The environmental-war complex we are facing, whether through the threat of nuclear annihilation, resource extraction, or ecological collapse, is a legacy of the long history of imperial expansion and capitalist extraction. In her contribution to the “Pluriverse of Peace” series, Tatsiana Shchurko argues that Bangalore Square in Minsk reflects these layered histories. And that it is also a place where the dreams of resisting nuclear power and state repression remain unfulfilled – a space where marginalized and silenced people have tried to imagine different, more hopeful futures.
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This essay is both a thought experiment and a reflection on transnational solidarities, place-based politics, and the possibility of livable futures. In Minsk, Belarus, there is a busy roundabout with a central island known as Bangalore Square. This island is inaccessible to pedestrians, as traffic flows continuously around it, and there is no designated path leading to it. It is usually covered in grass and flowers, with a billboard standing at its center. Although unmarked by any plaque and largely absent from public memory, the square is a relic of Cold War geopolitical theater and an unrealized gesture toward global solidarity.
Named in 1986 to commemorate the Indo-Soviet sister-city bond between Minsk and Bangalore, this square is less a monument and more a faint trace of hopes that were never fulfilled – a lingering reminder of futures foreclosed by Soviet imperial interests disguised as friendship. Sadly, Bangalore Square was never about real connections between people from different countries. Rather, it was a hollow symbol of state-led socialist internationalism: a roundabout named to represent the ties between ‘sister cities’ that never became kin. But its failure also invites a different way to think about it – not to resurrect the Soviet project, but to unearth the ‘seeds’ that might have emerged there: local acts of care, resistance, and survival that might help us imagine better global futures.
In this sense I take Bangalore Square as a site of “vital refiguration,” as Ann Stoler puts it – a place where imperial pasts, authoritarian presents, and hopes for livable futures are sedimented in daily life. Drawing on transnational feminist ideas – from scholars like Redi Koobak and Raili Marling, Enni Mikkonen, and Chandra Talpade Mohanty – and grounded in a sense of place that resists dominant forms of belonging, I ask: What if we imagine Bangalore Square not just as a leftover from the Cold War, but as part of a larger, decolonial network of solidarities? What can the missed connections between Minsk and Bangalore teach us about the shared struggles we face today, especially in the context of environmental destruction and war? I argue that we can see this site as a starting point for imagining new forms of solidarity against the forces shaping today’s environmental-war complex.
The environmental-war complex we are facing – whether through the threat of nuclear annihilation, resource extraction, or ecological collapse – is not something new. It continues the long history of imperial expansion and capitalist extraction. Bangalore Square is more than just a symbol; it reflects, for instance, the layered histories of nuclear power, state repression, and unfinished dreams of resistance. It is also a place of disruption – a space where nowadays silenced and marginalized people have tried to imagine different, more hopeful futures.
I use Bangalore Square to think about the decolonial pluriverse of solidarities – a vision and practice of global solidarity rooted in decolonial ethics. In this vision, diverse ways of living and knowing are respected, and relationships are fostered through mutual care and place-based relationality, rather than control or exploitation. This idea calls for building place-based alliances from the margins, across different worldviews, and by embracing differences – the unique social, ecological, and political dynamics of particular places and communities, rather than ignoring them.
Nuclear imperialism and the ghosts of the roundabout
Bangalore Square is rooted in nuclear geopolitics. It was not established to celebrate grassroots solidarity, but rather to strengthen the relationship between two nuclear-armed states. In 1971, the Indo-Soviet Treaty of Peace, Friendship, and Cooperation aligned India with the Soviet Union during a time of rising Cold War tensions in Asia. This treaty gave India access to military and nuclear technology, including the lease of a Soviet nuclear-powered submarine in the late 1980s. The treaty also played a pivotal role in India’s success in the Bangladesh Liberation War. While India claimed to follow a non-aligned path, this partnership revealed the contradictions between its postcolonial identity and dependence on Soviet support. Soviet support was not altruistic – it served Moscow’s own imperial ambitions of expanding influence across the Global South.
