent of the country’s yellow biomedical waste (Y-BMW) is not being treated as per the mandated guidelines.158 The study found that the average proportion of “yellow” BMW in India’s total BMW is 50.44 percent,159 which means that more than half of India’s hazardous biomedical waste is being incinerated. The increase in the generation of unsegregated Y-BMW during COVID-19 and the persistence of improper incineration practices used in the disposal of “yellow” wastes has resulted in the addition of “a significant amount of gases, heavy metals and PCBs into India’s atmosphere” such as nitrogen oxides (NOx), carbon monoxide (CO), sulphur oxide (SOx), particulate matter (PM), hydrogen chloride (HCl), cadmium (Cd), lead (Pb), mercury (Hg), polychlorinated biphenyls (PCBs), nickel (Ni), chromium (Cr), beryllium (Be), and arsenic (As).160 The detrimental effects on human health and the environment caused by these pollutants have been well-researched and they are known to cause a series of severe chronic illnesses as well as hasten the process of climate change. For instance, heavy metals such as lead, zinc, cadmium, nickel, arsenic, and PCBs lead to extensive soil and water contamination and sustained exposure to these pollutants is a carcinogenic risk factor for both adults and children.161 Furthermore, as we have already seen, noxious gases such as nitrous oxides, sulphur dioxide, and furans emitted by burning plastic waste found in “yellow” biomedical waste are responsible for smog formation and India’s toxic air, severely impacting the respiratory system of humans.162 But improper incineration is not the only unsafe waste disposal practice observed with highly infectious COVID-19 wastes in India. As many media reports have uncovered, due to a warlike humanitarian crisis in the country during the second wave and the incapacity of India’s waste treatment facilities to manage the growing mountains of toxic waste, much of the COVID-19 infected waste from hospitals, quarantine centers, and households was being dumped in public places and burial pits in cities like Delhi, Pune in the state of Maharashtra, and Vijayawada in Andhra Pradesh.163 Unmarked and open dumping of biomedical waste poses the greatest health risk to poor waste pickers in the informal economy, who are mostly children, and sanitation workers through direct contact with infectious wastes in the absence of personal protective gear, and has the potential to release pathogens into the environment leading to new health emergencies. But open disposal of untreated biomedical waste can also leach toxic pollutants into the surface and groundwater sources, and drinking contaminated water is the biggest source of premature mortality in children not only in India but worldwide.164 Furthermore, contaminated water will further aggravate the growing threat of antimicrobial resistance (AMR), the main drivers of which according to the World Health Organization are “lack of clean water and sanitation and inadequate infection

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prevention and control [that] promotes the spread of microbes, some of which can be resistant to antimicrobial treatment.”165 The WHO has declared AMR, which occurs when “bacteria, fungi, viruses and parasites no longer respond to medicines making infections harder to treat,”166 as one of the top ten global public health threats facing humanity. In addition to the dumping and burning of tons of untreated biomedical waste, the despoilment of land during India’s deadly second wave of the pandemic has also been caused due to the steep rise in the “death burden” faced by the country. The most devastating symbolic representation of a state that has reneged on its promise of care to its citizens was encapsulated in all its brutality and violence by the media images of human corpses lined up outside hospital morgues and cremation grounds, and the shocking sight of mass cremations conducted in makeshift cremation grounds in public parks and parking lots in New Delhi. During the pandemic, the Indian state’s collective ways of making death became palpable not only in the high death rates but also in the additional strain on natural resources such as wood. According to the traditional customs of Hinduism, the majority religion in India followed by nearly 80 percent of the population,167 the body of the dead must be brought to sacred grounds that are open-air spaces called “shamshan” (Hindi word for cremation ground) where the body’s “antim sanskar” (or last rites) is performed and the body burned on a funeral pyre made of wood. In Hinduism, fire is seen as a purifying force that helps release the soul from the body, after which the ashes of the dead should be scattered in a river, preferably in holy rivers like the Ganges River, to ensure salvation for the departed soul. In the month of May 2021, as India started recording over 4,000 COVID-19 deaths per day in addition to the non-COVID-19–related death burden, the unprecedented rise in the demand for daily cremations led to the oversaturation of Delhi’s existing crematoria and necessitated the emergency allotment of uninhabited public land in the city for shouldering the weight of departing with the dead. As reports of more than twenty-hour-long queues outside Delhi’s cremation grounds began to spread, the Delhi government authorities gave permission for the city’s valuable green spaces such as parks to be used for building funeral pyres. For instance, in an effort at increasing capacity for cremations, at least fifty new brick-and-mortar cremation platforms were constructed at a public park in southeast Delhi’s Sarai Kale Khan. And as the requirement for cremations increased, so did the requirement for wood to build the pyres. Even the capital’s electric crematoria were working beyond capacity, and since most Indians continue to prefer wood-based cremations in alignment with traditional customs, the acute shortage of wood lead to the black marketing and illegal felling of trees to meet the rising needs of the capital. According to one funeral manager of a crematorium in Delhi, whereas wood was being sold for INR 400–500 (USD 5.3–6.7) per quintal

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(equal to 100 kgs) before the COVID-19 surge, it was now being sold for as high as INR 700 (USD 9.4) per 100 kilograms.168 But if each funeral pyre requires about three or four quintals (300–400 kgs) of wood and with as many as 100–190 cremations169 being held at Delhi’s main cremation ground, Nigambodh Ghat, located along the banks of the River Yamuna, at the peak of the crisis, one can imagine the environmental cost of India’s human tragedy. According to a Hindustan Times article, Delhi’s Municipal Corporations granted permission for the felling of 400 “dead and dried” trees in the city as well as granted “early cutting permissions” to development projects like the construction of the regional rapid transit system (RRTS) for the purpose of meeting the growing demand for wood, even as multiple instances of illegal felling of fully grown trees across the city was reported by the forest department.170 There is no way of knowing how many trees were cut down legally and illegally during India’s COVID-19 emergency, but for a country that can ill afford a further attack on its air quality, the extensive loss of its green cover as well as the additional smoke generated from round-the-clock cremations in the city will only aggravate the country’s disease burden and its vulnerability to the devastating effects of climate change. This rapid depletion of tree cover in the country’s capital during COVID-19 was exacerbated, once again, by the government’s development-at-the-costof-the-environment approach to growth. Even as the citizens of Delhi were struggling to access medical care and arrange a dignified cremation for their loved ones, the Indian state machinery prioritized the construction of its sprawling USD 2.8 billion Central Vista Redevelopment Project, ironically classified as an “essential service” by the Supreme Court of India, at the heart of the city along Delhi’s historic Rajpath (King’s Way), a wide tree-lined ceremonial boulevard with manicured lawns on either side that hosts India’s Republic Day Parade every January 26. The government’s Central Vista Project is an extensive redevelopment plan for the seat of Parliament in New Delhi and includes plans for building new residences for the president and prime minister as well as a new parliament building. The elaborate project has been severely criticized by citizens and the national and international media for the unnecessary national expenditure on what has been called a “vanity project” in the media, at a time when India is facing multiple environmental crises as well as a public health emergency. While the rest of the city was in lockdown and ravaged by the second wave of the virus, destruction and demolition of Delhi’s most iconic landmarks along the 3.2 km stretch from Rashtrapati Bhavan (the president’s estate) to India Gate war memorial continued uninterrupted by the state as part of the redevelopment project. The violence of historical and cultural erasure in pursuit of capitalist greed was accompanied by violence against the environment. Unsurprisingly, environmental activists have pointed out that the environmental impact of the

