In its current avatar, with the Convention on Supplementary Compensation (CSC) at its fulcrum, the global architecture on nuclear liability under the aegis of the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA), has decisively normalized the indemnification of international nuclear suppliers.

However, India remains an aberration to this de jure universalization ofthe CSC-based regime. The domestic nuclear liability law that India enacted in 2010 allows for liability to be channeled to nuclear suppliers, both domestic and international private entities. This anomaly is owed in large part to grassroots voices, particularly the women of Bhopal in central India. The decades-long struggles for justice and accountability of these women, survivors of the world’s worst chemical industrial disaster in 1984 in Bhopal, shaped India’s domestic liability debate in significant ways. Both, their active protests against the liability law, as well as expressions of solidarity with anti-nuclear grassroots mobilizations in India at the time, led to this important aberration.

This paper will seek to engage with the various conceptualizations surrounding gender, technology, progress, risk, justice, and ethics implicated in these fascinating developments. When contrasted with organizational discourses on nuclear liability led by the IAEA, the abstractions and the “tendency to forget the vulnerability of flesh” (Mensch 2009, 5) in thinking of ‘liability’ primarily in terms of financial risk and potential losses to nuclear corporations, become glaringly evident. This paper will explore the challenges thrown up to such disembodied notions of what it means to be entangled with harm in the nuclear age through the discursive intrusions of the women of Bhopal. In so doing, they bring our attention to the asymmetrical ways in which risk, dispossession, harm, and exposure are distributed (and compensated), and thus, compel us to re-examine how international legal, political, and technical regimes respond to the challenges of living with toxic legacies in the Global South.