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The first of these occasions came months after the tests. It
came even as the nuclear hawks were still eloquent about the
pro-peace virtues of the new arms race in the region. Now, they
exulted, even the spectre of a conventional war had ceased to
haunt the subcontinent. Nothing like a bomb-achieved balance of
terror, they agreed, to make India and Pakistan live like the
neighbours and brothers they were. Came Kargil, and the claim
was shattered. In retrospect, it was a bomb-born confidence that
had prompted Pakistan’s army under an ambitious Pervez
Musharraf to provoke the conflict.
The second turning
point came with September 11, 2001. That the tragedy at the
World Trade Center (WTC) in New York, too, led to increased
insecurity in South Asia, is a point noted sharply in the latest
of the books on India’s nuclear weapons programme — Prisoners
of the Nuclear Dream edited by M.V. Ramana and C. Rammanohar
Reddy.
The editors are
unambiguous about this: "While the finer details of some of
these arguments (against India’s nuclear weaponisation) may be
changed with regard to the attack (on the WTC), it is certain
that concern about South Asia’s nuclear weapons has only
become that much more grave." The situation could not have
become graver than it did, when an attack by suspected Islamic
militants on Indian Parliament three months after 9/11 led to a
long India-Pakistan military standoff all along the border. The
eyeball-to-eyeball confrontation of a million soldiers of two
nuclear-weapon states continued though the chilling summer of
2002.
That both India
and Pakistan officially became allies of the USA in its
"global war on terror" spelt nuclear terror for the
entire region. The alliance made the subcontinent’s rivals
more implacable adversaries than ever. The superpower, quick to
waive post-Pokharan II and post-Chagai sanctions against both,
winked at their war games.
The danger posed
by the standoff might have passed. However, it has returned with
a vengeance after the most recent turning point. The US-UK
invasion of Iraq has provoked not only popular anti-war protests
in India, but also official protestations sparked by no passion
for peace. The immediate reaction of New Delhi was to plead for
an equal right to pre-emption, with particular reference to
Kashmir. Washington has rejected the plea, but the war can
promote nuclear militarism here in another way.
Iraq is a
heaven-sent opportunity for the Indian nuclear hawks to revive
the argument that makes the bomb synonymous with security, to
peddle the "deterrence" theory as proven beyond doubt.
The common purpose of the essays in this volume, compiled before
the "Coalition of the Killing" blitzed Baghdad, is to
prove this theory to be a tattered myth. As the editors sum it
up: "The people of India and Pakistan`85have now to come to
terms with Robert Jay Lifton’s assertion: ‘The central
existential fact of the nuclear age is vulnerability.’
The nuclear dream only makes us prisoners of insecurity."
Ramana and Reddy
have brought out earlier the physical and human aspects of such
insecurity. Ramana—along with Pakistani peace activists Zia
Mian and A.H. Nayyar as well as M. McKinzie—worked out the
possible toll of human lives (nearly three million) in an
India-Pakistan nuclear war. Reddy was the first to work out the
cost of India’s nuclear weaponisation (a whopping Rs
70,000-80,000 crore over a decade), and the title of his essay, Nuclear
Weapons versus Schools for Children, makes his telling
point.
The political
linkage is provided by M.V. Krishna Ananth, who draws attention
to the fact that the Congress and even sections of the Left, in
their first reactions to Pokharan II, talked of it as a proud
achievement of Indian science that could strengthen security.
The absence of consistent political opposition to nuclear
weaponisation per se should add considerably to the Indian peace
movement’s post-Iraq concern.
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LAST
May 11, it was already five years since Pokharan II. Must we still
go on debating whether India needs nuclear weapons or not?