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redevelopment project has not been assessed and the project has been allowed to bypass an independent Environment Impact Assessment.171 According to the minutes of the Expert Appraisal Committee (EAC) the project has been granted permission to “transplant” 3,230 trees, several of them over a 100 years old and planted as part of the original design of “Lutyens’s Delhi” in the 1920s, from the development site to other locations in the city.172 However, it is widely believed that even if the trees are transplanted as per the project plan, they will not survive the transplantation. Reflection In a recent article, Arundhati Roy, Indian activist and award-winning writer, has called the pandemic “a portal, a gateway between one world and the next” because “it offers us a chance to rethink the doomsday machine we have built for ourselves.”173 The pandemic has disrupted this normal by “bringing the engine of capitalism to a juddering halt,” not permanently perhaps but, in Roy’s eloquent words, “long enough for us to examine its parts, make an assessment and decide whether we want to help fix it, or look for a better engine.”174 But I believe it is also a mirror which reveals the out of sight. The pandemic has exposed the uncertainty and perplexity of life itself and proved hollow the arrogance of man as conquerors of nature. That the modern notions of “stability” and “order” have been plunged into crisis by this microscopic organism is only a reminder of how easily the “normal order” of human life can be thrown out of gear by nature. The pandemic has foregrounded the global necropolitics of death and dying more effectively than even wars have done and has rendered visible with such brutal and shocking immediacy, what Žižek called, the “invisible, systemic violence” which maintains the “normal” everyday order of things. According to Roy, “Historically, pandemics have forced humans to break with the past and imagine their world anew.”175 In her book Pandemic, Sonia Shah gives a brief history of the rise, spread and treatment of cholera in making the point that the management of the cholera pandemic forced Western countries to collaborate, and rewrote the science of health and disease.176 Indeed, pandemics have forced us to reinvent and improve ourselves. As Roy says, the pandemic presents an opportunity to rethink the idea of the “normal”—what kind of normal do we want?—and create a new normal, more just and equitable, than yearn for the one we have left behind. Whether this pandemic will be a portal to a brave new world as Arundhati Roy hopes or a reconsolidation of the powers that be toward a new normal more terrifying in the deftness with which it excludes, impoverishes, and invisiblizes the dispossessed, I suppose only time will tell. But until such time

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as we emerge into a postpandemic world, I think it is imperative that we read the pandemic as a looking-glass for the present state of the world in the hopes of rectifying its failures and weaknesses on our journey toward building a better tomorrow. Perhaps we can begin by returning to the question posed by Achille Mbembe in Necropolitics, “what is a good life and good living?” Notes 1. Saskia Sassen, Expulsions: Brutality and Complexity in the Global Economy (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2014), 1. 2. Ibid. 3. Ibid. 4. Ibid. 5. Rachel Carson, Silent Spring (Boston: Mariner Books, 2002), 186. 6. Sunita Narain, “A Year to Reiterate, Re-Imagine and Re-Invent,” in State of India’s Environment 2021 (New Delhi: Centre for Science and Environment, 2021), 8. 7. Shanna H. Swan with Stacey Colino, Countdown: How Our Modern World Is Threatening Sperm Counts, Altering Male and Female Reproductive Development, and Imperiling the Future of the Human Race (New York: Simon & Schuster, Inc., 2020), 197. 8. Nikhil Pandhi, “COVID-19 and India’s New Viral Necropolitics,” The Wire, May 25, 2021, https:​//​thewire​.in​/rights​/covid​-19​-india​-necropolitics​-caste. 9. Michel Foucault, “The Political Technology of Individuals,” in Power: Essential Works 1954–84, ed. James D Faubion, trans. Robert Hurley (UK: Penguin Books, 2000), 404. 10. Dilip M. Menon, “Viral Histories: Thinking in a Pandemic,” Thesis Eleven: Critical Theory and Historical Sociology, July 28, 2020, Viral Histories: Thinking in a Pandemic | Thesis Eleven. 11. Morgan McFall-Johnsen, “India Is the First Country to Record 400,000 Coronavirus Cases in a Single Day,” Business Insider India, May 2, 2021, https:​//​www​ .businessinsider​.com​.au​/india​-first​-country​-to​-record​-400000​-single​-day​-coronavirus​ -cases​-2021​-5​?r​=US​&IR​=T. 12. Narain, “A Year to Reiterate, Re-Imagine and Re-Invent,” 8–9. 13. Achille Mbembe, “Necropolitics,” in Necropolitics, trans. Steven Corcoran (Durham: Duke University Press, 2019), 66. 14. Mbembe, “Exit from Democracy,” in Necropolitics, trans. Steven Corcoran (Durham: Duke University Press, 2019), 37. 15. Ibid., 38. 16. Pandhi, “COVID-19 and India’s New Viral Necropolitics.” See also, Anuja Bose, “Necropolitics,” Contemporary Political Theory, August 24, 2020, https:​//​doi​ .org​/10​.1057​/s41296​-020​-00438​-w. 17. Mbembe, Necropolitics, 38 (italics mine).

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18. Antonio Pele, “Achille Mbembe: Necropolitics,” criticallegalthinking, March 2, 2020, https:​//​criticallegalthinking​.com​/2020​/03​/02​/achille​-mbembe​-necropolitics​/. 19. Mbembe, Necropolitics, 92. 20. Bose, “Necropolitics”; Adam Kotsko, “Giorgio Agamben: Clarifications,” An und für sich, March 17, 2020, https:​//​itself​.blog​/2020​/03​/17​/giorgio​-agamben​ -clarifications​/; Tarusi Jain, “COVID-19, Necropolitics and the Migrant,” Sabrang, May 27, 2020, https:​//​sabrangindia​.in​/article​/covid​-19​-necropolitics​-and​-migrant. 21. Mbembe, Necropolitics, 82. 22. Ibid. 23. Vandana Shiva, “Preface,” in Oneness vs. the 1%: Shattering Illusions, Seeding Freedom (Victoria: Spinifex Press, 2018), ix-x. 24. India’s rank in 2020 was 117 out of 166 countries with a score of 61.9/100 in the Sustainable Development Report 2020. In 2021, a total of 165 countries have been evaluated which makes the effective drop in India’s overall rank two places. 25. Jeffrey D. Sachs et al., Sustainable Development Report 2021: The Decade of Action for the Sustainable Development Goals (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2021), 248–49. 26. Ibid., 248. 27. Shiva, Oneness vs. the 1%, viii. 28. Ibid., vii. 29. Ibid., xi. 30. Anthony Shorrocks, James Davies, and Rodrigo Lluberas, “China and India,” in Global Wealth Report 2021 (Credit Suisse Research Institute, 2021), 39. 31. Shiva, Oneness vs. the 1%, viii. 32. For coverage on the Modi government’s role in exacerbating the virus see: Nitasha Kaul, “COVID in India: A Tragedy with Its Roots in Narendra Modi’s Leadership Style,” The Conversation, May 12, 2021, https:​//​theconversation​.com​/ covid​-in​-india​-a​-tragedy​-with​-its​-roots​-in​-narendra​-modis​-leadership​-style​-160552; “India’s Modi Slammed for COVID Handling amid Apiralling Crisis,” Aljazeera, May 5, 2021, https:​//​www​.aljazeera​.com​/news​/2021​/5​/5​/crime​-against​-humanity​ -indias​-modi​-slammed​-for​-covid​-handling; Joanna Slater and Niha Masih, “In India’s Surge, a Religious Gathering Attended by Millions Helped the Virus Spread,” The Washington Post, May 8, 2021, https:​//​www​.washingtonpost​.com​/world​/2021​/05​/08​/ india​-coronavirus​-kumbh​-mela​/. 33. Kiran Pandey and Rajit Sengupta, State of India’s Environment: In Figures 2021 (New Delhi: Centre for Science and Environment, 2021), 27. 34. Ibid. 35. Ibid. 29. 36. Ibid. 30. 37. Matthew Martin et al., Fighting Inequality in the Time of COVID-19: The Commitment to Reducing Inequality Index 2020, Development Finance and Oxfam Report (October 8, 2020), 7, Fighting Inequality in the time of COVID-19: The Commitment to Reducing Inequality Index 2020 (openrepository.com). 38. Mayurakshi Dutta and Sucheta Sardar, “Unaffordable and Frequently Absent Healthcare,” in The Inequality Virus: Davos India Supplement, 2021 (New Delhi:

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Oxfam India, 2021), 11, The Inequality Virus - India Supplement (Designed).pdf (d1ns4ht6ytuzzo.cloudfront.net). 39. “Coronavirus: The ‘Unknown’ COVID-19 Deaths in Rural India,” BBC News, June 8, 2021, https:​//​www​.bbc​.com​/news​/av​/world​-asia​-india​-57383131. 40. Brinda Karat, “For Modi Government, Migrant Workers Are Not Citizens,” NDTV Opinion, May 3, 2020, https:​//​www​.ndtv​.com​/opinion​/opinion​-pm​-cares​-fund​ -should​-pay​-for​-migrants​-trains​-home​-2222653. 41. Dutta and Sardar, The Inequality Virus, 13. 42. Stranded Workers Action Network (SWAN), “21 Days and Counting: Covid-19 Lockdown, Migrant Workers, and the Inadequacy of Welfare Measures in India,” (Stranded Workers Action Network (SWAN), April 15, 2020), 6, 21 Days and Counting: COVID-19 Lockdown, Migrant Workers, and the Inadequacy of Welfare Measures in India (ruralindiaonline.org). 43. Ibid. 44. Ibid. 7–8. 45. Express Web Desk, “Coronavirus Lockdown: So Far, over 130 Migrants Killed in Accidents en Route to Their Home States,” Indian Express, May 18, 2020, https:​ //​indianexpress​.com​/article​/india​/coronavirus​-lockdown​-count​-of​-migrants​-killed​-in​ -accidents​-enroute​-their​-home​-states​-6412475​/. 46. Karat, “For Modi Government, Migrant Workers Are Not Citizens.” 47. Gaurav Vivek Bhatnagar, “Across Waves of COVID-19 in India, Sanitation Workers Remain Most Ignored,” The Wire, May 31, 2021, https:​//​thewire​.in​/rights​/ across​-waves​-of​-covid​-19​-in​-india​-sanitation​-workers​-remain​-most​-ignored. 48. A Rajput, “Delhi: Half of Covid Dead under Municipal Corporations Are Safai Karamcharis,” Indian Express, May 28, 2021, https:​//​indianexpress​.com​/article​/cities​ /delhi​/delhi​-half​-of​-covid​-dead​-under​-municipal​-corporations​-are​-safai​-karamcharis​ -7333365​/ 49. Bhatnagar, “Across Waves of COVID-19 in India.” 50. Jayati Gosh, “A Critique of the Indian Government’s Response to the COVID-19 Pandemic,” Journal of Industrial and Business Economics 47 (2020): 519–30, https:​//​doi​.org​/10​.1007​/s40812​-020​-00170​-x. 51. Dutta and Sardar, The Inequality Virus, 15. 52. Ibid. 53. Ibid. 54. Winy Daigavane and Pavan Belmannu, “Impact of the Global Pandemic on Indian Labor Laws,” Jurist: Legal News & Commentary, May 20, 2020, https:​//​www​ .jurist​.org​/commentary​/2020​/05​/daigavane​-belmannu​-labor​-law​-suspensions​-india​/. 55. Martin et al., Fighting Inequality in the Time of COVID-19, 7. 56. Amit Basole et al., State of Working India 2021—One Year of Covid-19 (Karnataka: Azim Premji University (APU), May 5, 2021), 24, State_of_Working_ India_2021-One_year_of_Covid-19.f1623001426.pdf (azimpremjiuniversity.edu.in). 57. Rakesh Kochhar, “In the Pandemic, India’s Middle Class Shrinks and Poverty Spreads While China Sees Smaller Changes,” Pew Research Center, March 18, 2021, https:​//​www​.pewresearch​.org​/fact​-tank​/2021​/03​/18​/in​-the​-pandemic​-indias​-middle​ -class​-shrinks​-and​-poverty​-spreads​-while​-china​-sees​-smaller​-changes​/.

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58. Diksha Madhok, “India’s Billionaires Got Richer While Coronavirus Pushed Millions of Vulnerable People into Poverty,” CNN Business, July 6, 2021, https:​ //​edition​.cnn​.com​/2021​/07​/05​/economy​/ambani​-adani​-india​-covid​-billionaires​-intl​ -hnk​/index​.html. 59. Ibid. 60. Ibid. 61. Dutta and Sardar, The Inequality Virus, 2. 62. Ibid. 63. Swati Gupta and Hanna Ziady, “India Suffers First Recession in Decades,” CNN Business, November 27, 2020, https:​//​edition​.cnn​.com​/2020​/11​/27​/economy​/ india​-recession​/index​.html. 64. Madhok, “India’s Billionaires Got Richer.” 65. Dutta and Sardar, The Inequality Virus, 2. 66. Madhok, “India’s Billionaires Got Richer.” 67. Shiva with Shiva, Oneness vs. the 1%, vii–viii. 68. Deborah Hardoon, Sophia Ayele, and Ricardo Fuentes-Nieva, “An Economy for the 1%: How Privilege and Power in the Economy Drive Extreme Inequality and How This Can Be Stopped” (Oxford: Oxfam GB, January 18, 2016), 4, An Economy for the 1%: How Privilege and Power in the Economy Drive Extreme Inequality and How This Can Be Stopped. 69. Ibid. 70. Ibid., 3. 71. Ibid. 72. Ibid. 73. Outlook Web Bureau, “Govt Allows Commercial Mining of Coal, FM Says Rs 50,000 Crore to Be Spent on Infrastructure,” Outlook Magazine, May 16, 2020, https:​ //​www​.outlookindia​.com​/website​/story​/business​-news​-commercial​-mining​-of​-coal​-to​ -start​-govt​-monopoly​-to​-be​-removed​-fm​-sitharaman​/352909. 74. Amitabh Kant, “Privitisation of Coal Sector Will Transform India’s Growth Trajectory,” Financial Express, July 23, 2020, https:​//​www​.financialexpress​.com​ /opinion​/privatisation​-of​-coal​-sector​-will​-transform​-indias​-growth​-trajectory​-writes​ -amitabh​-kant​/2032424​/. 75. Alastair Marsh, “Adani Boosting Coal Assets Despite Vow to Be Carbon Negative,” Bloomberg, July 12, 2021, https:​//​www​.bloomberg​.com​/news​/articles​/2021​-07​ -12​/adani​-boosting​-coal​-assets​-despite​-pledge​-to​-turn​-carbon​-neutral. 76. “The Adani Files: A Short History of Corruption, Destruction and Criminal Activity,” GetUp Australia with Environmental Justice Australia and Earthjustice, February, 2017, Adani Files - A short history of corruption, destruction and criminal activity - Kractivism (kractivist.org). See also, Geoffegan, “Environmental Report Warns about Adani’s Track Record,” The Courier Mail Australia, February 15, 2017, https:​//​www​.couriermail​.com​.au​/news​/queensland​/sunshine​-coast​/environmental​ -report​-warns​-about​-adanis​-track​-record​/news​-story​/6c093a45587af01d9a38163e15 5f34c4. 77. “The Adani Files,” 6. 78. Ibid.