Soviet Belarus, itself a territory long occupied by Russian Tsarist and later Soviet rule, became instrumental for Soviet officials seeking to strengthen Indo-Soviet relations symbolically. Minsk and Bangalore became ‘sister cities’ in 1973, although Bangalore Square wasn’t established until 1986, likely following Prime Minister Rajiv Gandhi’s visit to Minsk in 1985. The square served as a symbolic gesture to reaffirm Indo-Soviet ties, not only in trade and culture, but also in military cooperation. As a symbol of Cold War militarized alliances, Bangalore Square also embodies how geopolitical ambitions can shape ecosystems and communities. Nuclear alliances promoted a model of development centered on heavy industry, fossil fuels, and military expansion. The environmental costs were – and still are – significant, including radioactive waste, pollution, and ecological damage, particularly in India’s fragile regions.
Today, the nuclear ties that once defined the alliance behind Bangalore Square are now resurfacing with renewed vigor. Russia’s invasion of Ukraine and its nuclear threats echo the same power logic of domination that once masked itself as ‘friendship.’ Russia’s shelling and occupation of the Zaporizhzhia Nuclear Power Plant (ZNPP) in Ukraine, along with the destruction of the Kakhovka Dam in 2023, which devastated local communities and jeopardized the ZNPP’s cooling systems, show how easily nuclear infrastructure becomes a weapon and underscore the enduring threat of nuclear disaster.
At the same time, global disarmament agreements are weakening. Authoritarian regimes, including Belarus, are doubling down on nuclear guarantees. In 2023, Russia began transferring tactical nuclear weapons to Belarus, positioning it as a forward base for Moscow’s military strategy. Even before Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine, Belarus had expanded its nuclear energy program, despite still dealing with the consequences of the 1986 Chernobyl disaster. The Astravets nuclear power plant, built by a Russian corporation near the Belarus-Lithuanian border, was opened in 2021, despite protests. Anti-nuclear and environmental activists in Belarus have long faced repression, surveillance, and arrests, exposing how authoritarian regimes inherit and reproduce Soviet imperial logics of control over land, bodies, and dissent.
India, too, has embraced a more aggressive nuclear stance. Under the Hindu nationalist BJP government, nuclear weapons are tied to a vision of national and civilizational supremacy. The state utilizes nuclear power not only for deterrence but also as a tool of political identity and control. Alongside ongoing threats of nuclear confrontation with Pakistan, India has intensified surveillance, militarization, and violence in Kashmir and Northeast India, while crushing dissent with alarming consistency. Just as Belarus criminalizes protest through legal and physical force, India uses sedition laws, digital surveillance, and paramilitary violence to extinguish opposition.
The Cold War played a key role in establishing the global nuclear system that we live with today. This system continues to reinforce imperial hierarchies and divert resources away from environmental resilience. Soviet and, later, Russian imperial logics have been central to this system, utilizing nuclear technology not only as a tool of development but also as a means of territorial control, surveillance, and geopolitical dominance. In this light, Bangalore Square is more than just a symbolic relic of the Cold War. It reminds us of the entanglements between militarism, environmental harm, and missed opportunities for genuine solidarity. However, what would it mean to reclaim this space, not as a relic of power, but as a site of anti-nuclear, anti-imperialist, and environmental justice struggles?
Refiguring the square for the struggles of ‘from-here’
The governments of Belarus and India rely on authoritarianism, invasive ‘surveillance’ technology, and extreme repression to maintain power. In Belarus, Alexander Lukashenko’s rule, backed by the Kreml, has become synonymous with state violence, including rigged elections and strict control of political parties and civil society actors. Bangalore Square in Minsk, designated as the sole legal protest zone, is strategically located away from the city center, encircled by traffic and surveillance. Yet paradoxically, this state-sanctioned space has hosted some of Belarus’s important uprisings: against nuclear energy (The Chernobyl Way), neoliberal decrees (the ‘parasite tax’), and gender-based violence.
