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Dangerous Descent
Praful Bidwai
Times of India, 15 May 1998
Five and a half years after the Ayodhya demolition, the BJP has again done the unthinkable, the unconscionable, the indefensible.
It has suddenly crossed the nuclear Rubicon and bestowed a grotesque kind of acceptability and legitimacy upon quintessential legitimacy instruments of mass annihilation and weapons of terror, which New Delhi has always denied them. The three Pokharan tests signify not India's maturity or her
arrival upon the world as a self-confident and vibrant nation, but just the opposite. At their heart is the raw power of an unbalanced, aggressive, xenophobic, belligerent nationalism. This nuclear sabre-rattling violates every single civilised and sane principle that New Delhi has stood for and
defended in the international arena for half a century, including non-use of force in relations between states, opposition to nuclear terrorism (which is what deterrence is all about}, and support for peace and disarmament.
The tests deeply offend the citizen's democratic conscience, for several reasons. To start with, they lack a strategic rationale.
There has been no perceptible adverse change whatsoever in India's security environment in recent years or months to justify a radical, violent shift of our military posture. If anything, there has been some improvement in the environments as a result of the subsiding of the azadi movement in the
Kashmir valley, and better relations with Bangladesh, Nepal, Sri Lanka, and most important, China. It is disingenuous to cite the fact of Sino-Pakistani nuclear cooperation. This is of a sporadic, largely non-strategic, nature, and does not constitute a serious threat. Nor is it new. China has not so far treated India as a nuclear adversary: indeed, it recently discontinued its programme to develop the Dong-Feng 25 missile specifically targeted to reach peninsular India. China is a threat in the same sense that any large military power, including the US, is always a potential threat. The fact that most of those who invoke China conveniently forget American hegemonism, indeed plead for a "bargain" with Washington, only shows the fatal flaw in their logic.
In any case, nuclear weapons are strategically incapable of meeting a strategic threat. They are not weapons of defence. Nor
are they good, reliable, deterrents. The notion of nuclear deterrence is deeply fraught-India has always called it "abhorrent"-and involves slippages into an arms race. That is one plain lesson of the Cold War, which our ruling coalition has evidently decided to erase and unlearn. We are now being treated to an assortment of other flawed reasons too-national pride, self-esteem, a place at the international high table. Are we to suppose, then, that we Indians have always lacked pride and that our self-esteem is now critically dependent solely on epossessing weapons of mass destruction? In that case, what happened to our centuries-old culture? And are we to believe that gatecrashing into the Exclusive Nuclear Club, which the bulk of the world's 185 nations distrust, is the best way of relating to their peoples and promoting our own interests?
It should be obvious that Pokharan-II has earned India suspicion, resentment and hatred, not respect-not just from the major
powers, but from the smaller non-nuclear states which have no stake in such armaments. The reason is that India wantonly, cynically, defied the post-Cold War global momentum, a healthy one, favouring nuclear restraint and disarmament. This was not done in the interest of a higher principle, but for utterly puerile, crude, Machiavellian considerations of power, wholly lacking in rationality. Barring the rather petty tactic of trying to pre-empt a discussion of India's security policy, and of presenting Washington with a nuclear fait accompli before the forthcoming round of talks with it, these
considerations are largely domestic. They have to do with the BJP outmanoeuvring its own allies such as the AIADMK and trying to win cheap popularity by drumming up jingoistic, macho, hate-driven notions of nationalism and self-esteem-the nuclear analogue or counterpart of the Ayodhya campaign mindset, if you please. Nothing else can explain the timing of the explosions other than this terrible Manichean logic. Mr Fernandes's wild, belligerently anti-Chinese rhetoric worked to the same purpose, as did the perversion of the peaceful-Buddha-Smiles symbolism to legitimise weapons of annihilation and insensate violence. The fact that a minority government, led by a party with 25 per cent of the popular vote, lacks the democratic
mandate to effect a violent, far-reaching change in long-established policies only compounds the gravity of Pokharan-II.
A billion Indians, and a third as many other South Asians now will now live under the much-hated shadow of the mushroom cloud-
the sub-continent's own. Their fears and insecurities are liable to increase as their economies haemorrhage due to bloated military spending, as the culture of public discourse in their unhappy, divided societies further coarsens, and support for the Bomb becomes the touchstone of patriotism among some circles. It would be much easier for us in India to cope with economic sanctions-assuming these are invoked-than with the crippling consequences of the social conformism, and the culture of intolerance and authoritarianism that nuclearism promotes wherever it holds sway. And yet it is precisely this that we are inflicting upon ourselves. We are not being independent and authentically Indian here. We are only slavishly imitating the
five nuclear weapons-states in embracing the very same theologies of destruction and committing the very same historic blunders that have brought the world to its present, sorry pass. In the process, we will sacrifice, not enhance, our security vis-a-vis China as well as Pakistan and other neighbours. Globally, India will be held guilty of sabotage of the nuclear disarmament agenda. That will be the ultimate folly: our real security lies in a nuclear weapons-free world, which that agenda seeks to bring eabout.
It might still be possible to contain some of the damage. If New Delhi wants to recover a modicum of credibility, it should pledge
never to use, or further test, nuclear weapons, sign the CTBT-working for its amendment to ban even sub-critical tests at a review conference scheduled for 1999-and return sincerely to the regional and global disarmament agenda. But to do this, the ruling coalition will have to abandon its macho nuclear fixations, its delusions of grandeur and the mistaken belief that flexing nuclear muscle guarantees immense popularity. Indira Gandhi too thought it would in 1974. She soon discovered that she was horrendously wrong. Social unrest grew. Internal problems multiplied. The emergency followed a year later. One can only hope history does not repeat itself in the Pokharan mode.
Copyright 1998 Times of India
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