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79. Ibid. 80. Ibid., 7. 81. Ibid., 8. 82. Ibid., 3. 83. “Why Are People against Vedanta’s Sterlite Plant in Tuticorin? 6 Things You Should Know,” The Economic Times, May 25, 2018, https:​//​economictimes​ .indiatimes​.com​/news​/politics​-and​-nation​/whats​-wrong​-with​-vedantas​-sterlite​-unit​-in​ -tuticorin​-6​-things​-you​-should​-know​/articleshow​/64273066​.cms​?from​=mdr. 84. Purva Chitnis, “Five Times Vedanta Triggered Environmental Worries,” Bloomberg Prime, May 23, 2018, https:​//​www​.bloombergquint​.com​/business​/five​ -times​-vedanta​-triggered​-environment​-worries. 85. “Goa State Pollution Board Asks Sesa Goa to Stop Coke Oven Plant Operations,” The Economic Times, August 28, 2012, https:​//​economictimes​.indiatimes​.com​ /industry​/indl​-goods​/svs​/metals​-mining​/goa​-state​-pollution​-board​-asks​-sesa​-goa​-to​ -stop​-coke​-oven​-plant​-operations​/articleshow​/15885078​.cms. 86. Chitnis, “Five Times Vedanta Triggered Environmental Worries.” 87. Abhijeet Kumar, “Sterlite Re-visited,” TheCitizen.in, May 4, 2021, https:​//​www​ .thecitizen​.in​/index​.php​/en​/newsdetail​/index​/13​/20301​/sterlite​-re​-visited. 88. Tim Gould, Peter Zeniewski, Siddharth Singh et al., “Chapter 1,” in India Energy Outlook 2021, World Energy Outlook (International Energy Agency, 2021), 17–18, India Energy Outlook 2021 (windows.net). 89. Ibid. 90. Laura Cozzi, Musa Erdogan, Timothy Goodson et al., Global Energy Review 2021: Assessing the Effects of Economic Recoveries on Global Energy Demand and CO2 Emissions in 2021 (France: International Energy Agency, April 2021), 9, Global Energy Review 2021 (windows.net). 91. Vigya Sharma, “India’s Wicked Problem: How to Loosen Its Grip on Coal While Not Abandoning the Millions Who Depend on It,” The Conversation, July 15, 2021, https:​//​theconversation​.com​/indias​-wicked​-problem​-how​-to​-loosen​-its​-grip​-on​ -coal​-while​-not​-abandoning​-the​-millions​-who​-depend​-on​-it​-163075. 92. Jocelyn Timperley, “The Carbon Brief Profile: India,” Country Profiles, Carbon Brief: Clear on Climate, March 14, 2019, https:​//​www​.carbonbrief​.org​/the​ -carbon​-brief​-profile​-india. 93. Jonas Karstensen et al., “Key Srivers of Indian Greenhouse Gas Emissions,” Economic & Political Weekly 55, no. 15 (April 11, 2020), https:​//​www​.epw​.in​/journal​ /2020​/15​/special​-articles​/key​-drivers​-indian​-greenhouse​-gas​-emissions​.html. 94. Soundaram Ramanathan, “Coal Burning Responsible for Heavy Air Pollution in India: IEACCC Study,” Down to Earth magazine, February 15, 2021, https:​//​ www​.downtoearth​.org​.in​/news​/air​/coal​-burning​-responsible​-for​-heavy​-air​-pollution​ -in​-india​-ieaccc​-study​-75536. 95. Ibid. 96. Debo Adams et al., “A Pathway to Reducing Emissions from Coal Power in India,” International Centre for Sustainable Carbon, February 10, 2021, Report. 97. Bhasker Tripathi, “International Org Questions India Decision to Dilute Coal Plants’ Pollution Norms,” International Centre for Sustainable Carbon, March 18,

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2021, https:​//​www​.sustainable​-carbon​.org​/international​-org​-questions​-india​-decision​ -to​-dilute​-coal​-plants​-pollution​-norms​/. 98. Ibid. 99. Ibid. 100. Ramanathan, “Coal Burning Responsible for Heavy Air Pollution in India.” 101. DTE Staff, “State of India’s Environment: Quality of Air, Water, Land Worsened in India’s Industrial Clusters,” Down to Earth magazine, February 25, 2021, https:​//​www​.downtoearth​.org​.in​/news​/environment​/state​-of​-india​-s​-environment​ -quality​-of​-air​-water​-land​-worsened​-in​-india​-s​-industrial​-clusters​-75664. 102. “Clearance Is the Norm,” “SoE Release 2021 Presentation,” for State of India’s Environment Report 2021, Down To Earth magazine and Centre for Science and Environment (CSE), February 25, 2021, https:​//​cdn​.cseindia​.org​/attachments​/0​ .69111100​_1614253933​_soe​-release​-2021​.pdf. 103. Ibid. 104. Meenakshi Kapoor and Krithika A. Dinesh, “Throughout the Pandemic, Environmental Clearance Law Has Been Under the Chopping Block,” The Wire, May 23, 2021, https:​//​thewire​.in​/environment​/throughout​-the​-pandemic​-environmental​ -clearance​-law​-has​-been​-under​-the​-chopping​-block. 105. “Understanding EIA,” Centre for Science and Environment (CSE), cseindia.org, accessed June 23, 2021, https:​//​www​.cseindia​.org​/understanding​ -eia 383#:~:text=EIA%20as%20a%20mandatory%20regulatory,NEPA)%20 1969%20in%20the%20US.&text=However%2C%20there%20were%20 some%20developing,)%2C%20Philippines%20(1978). 106. Suhrith Parthasarthy, “Diluting the EIA Process Spells a Path of No Return,” The Hindu, August 1, 2020, https:​//​www​.thehindu​.com​/opinion​/lead​/diluting​-the​-eia​ -process​-spells​-a​-path​-of​-no​-return​/article32243585​.ece. 107. Krithika A. Dinesh and Meenakshi Kapoor, “As Forums for Public Scrutiny of Environmental Decisions Shrink, Public Interest Is Dealt a Blow,” Scroll.in, June 22, 2020, https:​//​scroll​.in​/article​/965276​/as​-forums​-for​-public​-scrutiny​-of​-environmental​ -decisions​-shrink​-public​-interest​-is​-dealt​-a​-blow. 108. Ibid. 109. Ibid. 110. Ibid. 111. “No Progress Made in Indian Health and Safety Crisis,” IndustriAll Global Union, March 10, 2021, http:​//​www​.industriall​-union​.org​/no​-progress​-made​-in​-indian​ -health​-and​-safety​-crisis. 112. Nikhil Ghanekar, “India Allowing Industries to Expand with Little Scrutiny Is Disaster Risk,” Business Standard, May 28, 2021, https:​//​www​.business​-standard​ .com​/article​/current​-affairs​/expansion​-of​-industrial​-units​-by​-minimising​-scrutiny​ -can​-lead​-to​-disasters​-121052800106​_1​.html. 113. All scores given by the EPI are out of 100. These differ from a country’s overall rank or position which depends on the number of participating countries. See, Zachary Wendling et al., Environmental Performance Index 2020 (New Haven, CT: Yale Center for Environmental Law & Policy, 2020), xii, DOI:10.13140/ RG.2.2.21182.51529.

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114. Wendling et al., Environmental Performance Index Report 2020, 50. 115. Kiran Pandey and Ranjit Sengupta, “Environmental Performance Index,” in State of India’s Environment: In Figures 2021 (New Delhi: Centre for Science and Environment (CSE), 2021), 14–15. 116. This figure represents cumulative deaths from both indoor (household) and outdoor (ambient) air pollution. 117. According to the latest figures at the time of writing, the total number of COVID-19 deaths worldwide is 4,035,037 as of July 12, 2021, 05:08 CEST. Information sourced from WHO Coronavirus (COVID-19) Dashboard, https:​//​covid19​.who​ .int​/. 118. Covington Team, “Air Pollution in India,” Global Policy Watch, April 13, 2017, https:​//​www​.globalpolicywatch​.com​/2017​/04​/air​-pollution​-in​-india​/. 119. Health Effects Institute, State of Global Air 2020, Special Report (Boston, MA: Health Effects Institute, 2020), 3. 120. Pandey and Sengupta, State of India’s Environment, 122. 121. Health Effects Institute, State of Global Air 2020, 6. 122. Thomas Bourdrel et al., “The Impact of Outdoor Air Pollution on COVID-19: A Review of Evidence from in vitro, Animal, and Human Studies,” European Respiratory Review 30, no. 200242 (2021): 1–18, https:​//​doi​.org​/10​.1183​/16000617​.0242​ -2020. 123. Health Effects Institute, State of Global Air 2020, 3. 124. The WHO recommended “safe” limit of PM2.5 concentration is 10 μg/m3. See Andrea Pozzer et al., “Regional and Global Contributions of Air Pollution to Risk of Death from COVID-19,” Cardiovascular Research 116, no. 14 (December 1, 2020): 2247–53,  https:​//​doi​.org​/10​.1093​/cvr​/cvaa288. Italics mine. 125. Ibid. 126. Takahiro Yamada, Hiroyuki Yamada, and Muthukumara Mani, “The Causal Effects of Long-Term PM2.5 Exposure on COVID-19 in India,” Policy Research Working Paper 9543, World Bank Group, (February 2021): 24, https:​//​documents1​ .worldbank​.org​/curated​/en​/655721612964437622​/pdf​/The​-Causal​-Effects​-of​-Long​ -Term​-PM2​-5​-Exposure​-on​-COVID​-19​-in​-India​.pdf. 127. DNA correspondent, “Bhopal Gas Tragedy: Govt Claims 102 Gas Leak Survivors Died of Covid-19, NGOs Quote Bigger Number,” DNA Media, December 3, 2020, https:​//​www​.dnaindia​.com​/india​/news​-bhopal​-gas​-tragedy​-36th​-anniversary​ -government​ - data​ - 102 ​ - gas ​ - leak ​ - survivors ​ - died ​ - covid ​ - 19 ​ - ngos ​ - bigger​ - number​ -2859741. 128. Disha Shetty, “22 out of Top 30 World’s Most Polluted Cities in India,” Forbes, March 16, 2021, https:​//​www​.forbes​.com​/sites​/dishashetty​/2021​/03​/16​/22​ -out​-of​-top​-30​-worlds​-most​-polluted​-cities​-in​-india​/​?sh​=2a83995d75ad. 129. According to data by the World Air Quality Report 2020, assessment of air pollution is based on concentration of PM2.5 per cubic meter, https:​//​www​.iqair​.com​ /us​/world​-most​-polluted​-cities. 130. “PM2.5 Air Pollution behind an Estimated 160,000 Deaths in World’s 5 Biggest Cities in 2020,” Greenpeace Southeast Asia, February 18, 2021, PM2.5 Air

