Funnily enough, the India/Pakistan nuclear tests of May 1998 were triggered by a Tamil lady from India's south. Prime Minister Atal Behari Vajpayee, humiliated by a mere 13 days in office the first time around exactly two years earlier, was unwilling to lead his party through another ignominious early ouster. And so when the querulous partners in his shaky coalition, most importantly J. Jayalalitha of the AIADMK, threatened to pull out of the BJP-led government, Vajpayee went nuclear. It was as simple as that. The resulting nationalist wave would sustain the government a few months longer. A political party's short-term interest had decided national policy with grave regional and international fallout.
After India tested, Pakistan tested. Two countries, made essentially of the same people sharing the same history and sensibility, having land borders and adjacent population centres, now make plans to cap their missiles with nuclear tips. They contemplate atomic war. What was unthinkable in April became hard reality over the course of May.
Pakistan had it easy in explaining its own tests – it was only responding to India's. It was India that had to resort to unconvincing ex post facto justifications, such as the sudden emergence of a 'China threat'. As for the unfairness of the international non-proliferation regime, why did India alone among the 180-odd non-nuclear weapon states feel that it had to make the point? Nuclear hegemonism could have been fought by making common cause with other powerhouses of the South, from Brazil to Indonesia.
At the United Nations and elsewhere, India has long reserved for itself the high moral ground, armed with reference to Gandhi, Nehru, Tagore, Ashoka and Buddha. Today, India speaks the language of power and machismo. But has this buttressed its own security? Whereas earlier India was one ahead within the Subcontinent, with Pokhran I, now Islamabad stands shoulder-to-shoulder at the doors of a South Asian Armageddon. India seems to have hurt its own security by goading the overt nuclearisation of Pakistan, a much more unstable state than itself, with fewer failsafe mechanisms in its polity.