The Hindustan Times
Friday, May 17, 2002

From Pokhran to Gujarat

by Praful Bidwai

One of the most perceptive comments on the Pokhran-II nuclear tests,
which occurred this week four years ago, was made by a peace
activist. He said: "They killed Mahatma Gandhi twice - first in 1948,
and again in 1998." 'They' here clearly referred to the forces of
Hindutva, which fiercely oppose the Gandhian notions of tolerance,
secularism, pluralism and nonviolence.

Fifty-four years ago, these forces were personified by former RSS
swayamsewak Nathuram Godse, who regarded Gandhi as effete and
effeminate and an appeaser of Muslims and Pakistan. Today, they are
represented by former pracharak Narendra Modi, and other Hindu
fundamentalists belonging to the BJP, who too regard Gujarat's
Muslims as Pakistan's Fifth Column, who deserve to be killed.

Is the Pokhran-Gujarat connection far-fetched? Actually, the links go
beyond the 1948-1998 analogy. Thus, the VHP's first response to
Pokhran-II was to declare that the Hindus had finally "awakened" with
the "Shakti" series of tests, and to demand that India be formally,
constitutionally, declared a "Hindu State".

Identically, VHP leader Ashok Singhal now terms Gujarat's pogrom of
Muslims as signifying, indeed proof of, Hindu "awakening" or
"resurgence".

Four years ago, the VHP announced it would build a temple to a new
national goddess, "Atomic Shakti", and carry Pokhran's radioactive
sands in a rath yatra to each corner of India. Today, it is reaping
the harvest of the seeds sown by its campaign to build another
illegitimate temple, at Ayodhya, fertilised by kar sewaks who went
there from Gujarat in their thousands.

Beyond such analogies lie deeper, causal connections. Gujarat was a
"Hindutva-only" affair. (That is why the BJP remains totally isolated
on its support for the pogrom). Pokhran-II too was a parochial,
'BJP-RSS-only', thing, not a national enterprise.

The decision to conduct the blasts was not taken in the cabinet,
following a 'strategic review' or consultations with the defence
services. As RSS chief K.S. Sudarshan boasted, it was taken by the
Sangh. Only a handful of RSS-loyal ministers were privy to it.
Indeed, most of our hawkish 'strategic experts' did not advocate
actual testing. Never known for much independence, they however duly
fell in line on May 11 and spun out fanciful ex-post
rationalisations. Four years on, these appear hollow and fraudulent.

After the 1998 elections, and even before Pokhran-II, the BJP
jealously, doggedly, stuck to its manifesto's promise to "reevaluate
the country's nuclear policy and exercise the option to induct
nuclear weapons", and imposed it on the NDA's 'National Agenda for
Governance', which repeated it verbatim. Such repetition occurred on
only one other issue: constitutional review.

It is easy to see that Hindutva's obsession with nuclear weapons
derives from a certain conception of power and prestige, and of
nationalism. This notion of power is quite unrelated to security,
even conventional military security.

The BJP-Jan Sangh's half-century-old demand that India should go
nuclear was made irrespective of the state of India's security
environment at any point. It is driven by a neurotic fascination with
nuclearism, the worship of the ability to wreak limitless vengeance
and bludgeon the adversary into submission - by threatening mass
destruction. Power here is equated with the ability to cause mortal
fear, not evoke respect.

This conception is morally perverse. It makes nonsense of the ethics
of just war, including non-combatant immunity, proportionality in the
use of force, and avoidance of cruel, degrading and inhuman methods.

One can embrace nuclearism with BJP-style enthusiasm only by erasing
all distinctions between soldiers and civilians, measured (or
well-targeted) and indiscriminate force, and just and barbaric
methods of warfare. How else can one justify incinerating millions of
people, flattening whole cities at one go, or extensively poisoning
land, air and water with long-acting toxins (some with half-lives of
millions of years), or inflicting chromosomal damage upon scores of
as-yet-unborn generations?

It is also relevant to ask how one can justify, as Hindutva does, the
slitting of wombs to destroy foetuses, spearing little babies to
death, burning alive old people, and savaging and quartering women's
bodies. That is precisely what happened in the Gujarat massacre,
which the BJP and its associates organised and executed with full
State complicity.

When you 'normalise' Genghis Khan-level barbarism as the "natural"
logic of action-and-reaction, when you plot the butchery of innocent
citizens because 'they', some members of that false collectivity, did
a Godhra to 'us', when you malign Muslims as people incapable of
living with others, when you demonise and dehumanise a whole
community, you follow the same logic as nuclearism does.

Common to both is the legitimation of genocidal destruction, of a
break in the chain of being, of unlimited punishment disproportionate
to the threat/crime. Rationalising a pogrom or worshipping nuclear
weapons means banalising evil. Both celebrate revenge and savagery
bordering on genocide.

The BJP's conception of nationhood involves a warped notion of
grandeur based on the congruence of pitrabhoomi and punyabhoomi, and
privileging of one ethnic-religious group. Central to it is
exclusion, coercion and violence, as well as false glorification of
India's past. Hindu nationalism is just as incompatible with the
Constitution and universal rights as Islamic or Zionist
fundamentalism.

The bomb serves this idea of nationhood ideally. Nuclearism denies
the possibility of drawing upon humane values and life-affirming or
cooperative attitudes. This mindset promotes what are conventionally
known as 'masculine' values: lack of compassion, eagerness to
retaliate, violence, and brutality. No wonder, Hindutva has a
compulsive and obsessive fascination with 'manhood' and 'virility'.
This has nowhere been more evident than in Gujarat.

Central to this muscular, male-supremacist, virulent nationalism is
the idea of 'sacrifice' and 'martyrdom' - in the cause of mass
destruction. The first South Asian leader who said, "we'll eat grass,
but we'll have the bomb", was not Bhutto. It was Atal Bihari
Vajpayee, way back in the Sixties - with a variation: eating one
chapati in place of two, rather than grass.

Needless to say, the leaders who pledge such sacrifices on behalf of
the people never end up eating grass themselves. They merely prepare
the ground for profoundly irrational, hysterical ways of
conceptualising security - by severing the people from the nation.

The causal chain that links Pokhran to Gujarat is unmistakable. The
first mindset evolves seamlessly into the second. If Gujarat has
inflicted unconscionable damage upon India's constitutional order and
its claim to pluralism, nuclear weapons have grotesquely perverted
our social and economic priorities, promoted crude Social-Darwinist
ideas of "survival of the fittest", legitimised unbounded cruelty -
and degraded India's security.

Nothing illustrates this better than today's India-Pakistan military
standoff, born of reckless brinkmanship, aggravated by a cynical
'Wag-the-Dog' calculus, and further compounded by the condemnable
Jammu massacre. There is now a likelihood of "limited" strikes
rapidly escalating into a nuclear standoff.

More than a billion innocent, unarmed civilians in South Asia have
now become hostage to mass-destruction weapons against which there
is, can be, no defence. Four years after Pokhran-II - and the Chagai
tests it provoked - the nuclear balance sheet looks ugly.
Nuclearisation has had a disastrous social, economic, political and
foreign policy impact. This will worsen as India bankrupts itself,
our social services collapse, and the State fails, while the people
become insecure, as in Gujarat.

We could not have made a worse Faustian bargain.