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Pollution behind an Estimated 160,000 Deaths in World’s 5 Biggest Cities in 2020 Greenpeace Southeast Asia. 131. Anamika Pandey et al., “Health and Economic Impact of Air Pollution in the States of India: The Global Burden of Disease Study 2019,” Lancet Planet Health 5 (December 2020): e25–e38, https:​//​doi​.org​/10​.1016​/ S2542-5196(20)30298–9. 132. Umair Irfan, “The Law That’s Helping Fuel Delhi’s Deadly Air Pollution,” Vox Media, December 16, 2019, https:​//​www​.vox​.com​/science​-and​-health​/2019​/11​/8​ /20948348​/delhi​-india​-air​-pollution​-quality​-cause. 133. Jasjeev Gandhiok, “Delhiites Lose 9 Years’ Life Due to Pollution: Study,” The Times of India, July 29, 2020, https:​//​timesofindia​.indiatimes​.com​/city​/delhi​/delhiites​ -lose​-9​-years​-life​-due​-to​-pollution​-study​/articleshow​/77231671​.cms. 134. Deepali Sharma, “RIL’s Consolidated Revenue Reaches  ₹540,000 Crore: Key Financial Highlights,” Hindustan Times Business, June 24, 2021, https:​//​www​ .hindustantimes​.com​/business​/rils​-consolidated​-revenue​-reaches​-rs​-540​-000​-crore​ -key​-financial​-highlights​-101624523116437​.html. 135. Arpan Chatterji, “Air Pollution in Delhi: Filling the Policy Gaps,” ORF Occasional Paper, no. 291 (New Delhi: Observer Research Foundation (ORF), December 2020): 5–47, https:​//​www​.orfonline​.org​/research​/air​-pollution​-delhi​-filling​-policy​ -gaps​/​#​_edn2. 136. Ibid. 137. Ibid. 138. Ibid. 139. Ibid. 140. Ibid. 141. Tauseef Shahidi, “What Is India Missing in Its Battle against Air Pollution?,” Mint media, November 30, 2020, https:​//​www​.livemint​.com​/news​/india​/what​-is​-india​ -missing​-in​-its​-battle​-against​-air​-pollution​-11606459726967​.html. 142. J. Jagannath, “Delhi Cabinet Approves Installation of ₹20-cr ‘Smog Tower’ in Connaught Place,” Livemint.com, October 9, 2020, https:​//​www​.livemint​.com​/news​/ india​/delhi​-cabinet​-approves​-installation​-of​-rs​-20​-cr​-smog​-tower​-in​-connaught​-place​ -11602241906390​.html. 143. Md. Hizbullah, Syed Masroor Hasan, and Nitin Jain, “Green Diwali? Sale of Firecrackers in Delhi Continues Unabated,” India Today, October 25, 2019, https:​ //​www​.indiatoday​.in​/india​/story​/green​-diwali​-sale​-of​-firecrackers​-in​-delhi​-continues​ -unabated​-1612957​-2019​-10​-25. 144. “Indoor Air Pollution and Household Fuels,” Health and Environment Linkages Initiative (HELI), World Health Organization, accessed April 16, 2020, https:​//​ www​.who​.int​/heli​/risks​/indoorair​/en​/. 145. Ibid. 146. Timperley, “The Carbon Brief Profile: India.” 147. Ibid. 148. Sunita Narain, “Chapter 29: Poverty and Environmental Inequality in India,” in World Science Report 2016, (United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO), 2016), 1. 149. Ibid.

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150. Tanveer M. Adyel, “Accumulation of Plastic Waste during COVID-19,” Science 369, no. 6509 (September 11, 2020): 1314–1315, DOI: 10.1126/science. abd9925, https:​//​science​.sciencemag​.org​/content​/369​/6509​/1314. 151. Siddharth Ghanshyam Singh, “COVID-19 Will Place India’s Biomedical Waste Management under Terrible Strain,” Down to Earth magazine, June 30, 2021, https:​//​www​.downtoearth​.org​.in​/news​/waste​/covid​-19​-will​-place​-india​-s​-biomedical​ -waste​-management​-under​-terrible​-strain​-77714. 152. Ibid. 153. Ibid. 154. Ibid. 155. “Managing Covid-19 Biomedical Waste in India,” Centre for Science and Environment (CSE), June 30, 2021, Webinar, Managing Covid-19 Biomedical Waste in India (cseindia.org). 156. Singh, “COVID-19 Will Place India’s Biomedical Waste Management under Terrible Strain.” 157. “World Environment Day: Covid Surge Intensifies India’s Plastic, Biomedical Waste Problem,” livemint.com, June 5, 2021, https:​//​www​.livemint​.com​/news​/india​ /world​-environment​-day​-covid​-surge​-intensifies​-india​-s​-plastic​-biomedical​-waste​ -problem​-11622869181058​.html. 158. Parteek Singh Thind et al., “Compromising Situation of India’s Bio-Medical Waste Incineration Units during Pandemic Outbreak of COVID-19: Associated Environmental-Health Impacts and Mitigation Measures,” Environ Pollut. 276, no. 116621 (February 8, 2021), doi: 10.1016/j.envpol.2021.116621. 159. Ibid. 160. Ibid. 161. Ibid. 162. Singh, “COVID-19 Will Place India’s Biomedical Waste Management under Terrible Strain.” 163. See, Chaitanya Mallapur, “Sanitation Workers at Risk from Discarded Medical Waste Related to COVID-19,” India Spend, April 9, 2020, https:​//​www​.indiaspend​ .com​/sanitation​-workers​-at​-risk​-from​-discarded​-medical​-waste​-related​-to​-covid​-19​/; Express News Service, “Vijayawada: Covid-19 Waste Dumped in the Open Poses Hazard,” The New Indian Express, August 29, 2020, https:​//​www​.newindianexpress​ .com​/cities​/vijayawada​/2020​/aug​/29​/vijayawada​-covid​-19​-waste​-dumped​-in​-the​ -open​-poses​-hazard​-2189693​.html. 164. Narain, “Chapter 29: Poverty and Environmental Inequality in India,” 1. 165. “Key Facts,” “Antimicrobial Resistance,” World Health Organization, October 13, 2020, https:​//​www​.who​.int​/news​-room​/fact​-sheets​/detail​/antimicrobial​ -resistance​#:​​~:​text​=What​%20is​%20antimicrobial​%20resistance​%3F​,spread​%2C​ %20severe​%20illness​%20and​%20death. 166. Ibid. 167. The practice of cremating the dead is also followed by Sikhs and Jains in India. 168. Paras Singh, “Delhi: Pushed to the Limit, Crematoria Staring at Acute Wood Shortage,” The Times of India, April 28, 2021, https:​//​timesofindia​.indiatimes​.com​/

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city​/delhi​/pushed​-to​-the​-limit​-crematoria​-staring​-at​-acute​-wood​-shortage​/articleshow​ /82282020​.cms. 169. Ibid. These numbers reflect a range for the cumulative cremations held for both COVID-19 and non-COVID-19 deaths performed at Nigambodh Ghat in Delhi between April 16–19, 2021. 170. Soumya Pillai, “Forest Dept Ups Vigil as Demand for Wood Spikes in Crematoriums,” Hindustan Times, May 13, 2021, https:​//​www​.hindustantimes​.com​/ cities​/delhi​-news​/forest​-dept​-ups​-vigil​-as​-demand​-for​-wood​-spikes​-in​-crematoriums​ -101620864317986​.html. 171. Ibid. 172. Ibid. 173. Arundhati Roy, “The Pandemic Is a Portal,” Financial Times, April 4, 2020, https:​//​www​.ft​.com​/content​/10d8f5e8​-74eb​-11ea​-95fe​-fcd274e920ca. 174. Ibid. 175. Ibid. 176. Sonia Shah, Pandemic: Tracking Contagions, from Cholera to Ebola and Beyond (New York: Picador, 2017).

