ECONOMIC AND POLITICAL WEEKLY, BOMBAY, 30 MAY, 1998
After the recent round of nuclear explosions, a top nuclear scientist reportedly said that until the tests Indians had to read their ancient classics to feel proud; now they would not have to do so. This scientist, who celebrated the event by popping a champagne bottle, forgot in that moment of glory that our ancient classics were our own; what he was celebrating was just a special case of import substitution; the devices/weapons the Indian scientists and engineers had produced had been invented by the West, then imitated by China and were already within the easy reach of many developed countries.The idea of measuring the achievement of the Indian civilisation on the scale of megatons of destruction can, however, be considered a conceptual breakthrough of a particular kind of Indian!
The quest for the Indian "big bomb", to use the words of Prime Minister A.B. Vajpayee, has produced reams of West-bashing with streams of adjectives like "double-speak", "hypocrisy" , "Western nuclear theology" and so forth. Until the tests, the adjectives applied to India included "nuclear brahmacharya", "self-restraint" and such other terms usually applied to sexual abstinence. But now that the devices/weapons have made India enter nuclear ´grihasthashram´, an Indian nuclear 'varnashram' theology is taking shape.
The first article of faith in this theology is that nuclear weapons are the currency of international power; the other currencies are secondary. What if Indians are poor? They now have the same currency as the Nuclear Five. The Chinese are supposed to have ´proved´ this point inasmuch as China was given a permanent seat in the UN Security Council and the US was not only forced to recognise it but to ´engage´ with it, despite its anti-China stance. It is a small matter that China, in its non-nuclear incarnation, i.e., the KMT´s ´Republic of China´, was already a permanent member of the Security Council and that the US ´engagement´ with China was contemplated as far back as in 1961 but the Vietnam war came in the way. Closer home, did Rajiv Gandhi go to China because it was a nuclear weapons power?