In India, the signs of authoritarianism are more veiled but no less dangerous – and deeply rooted in colonial legacies. Protests against the Citizenship Amendment Act, the farmers’ movement, and anti-caste mobilizations are met with brutal police crackdowns. Activists are often detained without trial; educational institutions are increasingly militarized; and marginalized groups are scapegoated and often subjected to racialized violence. Bangalore, nowadays a hub of technocratic cosmopolitanism, has also become a site of increasing inequality, ecological degradation, and pervasive ‘surveillance.’ These patterns are not new; they echo colonial strategies of control – policing dissent, regulating bodies, and governing through coercion – now repurposed under the banners of development and national unity to suppress resistance and sustain extractive agendas.
These parallels between Belarus and India are not coincidental but structural, shaped by Soviet, Russian, British, and other imperial legacies. The authoritarian governance of both states is deeply intertwined with the history of empires and the global nuclear order those empires helped create. Nuclear imperialism and authoritarianism are mutually reinforcing: both rely on secrecy, militarization, and the suppression of dissent to maintain control. These are forms of “necropolitics”– the power to determine who may live and who must die, who is valued and who is rendered disposable. Nuclear states are necro-states. They justify violence in the name of progress, enforce silence in the name of security, erase memory in the name of national unity, and turn solidarity into spectacle.
In this context, Bangalore Square is a site where imperial, authoritarian, and nuclear logics converge – and are contested. Though it is marginalized and surveilled, the square has hosted protests resisting state violence and reclaiming space for pluralist, anti-capitalist, and anti-colonial futures. Thus, it becomes a space reworked and repurposed for contemporary struggles where new forms of solidarity may take root. Drawing from the intertwined histories of authoritarianism, nuclear imperialism, and resistance, Bangalore Square emerges as more than just a monument; it is also a place-based analytic, offering a lens through which we can trace how power is established, challenged, and reimagined across space. Its marginal yet visible location, state-sanctioned yet subversive uses, and Cold War lineage make it a generative site for rethinking solidarity from the ground up.
In Belarus, for example, the concept of tutejšasć, or ‘from-here-ness,’ offers one such place-rooted framework. Emerging in the 18th century as a form of local self-identification beyond imperial or national categories, tutejšasć resists fixed identities and affirms relational belonging to land and community. Often dismissed by elites as apolitical or backward, it can instead be read, following Alex Pershai, as a quiet defiance of imperial logics, offering an ethics of presence, care, and survival that escapes state control.
Framing Bangalore Square through this place-based ethos shifts its meaning: no longer a passive remnant of Soviet internationalism, it becomes a living archive of dissent – a space where authoritarian scripts are rewritten by those on the margins. This approach not only theorizes Bangalore Square as situated and relational but also affirms tutejšasć as one among many decolonial ways of grounding solidarity. From here, we can begin to imagine Bangalore Square as part of a transnational constellation of resistance. What if it were linked not only to its namesake city, but also to Bhopal, where survivors of industrial genocide still seek justice, or to Kudankulam, where anti-nuclear protests meet state violence? Like Chernobyl and Zaporizhzhia, these are sacrifice zones, not just disaster zones – places where hazardous technologies backed by imperial and capitalist interests are imposed on expendable populations.
Reimagined this way, Bangalore Square invites us to think beyond the nation-state or Cold War nostalgia. It becomes a node in a pluriversal geography of refusal – a space where local rootedness and transnational solidarity converge to challenge nuclear imperialism, ecological harm, and authoritarian violence.
Toward a decolonial pluriverse of solidarities
To reiterate, I propose taking Bangalore Square as a starting point to rethink the legacies of imperialism and state-orchestrated politics that gave rise to places like this one. I also suggest reconfiguring the square to center local understandings of resistance and offer a lens through which to envision new, grounded networks of solidarity.