Conclusion

India’s Precarious Present This book began with an often repeated “why” question: Why does the toxic contamination of India’s total environment continue even though it causes millions of premature deaths each year and costs the economy billions of dollars in annual losses? But as this book has demonstrated, the answers to this question rather lie in asking “how” instead of “why”: how is the chronic exposure to toxic pollution allowable for certain populations and the places they inhabit? This is because the question of “why” leads us to analytically deficient and dead-end responses, such as “poverty” or “corruption,” which are merely symptoms of the problem, and so leave us none the wiser about the underlying causes of these symptoms. Whereas the question of “how” allows us to investigate the conditions, techniques, and even the logics that enable systemic violence against environments and people to continue unchecked. Indeed, how problems are posed matters because it determines the direction in which solutions and responses are sought. As I have argued in this book, “toxicity as a form of life” in contemporary India is effectively a “death-making” organization of state power such that protecting the “life” and “health” of the population is no longer, what Foucault would call, the goal of government. Under such life-denying conditions of existence, where the capitalist state places profits over people by making “available to be poisoned” those who have been marked disposable to serve the interests of the state and elite segments of the population, opportunities for recovery, and living a good life, or even a healthy life, are foreclosed. In following the method of Deleuze and Guattari who always proceeded to analyze contemporary relations in society and to problematize them by first asking the question: “whatever could have happened for things to come to this?,”1 I have argued that the extractive economies of unequal global 177

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relations and profit-oriented models of growth and progress established by globalized neoliberalism do not fully explain the unabated devastation of life-worlds in India. The unchecked and wide-scale environmental degradation and permanent states of illness, injury, and debility to which the majority of the country’s poor are subjected must also be analyzed through the local axes of power and discrimination such as caste. I have offered the notion of “slow governance” to indicate a form of governance premised upon a “logic of toxicity” as a way to control populations through exposure to chemical contamination and have argued for the need to read the caste system through this lens. As the dominant organizing principle of life in India, the social hierarchy of the caste system categorizes Indian society into those who are allowed to be poisoned, to what degree, and those who are not, by establishing a complex system of occupational segregation based on birth into a caste group. In this sense, exposure to toxic conditions of life and work through a deeply embedded structure of caste-based discriminations becomes a way of maintaining societal disadvantages and disabling economic and social opportunities for “flourishing” in life that becomes a means of, what David Harvey called, “accumulation by dispossession.” Unsurprisingly, centuries of caste-based “accumulation by dispossession” has ensured that the poor and marginalized, such as lower castes, Dalits, poor Muslims, and women, disproportionately bear the burden of exposure to contamination and disease, pushing the poor into greater poverty, while enabling the rich to consolidate wealth and power. In the twenty-first century, and more so after the humanitarian, environmental, and economic devastations wrought by the COVID-19 pandemic, India stands at a precipice where its decision to continue down the heavily polluting path of “modernity” and “progress” established by the West will send it tumbling down the precipice to a point of no return. Its once clean air is toxic, its abundant reserves of water are either overdrawn or poisoned or both, its soil is degraded, and its land is being used as an open dumping ground from where more toxics find their way into already stressed water bodies and heavily contaminated air. As the current state of India’s environment reveals, once the circle of poison begins, it infects the entire web of life, including the lives and lifestyles of elite segments of the population, as the case of air pollution and the high concentrations of pesticides and other chemicals in Indian food products and crops demonstrate. Unfortunately, the spread of toxic pollution continues to remain an invisible problem in twenty-first-century India, and therefore an accepted condition of life, particularly for the poor and marginalized. But if the chemical contamination of India’s rapidly degrading and depleting natural resources continues to be accepted as a part of daily life, how will the majority of India’s population, exposed to pesticides, heavy metals, industrial wastes, and other hazardous chemicals, through habitation

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and work, rise out of poverty and access avenues for living a good life, one not ridden with injury, disease, illness, crippling debt, and slow death? How will India sustain her economic growth in the future without the health of her population and ecosystems that are vital for life? In her now classic book on waste, Waste and Want, American historian Susan Strasser charts a genealogy of waste in the West in order to demonstrate that the consumerist ethic of disposability and wastefulness has not always defined the relationship of Western publics to waste. On the contrary, as she argues, the modern practices of wasting and wanting are a recent invention of neoliberal consumerism. Strasser’s objective is to demonstrate that the contemporary buildup of wastes in landfills and in the oceans has not always been premised on maleficence and, what Lindsay Ofrias has called, “the incentive to contaminate.” In fact, until as recently as the 1850s, Strasser points out, it was still widely believed that “nature” would somehow “take care” of pollution. Based on Strasser’s history of trash, it is possible to distinguish three phases in the evolving relationship of Western publics not only to trash, but to pollution in general, which I have delineated as: the phase of “ignorance,” the phase of “optimistic denial,” and the phase of “deliberate poisoning.” In the first phase of ignorance, collective knowledge of the long-term effects of toxic dumping was yet to be developed, and without the certainty of knowing what will happen, assumptions and calculated guesses suggested that nature will absorb pollution. In the second phase of “optimistic denial,” spanning the end of the nineteenth century to the late twentieth century, scientific knowledge began to apprehend long-term environmental harm, see the early signs of contamination and understand what will most likely happen, yet chose to believe the earth will take care of it. And the third phase, which aligns with our contemporary moment, is the phase of “deliberate poisoning.” Undoubtedly, this is the most sinister phase because even though today we know the wide-reaching consequences of toxic contamination across species, habitats, and populations, we choose to continue with business as usual rather than change our ways. Ignoring and/or contesting the science on climate change is one example of our current phase, while the global political reluctance to enact strict regulations governing the spread of toxic chemicals in the environment is another. The height of postcolonial industrialization in India has coincided with the third phase in the history of waste—a phase marked not only by environmental calamity but equally by the corresponding decline in human health. For India, this can prove to be a great asset in finding solutions and strategies for mitigating its overwhelming chemical pollution crisis. Today, India’s level of development is comparable with nineteenth-century Victorian England when the problems of deadly, noxious air and dirty, sewage-infested

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waters of the Thames River came to be known as the Great Smog and the Great Stink. Poverty, filth, and disease threatened the health of Londoners, the rapidly growing population strained public services and caused a severe housing crisis, and the city’s authorities struggled to contain mounting pollution, disease, and poverty.2 Yet India stands at a considerable advantage in relation to nineteenth-century London. As Assa Doron and Robin Jeffrey point out in their book Waste of a Nation, India can draw on “the experience of 150 years of science, technology, and experiments in urban living and public sanitation from around the world.”3 But instead of learning from the lessons of the West, India seems to be blindly following the model of the West in her road to modernity. Today, India’s decision to pursue a model of ‘development without environment’ is willful ignorance where “not knowing” itself becomes a strategy to adopt the path of least resistance for business and economic growth. In the twenty-first century, India’s celebrated economic growth has been achieved at the expense of the environment and the poor who live precariously and continue to struggle for life’s basic necessities of adequate food, clean water, shelter, jobs, and medical care, even as India’s minority elite and middle-classes emulate the consumerist habits of the West. In the modern, market-friendly, and democratic India of today, Dalits and Adivasis have remained impoverished, their lands seized by the corporate state for “development” projects from which they are excluded, poor farmers continue to commit suicide by drinking toxic pesticides to escape the suffering of crippling debt in the absence of state support, minority Muslims continue to be lynched and humiliated by Hindu fundamentalist vigilantes, and the children born of poverty experience wasting and malnourishment before they silently become another forgotten statistic. At the same time, the toxic pollution of India’s air, water, and land has been increasing in the twenty-first century. The biggest challenge to curbing chemical pollution in India has been an overall weak regulatory framework, with the failure of implementation and enforcement of existing laws proving to be the single biggest cause of increasing levels of toxicity in the country. And yet, as I have argued in this book, such regulatory failures are a technique to protect industry and business interests, and to ensure a steady supply of cheap labor by neglecting the rights of India’s poorest. In her essay, “The Greater Common Good,” Arundhati Roy swiftly dispels the commonly held notion of modern India’s failures, whether it be poverty alleviation, environmental degradation, or sexual violence against women, being attributed to “an overstretched State, struggling to cope with the sheer weight and scale of its problems.”4 Instead, as she points out, “There is method here, precise, relentless, and a 100 per cent man-made.”5 As Roy writes in her classic acerbic style, “India doesn’t live in her villages. India dies in her villages. India gets kicked around in her villages. India lives

