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Pokhran II, still the right decision

I wrote an impassioned column 'The End of Nuclear Virginity' in support of the May 11, 1998 nuclear blasts at Pokhran. For I believed firmly that it was the right thing for the country. As a confirmed neo-liberal and a nationalist, I continue to believe that it was the right message to send out to the world at large -- and the recent events in Iraq and Yugoslavia have only confirmed my belief: military weakness is no virtue.

Now it is a rather different matter as to whether the government was able to get maximum mileage out of the whole thing -- and I have to give it a grade of C-minus. This is where the appalling media naivete of the BJP came into the picture. Neither did the government explain to the Indian public the rationale for the tests; nor did it bring its rather excellent case to the rest of the world -- instead, it went into guilt-ridden defensiveness.

A small, but telling, example of poor media management was a photograph of Atal Bihari Vajpayee bedecked in a bright-red turban and brandishing, somewhat gingerly, a very large sword. Now this was taken at a completely unrelated Sikh function around May 11, 1998, but somehow the global media used this singularly inappropriate photograph alongside its coverage of Pokhran -- insinuating a dangerous India. Picture and thousand words and all that.

Compare this to the outstanding job of media manipulation by the NATO forces in the wake of their Yugoslav misadventure. They bomb civilians aplenty -- that is "unfortunate". They destroy the broadcasting apparatus of the Serbs -- and that is not information warfare but "attacking a military wing of Slobodan Milosevic". They pursue a rather unjustifiable and cruel war, but it is a "just war" for the sake of "human rights". Brilliant Goebbelsian techniques; granted it is easy because of the military-industrial-media nexus in the US. India is utterly naïve at this.

More alarmingly, India allowed itself to be bracketed once again with Pakistan, after the latter's immediate counter-blasts. Furthermore, the innumerable rounds of talks between Jaswant Singh and Strobe Talbott notwithstanding, India has not been able to get the hectoring Americans to move even an inch away from their position that India has no business being a nuclear power. Somehow, India did not use blackmail -- eg, the threat of proliferation -- to best effect.

Thus the post-event management of the blasts leaves much to be desired; nevertheless, I think the population at large in India has come to recognise that it was necessary not only to demonstrate the weapons, but also to, post-haste, develop the means of delivering them. Thus the general acceptance -- there were few protests -- when Agni II was tested in April.

There were indeed loud protests last year led by a few well-meaning 'progressives' (and some who are singing for their supper). Their objections seemed to be based on several factors:
*philosophical opposition to nuclear weapons
*the idea that the money spent on weapons could have been far more profitably used for humanitarian purposes to uplift the masses
*the hope that the world had become a more gentle place, and that existing arms treaties and so forth should suffice; that there will be no more major wars.

On the first item, I cannot disagree at all. Nuclear weapons are the ultimate evil, and there is no moral justification in having them. Total disarmament should be the proper objective of every sane and thinking individual.

Unfortunately, of course, there is a catch. As part of NATO's 50th birthday bash (I don't happen to have the exact words they used), that Euro-American alliance made it crystal clear that nuclear weapons will continue to be a centerpiece of their strategy for the foreseeable future! This while preaching the virtues of nuclear abstinence to all and sundry.

Clearly a brazen, blatant, premeditated act on NATO's part, which had been evident in the way they rammed the NPT and the CTBT through, arrogating to themselves, and to themselves alone, the right to possess and deploy nuclear weapons. And this is just hunky-dory for these countries and those under their nuclear umbrella such as Japan and Australia.

So it is clear that all this talk of disarmament is only meant for the consumption of Third countries, and the western axis intends to continue deceiving them; they are not even willing to sign up to a no-first-use clause. Noting all this, Ukraine, which, as the possessor of some of the erstwhile Soviet arsenal, had forsworn nukes, felt it was a good idea to rescind this abstinence -- Ukraine will now move towards maintaining its own nuclear stockpile.

Therefore, item number one is not a good reason to oppose India's nuclear plans.

As for item two, the idea that the money could be used more productively to help India's teeming masses, this is a red herring. For one thing, from 1947 to 1997 India did not have nuclear weapons -- why didn't our populace climb out of poverty in that timeframe? The 'progressives' are clearly guilty of a logical error -- guns and butter are not mutually exclusive. It is not that India should only build guns, or that it should only build butter. A judicious mixture of the two is called for -- and that is the concept of the minimum deterrent.

I pointed out before that there is a fundamental question that the 'progressives' refuse to look at: why indeed is it the case that the Indian masses are poverty-stricken? It is a demonstrable historical fact that Indians were not so poor in centuries past -- in fact, India was a rather rich nation. Which of course is what attracted all those invaders.

The 'progressives' are mistaken. It is not because of weapons that India is poor. It is because India did not have weapons that the country is poor today. Every passing adventurer and bandit could (and did), without fear of retaliation, invade India and carry off untold booty -- Alexander, Ghazni, Ghori, Nadir Shah, Timur, Clive... To take just one example, the British took (my estimate) one trillion dollars out of India -- that is $1,000,000,000,000. No wonder India is poor.

It would be completely unconscionable to allow this situation to continue in future, allowing other marauders to invade and impoverish. Therefore, item number two is not a good reason.

It is laughable to suggest that, mankind has somehow became more civilised and that we can settle all our differences without recourse to violence. As Exhibit A, I present the former Yugoslavia. It is self-evident that the rule of the jungle continues to operate. Behind brilliantly-conceived propaganda tactics, the mighty still prey upon the weak. War is Peace. Doublespeak lives. Orwell would approve.

I would also like to ask the 'progressives' exactly how they would propose to defend India should there be, heaven forbid, a Yugoslavia-style attack on India by an unholy gang of three: the US out of Diego Garcia in the Indian Ocean, the Chinese on the Tibetan border, and Pakistan across the Line of Control in Kashmir. Not by waving white flags, I hope?

Of course, there will be some who would be happy to cede Kashmir to Pakistan, Arunachal Pradesh and possibly the entire North-East to China, and perhaps Kochi and Vishakhapatnam to the Americans as naval bases. We all know who these delightful Fifth Columnists would be. But for the rest of the people in India, it would be a matter of life and death -- and they would want to defend themselves. How indeed would the 'progressives' do so?

I contend that there is no way India can forestall such a devastating attack except by the expedient of deterrence -- Agni II, the Agni III and IV ICBMs, tactical and strategic warheads, thermonuclear bombs. Even China, notoriously cavalier about such things, will think twice if a stray Indian ICBM could flatten Shanghai or Beijing.

Therefore, item number three is also not a good reason.

Sun Tzu, China's Chanakya, suggests that the essence of strategy is to know one's foe. And who are India's foes? Today, it is Pakistan, with its blind religious hatred. Today and tomorrow, it is China, coldly calculating domination of Asia. Tomorrow, it will also be the United States.

I don't mean the US is India's enemy per se in the conventional sense of the term. It is more that the two nations are natural competitors with some similar strengths -- in the long run, hard though it may be for people to believe, India will indeed compete with the US as an economic and political rival.

In 1995, I interviewed Joel Kotkin, a Los Angeles sociologist who wrote the fascinating book Tribes. He said, "Ten years ago, people gave me blank looks when I said that China would be the US' major competitor. It is becoming true today. Now I tell them that India will be another major competitor of the US, and I get the same blank looks."

India needs to plan to compete on a variety of fronts with the Americans -- in intellectual property, in film and entertainment, in agriculture -- and as a corollary of this, India should also aspire to a global standing in political and military terms that make it a nation to reckon with.

Rajeev Srinivasan