SHANTI and the political economy of Nuclear risk in India today

Nuclear power has always rested on a political bargain rather than a technical solution. It promises modernity, energy security, and national prestige, but survives only because states absorb the consequences when its risks materialize. Markets cannot insure nuclear catastrophe. Corporations cannot bear its costs. Law is therefore bent to protect capital and discipline society. The Modi government’s Sustainable Harnessing and Advancement of Nuclear Energy for Transforming India Bill—branded with the soothing acronym SHANTI—must be read in this global history of nuclear exceptionalism. Far from a neutral energy reform, SHANTI is a project to rewrite responsibility, transfer catastrophic risk from private actors to the public, and align India’s nuclear future with the demands of global capital.

Across the world, nuclear power is governed by special legal regimes that acknowledge what they never openly admit: without state guarantees, the industry would collapse. In Europe, liability conventions channel responsibility to plant operators while capping compensation far below the real social and ecological costs of a major accident. In the United States, the Price–Anderson Act openly socializes risk through federal indemnity and industry pooling, shielding suppliers from meaningful exposure. These systems are presented as pragmatic compromises, but they are better understood as political choices to make nuclear investment possible by converting private risk into public obligation.

Fukushima stripped these arrangements of their remaining illusions. Japan’s operator-liability framework collapsed under the scale of the disaster, forcing the state to absorb losses running into hundreds of billions of dollars and to manage contamination that will endure for generations. The lesson was not that nuclear power had failed, but that when it does fail, corporations do not pay. States do.

India’s nuclear liability law emerged from a different and more painful historical memory. The Civil Liability for Nuclear Damage Act of 2010 was shaped by the trauma of Bhopal, where corporate negligence led to mass death and lasting harm, followed by a settlement that became a symbol of legal abdication. The CLNDA accepted global norms of no-fault operator liability and capped compensation, but it refused to grant total immunity. It preserved a statutory right of recourse against suppliers whose defective equipment or services caused an accident, and it allowed victims to seek remedies under other civil and criminal laws. These provisions were limited, but they carried a moral warning: India could not afford another Bhopal in an industry whose failures would be exponentially more destructive.

For global nuclear suppliers, even this modest assertion of accountability was intolerable. For more than a decade, corporations from the United States, France, and Japan complained that India’s law was out of step with international practice. What they sought was not safety harmonization, but insulation from consequence. SHANTI is the Modi government’s decisive answer to that pressure.

By opening the civil nuclear sector to private participation and signalling a restructuring of liability through revised caps and thresholds, SHANTI marks a counterrevolution in nuclear law. Although the government avoids public debate on the precise amendments to existing safeguards, the direction is clear enough. Supplier exposure is to be neutralized. Operator liability is to be streamlined. The Indian state is to stand behind the industry as guarantor of last resort. What was once an uneasy compromise between investment and accountability is being replaced by a framework designed primarily to reassure capital.

This shift reflects the deeper ideological coherence of Modi’s political economy. Across sectors, the state has acted to transfer risk from corporations to society. Labour codes weaken worker protections while promising flexibility to employers. Environmental regulations are diluted to accelerate extraction and infrastructure. Defence production is privatized while strategic risk is nationalized. Nuclear power represents the most extreme extension of this logic, because its failures are not merely costly but catastrophic.

The government justifies SHANTI by invoking climate urgency and energy security. Nuclear power, it claims, is indispensable to India’s low-carbon future. Yet the empirical record tells a different story. Nuclear energy remains among the most expensive and slowest forms of electricity generation. India’s nuclear capacity has stagnated below ten gigawatts, while renewable energy has expanded far more rapidly and cheaply. The appeal of nuclear power lies less in its contribution to decarbonization than in its symbolic value as a marker of technological modernity and geopolitical status.

Small modular reactors and “advanced nuclear innovation” are invoked as talismans, despite their commercial failure and unresolved safety risks worldwide. They function ideologically rather than materially, serving as placeholders for a future that never arrives while liability law is dismantled in the present. SHANTI thus prepares the legal ground for a speculative nuclear future by sacrificing the protections that once acknowledged historical injustice and social risk.

There is also an unmistakable imperial dimension to this reform. India is being positioned as a market for surplus nuclear technology from the Global North at a time when nuclear industries in advanced economies face stagnation and political resistance. Harmonization, in this context, means subordinating Indian law to the risk preferences of foreign corporations and their home states. This subordination is especially dangerous given India’s weak regulatory institutions. The nuclear regulatory lacks statutory independence. Safety oversight is opaque. Public participation in siting and emergency planning is minimal. Courts are slow and inaccessible to mass tort victims. Importing capital-friendly liability norms into this landscape is not reform. It is abdication.

At its core, nuclear liability law answers a single question: who pays when prevention fails. SHANTI answers that question in advance, and its answer is chillingly clear. The public pays. The state pays. Capital walks away. Radiation does not respect liability caps, corporate structures, or contractual shields. Its victims are workers, farmers, fishers, women, and children, those least equipped to navigate legal systems designed to contain claims rather than deliver justice.

To describe SHANTI as a technical energy reform is therefore to obscure its moral and political stakes. It is a deliberate choice to normalize catastrophe through law, to pre-empt accountability, and to convert democratic governance into disaster management. India’s nuclear liability framework, flawed as it was, carried the memory of Bhopal and a warning from history. SHANTI seeks to erase both.

Peace is invoked to sell a law that prepares for irreversible harm. Development is promised through a framework that dismantles accountability. Sovereignty is proclaimed even as law is rewritten to satisfy global capital. Nuclear power demands democratic control precisely because its failures are collective, transboundary, and permanent. SHANTI moves in the opposite direction, deepening the separation between those who decide and those who will bear the consequences.

The struggle over SHANTI is therefore not a dispute over reactor designs or megawatts. It is a struggle over the political economy of risk in contemporary India. It asks whether the state exists to protect life or to insure capital, whether law serves justice or investment, and whether historical memory has any place in policymaking under neoliberal rule. In answering these questions, SHANTI reveals the trajectory of Modi’s India with unsettling clarity.

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