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in her cities. India’s villages live only to serve her cities. Her villages are her citizens’ vassals and for that reason must be controlled and kept alive, but only just.”6 What is clear is that the assaults against the environment and the assaults against the marginalized have their roots in the same ideology, and so one cannot be resolved without the other. In her book A River Runs Again: India’s Natural World in Crisis, based on extensive fieldwork across India’s small-scale farmlands and rural communities, Meera Subramanian surmises that India needs to “create her own way to develop her people and resources” and that way lies in moving away from the “well-worn path” of Western modernity and toward the “model of the micro,” where “the small, the local, the indigenous” could guide the way into India’s future as one of “environmental self-rule” or “Eco Swaraj” as she calls it. Renowned Indian author and political activist Arundhati Roy has similarly argued that India’s path to modernity must lie in the dismantling of the model of the Big introduced by the West, “Big bombs, big dams, big ideologies, big contradictions, big countries, big wars, big heroes, big mistakes.”7 A recent report by UNICEF has stated that less than 50 percent of India’s population has access to clean drinking water, and the “chemical contamination of water, mainly through fluoride and arsenic, is present in 1.96 million dwellings.”8 Moreover, according to UNICEF, “two-thirds of India’s 718 districts are affected by extreme water depletion, and the current lack of planning for water safety and security is a major concern.”9 Being a predominantly agrarian economy, India is the world’s highest user of groundwater for the purpose of cultivation but groundwater also supplies 85 percent of drinking water in rural areas and 48 percent of water requirements in urban areas.10 As India’s groundwater depletion reaches unsustainable and emergency levels, recent research has predicted that it will lead to a 20 percent nationwide decrease in cropping intensity and as high as 68 percent decrease in groundwater-depleted regions like Punjab.11 Such losses in agricultural production will result in economic losses, reinforcing the interconnection between the environment and society. Indeed, following the path of “the Big” has led to the current toxics crisis in India, and that crisis is being felt all the way to the top echelons of the society in the form of air and water pollution and the number of chemicals which make their way to the dinner plates of India’s wealthiest. How, then, can change be initiated? Doron and Jeffrey offer the concept of a “binding crisis” which they describe as “an event, usually involving a natural disaster or a health panic, that brings a shared sense of menace to both rich and poor.”12 For them, India currently faces two problems that have some characteristics of a binding crisis—the problem of air pollution and the problem of childhood stunting and infant mortality13—and therefore have the potential to mobilize collective action on these issues. And yet, the environmentalism of the rich has never intersected with the environmentalism of the

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poor so even though the outcry against air pollution has gained momentum in India it is a movement concentrated among those who “have”­—India’s poor suffer from indoor air pollution, toxic fumes from e-waste disposal and waste burning, and living near highly polluting industries—the current mobilization of the middle class against air pollution has not expanded to a consideration of all forms of air pollution including those affecting the poor. Similarly, the crisis of childhood malnourishment and stunting is one that specifically afflicts poor children and has thus far failed to mobilize a collective outcry against this emergency. In conclusion, we must ask the question, no matter how difficult and complex, is there a possibility of an escape from toxicity? Or perhaps, a better starting point could be, what is the opposite of intoxicated embodiment? What would a de-toxic state of being look like? A notion of what Lauren Berlant has called “flourishing” might be a useful way to theorize a process of recuperation from intoxicated lives. But what counts as “health” under the condition of neoliberal governmentality? As we have seen, there are different meanings of health for different categories of humans—for the elite health is the right to flourish, or in Foucauldian terms the “optimization of the state of life.” But for those on the fringes of society, health is coded as “being allowed to live” and “not be killed”—living in permanent states of illness, injury, and disability. Moreover, the very notion of “health” as thriving life is itself highly politicized as we know. By restricting access to health care systems and in certain instances, denying the basic right to adequate health care itself becomes a potent biopolitical tool for the consolidation of power. Havi Carel in her paper Can I be Ill and Happy? disagrees with the common intuition that illness and happiness are somehow mutually exclusive (such that who is seriously ill faces insurmountable challenges to being happy). Following phenomenologists such as Merleau-Ponty she distinguishes between the lived or phenomenological body and the objective or biological body. Carel rejects a common naturalistic approach to characterizing well-being, according to which disease and illness are characterized straightforwardly in terms of a divergence from biological norms (and therefore conceives of “health” as a value-free concept). Said characterization, she contends, fails to consider “anything about the experience of illness,”14 and, resultantly, fails to acknowledge the transformative changes to the lived body brought about by successful coping mechanisms. We often fail to acknowledge that we can be happy and ill, for Carel, because we fail to acknowledge that biological dysfunction is but one aspect of illness, and, in turn, do not acknowledge the importance of the lived body in how the ill person relates to her “daily activities, goals and interaction with the environment and social world.”15

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We are now in a position to see that those suffering worst under India’s regime of toxicity will often not be able to be ill and happy even taking into account Carel’s insight. There is, under said regime, an inextricable and cyclical link between illness and abject poverty. Given the inability of those most exposed to toxicity to escape their suffering (maintained by the normalization of toxicity against the exploitation of the caste system) illness in biological terms will go hand in glove with an inability to change their lived experience. Even noting the relational aspect of illness, then, we can see that the regime of toxicity will preclude the ill from bettering their circumstances or forging anything like a better life for themselves. Notes 1. Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia, trans. Brian Massumi (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1987), 194. 2. Beverley Cook and Alex Werner, “Breathing in London’s History: From the Great Stink to the Great Smog,” museumoflondon.org.uk, August 24, 2017, https:​//​ www​.museumoflondon​.org​.uk​/discover​/londons​-past​-air. 3. Assa Doron and Robin Jeffrey, Waste of a Nation: Garbage and Growth in India (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2018), 258. 4. Arundhati Roy, “The Greater Common Good,” in My Seditious Heart: Collected Nonfiction (UK: Hamish Hamilton, 2019), 36. 5. Ibid. 6. Ibid. 7. Roy, My Seditious Heart: Collected Nonfiction, 278–279. 8. “Clean Drinking Water: Ensuring Survival and Improved Outcomes across All Outcomes for Every Child,” unicef.org, UNICEF India, accessed July 4, 2021, https:​ //​www​.unicef​.org​/india​/what​-we​-do​/clean​-drinking​-water. 9. Ibid. 10. Ibid. 11. Meha Jain et al., “Groundwater Depletion Will Reduce Cropping Intensity in India,” Science Advances 7, no. 9 (February 24, 2021): 1, doi: 10.1126/sciadv. abd2849. 12. Doron and Jeffrey, Waste of a Nation, 261. 13. Ibid., 263. 14. Havi Carel, “Can I Be Ill and Happy?,” Philosophia 35, no. 2 (2007): 97, https:​ //​doi​.org​/10​.1007​/s11406​-007​-9085​-5. 15. Ibid., 98.

