“Responsible to Science and Responsive to Society”: The Executive, Bureaucracy, and Genetically Modified Food Crops in India

This article provides a fine-grained account of negotiations at the highest level of government on the question of releasing genetically modified (GM) crops, which are at the heart of the global food industry. I analyze the tenure of three successive federal environment ministers in India at the peak of the controversy over GM food crops and trace the shifting configurations of power and expertise in the production of governance. My ethnography highlights transverse exchanges within and across departments that strain topographic maps of the state. Hierarchy and technical expertise count, but in topological terms of reach rather than topographic metaphors of vertical or horizontal. Further, in the face of uncertainty, addressing epistemic gaps is a crucial logic for the spatial extension of the state and a key area of negotiation within and across departments, and between the bureaucracy and the cabinet of ministers. I thus suggest that the relationship between expertise and politicization is topological and highlight implications for democratic politics in India and beyond.