Reimagining Bangalore Square in this way, for example, opens the door to more people-centered and place-based models of ‘sister city’ solidarity, such as the Brooklyn Sister City Project with San Juan del Río Coco, Nicaragua, in the 1980s. Unlike the top-down tie between Minsk and Bangalore, Brooklyn’s grassroots effort forged material and affective solidarities to support communities during the Nicaraguan civil war. Through medical aid, infrastructure projects, mutual visits, and feminist exchanges, it became a deliberate rejection of imperialism and authoritarianism. This rejection was grounded in shared survival struggles and everyday interdependence. Bangalore Square could still embody this kind of relationality – if we interpret its unrealized solidarity as an invitation rather than a failure.
Other grassroots and imaginative ‘sisterings’ include Ferguson to Gaza, Detroit to Puerto Rico, Palestine to Kashmir, Detroit to Standing Rock, and Chiapas to Rojava. These constellations of connection form what might be called a decolonial pluriverse of solidarities – a global web of resistance rooted in place, rather than abstract ideals. Bangalore Square, like many spaces shaped by imperial debris, resists neat historical closure. It reflects the contradictions of socialist internationalism and Cold War geopolitics, yet also gestures toward future alliances – for instance, between feminists resisting extractivism in India and queer activists challenging authoritarianism in Belarus.
The question, then, is not whether Bangalore Square can be redeemed, but how it can be repurposed. What kinds of communities emerge when solidarity grows from below, not imposed from above? How might we reimagine ‘sister cities’ not as diplomatic performance, but as radical kinship and place-based resistance? A decolonial pluriverse of solidarities calls for this kind of vision – one that connects those most impacted by war, extraction, and displacement, those resisting from the margins, and those building alternative futures. It asks: How do we make these struggles legible to one another? Bangalore Square offers no easy answers. But it does pose a vital question: What solidarities could have been – and what solidarities might still be?
Imagining what is possible and necessary
By grounding our vision in place-based resistance, such as the ethos of ‘from-here-ness,’ with its attention to complicity and contradiction, we can begin to see ‘sister cities’ not as relics of Cold War diplomacy, but as potential nodes in an emancipatory network. In this light, Bangalore Square is not a dead monument, but rather a living site that holds space for memory, dissent, and reimagining. Feminist and ecological movements in India and Belarus are already pointing toward this possibility. Examples include the anti-nuclear resistance in Kudankulam, queer and feminist organizing in Minsk, and labor struggles that defy nationalist silos. These are not peripheral fights; they are central to the project of imagining livable, just futures. The question that follows is not only how to recognize such movements, but how to connect them, not as symbolic sisters, but as real kin in struggle. I don’t claim to solve that challenge in this essay, but I do seek to open a space for imagining such a solidarity as both possible and necessary.
So, we return to Bangalore Square – not to mourn what was, but to imagine what could be. Not to restore a past shaped by empire, but to reclaim the possibility of solidarity in its wake. The decolonial pluriverse of solidarities is just that: a constellation of place-based alliances rooted in care, accountability, and shared refusal of nuclear imperialism and authoritarian rule. It doesn’t impose a single model; it honors many. It invites us, across borders, histories, and struggles, to build solidarities that embrace difference and deepen relational responsibility.
Since the 2020 uprising, spaces like Bangalore Square have become even more inaccessible, especially for those in exile and for those whose acts of dissent are no longer tolerated in public. The escalation of authoritarianism in Belarus has brought with it an extensive carceral system, where political prisoners face long-term imprisonment, constant surveillance, and systemic silencing. In that context, Bangalore Square becomes less a physical location and more an analytic – one way among many to hold on to place, rootedness, and memory. It carries layered histories of violence and resistance that continue to shape my understanding of land, belonging, and the urgent need for solidarities that emerge from, rather than erase, these complexities.