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Index

Adani, Gautam, 144–47 adivasis, 2, 50–51, 108, 180 Agamben, Giorgio: on form of life, 7; on state of exception, 52, 137 Agent Orange, 25, 68 agrochemical corporations, 15, 21, 33, 61, 64, 68, 78, 82 air pollution, 3, 134, 138, 149–50, 154– 59, 178, 181–82 Ambani, Mukesh, 144–45, 157 Ambedkar, B.R., 47–49 American Dust Bowl, 82 Anthropocene, 8, 27–28, 35, 40, 42 antimicrobial resistance (AMR), 30, 162, 163 available to be poisoned, 1–3, 5, 10, 16, 41, 43, 89, 108, 119, 177 Badiou, Alain: on void, 103, 104 Beck, Ulrich, 34–36 Benjamin, Walter, 5 Berlant, Lauren, 34, 182 Bhopal Gas Disaster, 15–16, 113, 115– 16, 119, 151 Bhopal gas tragedy, 6, 11, 14, 27, 101, 108, 119, 125, 152–53, 155, 156 biomedical waste, 6, 159–63 biopolitics. See Foucault, Michel biopolitics of catastrophe, 35, 36

blue-baby syndrome, 80, 85 Borlaug, Norman, 82 Buchanan, Ian: on constellations, 5; on governmentality, 119; on strata, 46 Butler, Judith, 109 Carson, Rachel, 15, 21, 25, 62, 65, 69, 71–79, 80, 87, 132 caste system, the, 4, 12, 46–48: and neoliberalism, 49–53 caste politics, 47, 52 Centre for Science and Environment (CSE), 132, 140, 160 chemical dependency, 15, 63, 80, 85, 102 chemical industry, the, 22, 62, 68–70, 74, 77–78, 122–24 Chomsky, Noam: manufacturing consent, 63 Cold War, 72, 77 colonialism, 8, 15, 39, 40, 43, 63, 65: corporate, 43, 63; chemical, 62–64; toxic, 8, 33, 112, 132 common sense, 32, 41–43 constellations. See Benjamin, Walter counter-conduct, 11 COVID-19, 14, 16, 23–24, 52, 131–38, 140–44, 146, 152, 154–56, 158–64, 178 205

206

Index

cruel optimism, 34 cruel pessimism, 34 cumulative poisoning, 71, 73 Dalits, 11–13, 15, 49–51, 142, 178, 180 Das, Veena, 107, 121 DDT, 1, 22, 67, 69–71, 75–79, 87, 90, 102 defamiliarize, 13 Deleuze, Gilles, and Félix Guattari: on render visible, 4; on strata, 46; on work and war, 10 devitalized bodies, 105, 107–9, 120, 124 Douglas, Mary, 4 Dow Chemicals, 68, 112, 114, 118, 126 Environmental Impact Assessment (EIA), 150–53 Environmental Protection Agency, 65, 76, 78 environmental toxicity, 1–2, 22, 31–32, 131, 134, 137, 152–53 Eurocene, 27 expulsion, 106, 131–32 extractive economies, 8, 177 extreme cases, 131 farmer suicides, 86 Ford foundation, 79, 81–82, 102 form of life, 46, 89, 113: as a definition, 7; as toxicity, 3–5, 7, 10, 13–16, 24, 26, 32, 35, 42, 66, 99, 131, 177; as war, 7, 46 Fortun, Kim, 112 Foucault, Michel: and biopolitics, 2, 16, 43, 44, 117, 125–26; and counterconduct, 11; and discourse, 4, 120; and governmentality, 2, 4, 11, 37–38, 45, 50, 117–18, 120, 121, 125, 134, 182; and neoliberalism, 44; and thanatopolitics, 11, 12, 137 Gillam, Carey, 78 Global Toxic Economy, 68, 80 globalization, 43, 89, 112, 145

governmentality. See Foucault, Michel graded inequality, 47, 48 Gramsci, Antonio, 41 Great Acceleration, 27 Green Revolution, the, 15, 62, 64, 79–86, 89, 101–2, 105, 134 Grove, Jairus Victor, 7, 9, 27, 32 Gupta, Akhil, 2, 9, 121 Habermas, Jürgen, 37 Haraway, Donna, 4 Harvey, David, 10: on accumulation by dispossession, 7, 13, 51, 178 humanism, Western, 73 ideology, 12, 41, 66–67, 71, 77, 101, 181 I.G. Farben, 68 incentive to contaminate, 9, 179 industrial accidents, 6, 101, 106, 122– 24, 152, 153 industrial chemicals, 8, 24, 26, 39 International Energy Agency (IEA), 148–49 International Monetary Fund (IMF), 64 Jasanoff, Sheila, 103 letting die, 12, 44, 52, 143 Liboiron, Max, 3, 8, 12, 28–29, 39 logic of toxicity, 14–15, 27, 37, 39, 47, 66, 178 Lyotard, Jean-François, 118 malnourishment, in children, 87–88, 180, 182 manual scavenging, 12, 48–51, 142 Mbembe, Achille, 13, 136–37, 166 methyl isocyanate (MIC), 25, 105, 109–10, 122–23 Mid-Day Meal Scheme (MDMS), 88 militarization of agriculture, 13, 66 MOBAY, 68 modern environmental movement, 62, 76, 79, 151

Index

Monsanto, 21, 68, 70, 77–79, 138 monocultures, 64–65 Mukherjee, Suroopa, 106 Nazi, 67–68, 78 necropolitics, 16, 135–37, 141, 165, 166 neoliberalism, 8, 10, 42–45, 49, 63, 101–2, 115, 126, 178 New Economic Policy, of India, 102 Neyrat, Frédéric, 35 Nixon, Rob, 3, 16, 33, 101, 107, 120 Ofrias, Lindsay, 3, 9, 33, 179 Oreskes, Naomi and Erik M. Conway, 77 outcaste, 2, 11, 48, 52, 108, 138, 142 pandemic, 16, 24, 52, 120, 131–40, 142, 144–45, 149–50, 152–56, 159, 163, 165–66, 178 parens patriae, 114, 118 Patel, Raj and Jason W. Moore, 8, 27 pesticide poisoning, 64, 73, 89 pesticides, 1, 3, 6, 8, 14–15, 21–23, 25–27, 30, 32, 39, 61–70, 72–76, 79, 80–90, 102, 105, 124, 178, 180 pollution: toxic, 2–3, 8, 11, 13, 15, 23–24, 27–30, 32–34, 36, 40, 46–48, 50–51, 177–78, 180; chemical, 2, 9, 12, 21, 23, 179–80 posthumanism, 5, 72, 75, 93, 107 predisabled populations, 10, 11 Puar, Jasbir: on right to maim, 10, 44; on debilitation, 10, 11, 44, 104; on debility, 44 purity, 12, 32, 47–48, 50–51; and pollution, 12, 48, 51; and impurity, 32 regime of truth, 16, 99, 100, 116, 120 risk society, 34–35 Rockefeller foundation, 68, 79, 81, 102, 144 Roundup, 21, 78, 79

207

Roy, Arundhati, 47, 118, 165, 180, 181 safe dose, 71, 74 Sassen, Saskia, 131 Scheduled Castes, 11, 50 Sevin, insecticide, 102, 105, 123 Shiva, Vandana, 15, 43, 63, 139, 145, 153 Shotwell, Alexis, 32 slow genocide, 64, 112–13, 116, 118 slow governance, 14, 38, 89, 121, 178 slow violence, 33, 88, 107, 132 state of exception, 10, 51–52, 137 strata. See under Deleuze, Gilles, and Félix Guattari Structural Adjustment Programs, 62–63 Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), 138–39 Swan, Shanna H., 24–25, 134 third world, 27, 61–63, 100 Toxcene, 3, 14, 26–28 toxic colonialism, 8, 33, 112, 132 toxicality, 37–38 toxicity: as a form of life. See under form of life; as a system, 12, 15, 46; as war, 5, 9; as a wicked problem, 14, 28–29 ungrievable life, 109 Union Carbide Corporation (UCC), 102, 105, 112, 114–16, 118–19, 120 untouchable castes, 11, 12, 48, 142 varnashrama dharma, 12, 48 Vedanta Limited, 146–48 Vietnam War, 25, 68 war as a form of life, 7 wartime poisons, 15, 66, 68 web of life, 21, 26, 32, 65–66, 72, 80, 89, 135, 178 wicked problems, 28–29 world of the third, 100

208

World Bank, 64, 79, 81, 102 World Health Organization (WHO), 82, 85, 90, 156, 159, 162

Index

World War II, 67, 69, 72, 77 Zyklon-B, 68

About the Author

Dipali Mathur completed her PhD in environmental humanities from the University of Wollongong, Australia, in 2022. Prior to commencing her PhD research in Australia, Dipali obtained her bachelor’s and master’s degrees in English literature from the University of Delhi, India, and then went on to teach English literature there for three years. She currently holds an honorary fellowship at the University of Wollongong, Australia, and is a postdoctoral fellow at the University of Edinburgh, Scotland. Available to Be Poisoned: Toxicity as a Form of Life is her first book.

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