

From Pokhran to Gujarat

Praful Bidwai

The Hindustan Times, 17 May 2002 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. Copyright 2002 The Hindustan Times

