The Collapse of the Bharatiya Janata Party-led government barely 13 months after coming to power has sent an unambiguous message to India's politicians: ultranationalism, hawkishness on matters of security, and nuclear and missile muscle-flexing can hardly guarantee political survival.
The BJP has long been identified as the only political party in India that is a strong, unconditional votary of nuclear weapons and missiles. It has demanded a nuclear bomb for India since 1951—when India's security environment was qualitatively better than at any time in the 1980s or 1990s and fully 13 years before China crossed the nuclear threshold. One of its first decisions upon coming to power in March last year was to conduct a nuclear test, a decision made even before it had won a confidence vote in Parliament by a razor-thin margin made possible by abstentions.
Prime Minister Atal Behari Vajpayee did not even share the decision to test with his cabinet, although the Bjp's ideological mentor and organisational master, the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh, was privy to it. Even Defence Minister George Fernandes was not told about it till a few hours before the 11 May 1998 tests.
The BJP had thought that nuclearisation would produce a popularity wave in its favour — a delusion strengthened by the selective, exaggerated pictures of jubiliatory scenes among some of its hardcore supporters immediately after the tests. The opposite happened, especially after Pakistan's own tests deflated the jingoistic claim that India's nuclearisation was a great scientific-technological achievement unique to the Third World.