Source: [THE HINDU], Saturday, June 20, 1998 / SECTION: Opinion
The Hindutva bomb
Date: 20-06-1998 :: Pg: 12 :: Col: c
By Gail Omvedt
``BRIGHTER than a thousand suns,'' is how MartinOppenheimer is said to have described the first American
nuclear test, quoting apparently from the Bhagavad Gita.
A colleague is said to have reminded him that following
this were the lines, ``I am become death, the shatterer
of worlds.'' The beauty of the mushroom cloud is indeed
the harbinger of death. Only, whereas in the first days
of the bomb the death-bringers were Americans and the
death-takers were the Japanese citizens of Hiroshima and
Nagasaki, today the threat of the dance of death is
looming over the Indian subcontinent.
However much the countries possessing nuclear weaponsare assuring us that they are being held in order not to
be used, it is too easy to forget the costs of using
them. Mark Selden, in an introduction to the book, The
Atomic Bomb: voices from Hiroshima and Nagasaki, has
given some translations of the survivors' experiences.
Perhaps it would be well to recall some of the
descriptions following the bombing of Hiroshima, which
resulted in an estimated 200,000 deaths. A five year-
old girl recalled, ``Black smoke was billowing up and we
could hear the sound of big things exploding... Those
dreadful streets. The fires were burning. There was a
strange smell all over. Blue-green balls of fire were
drifting around. I had a terrible lonely feeling that
everybody else in the world was dead and only we were
alive.''
A young Japanese soldier, describes a burnt-outwasteland the following day: ``Houses had been shattered
and their inhabitants buried in a welter of tiles and
plaster, their naked bodies covered in ashes. Here and
there an arm or a leg protruded. Other bodies lay strewn
about, their stomachs torn open and their entrails
pouring into the ashes... The expressions on the dead
faces as they gazed emptily into space was more
contorted and agonised than those of the fierce
gate-guardian deities of Japanese temples.'' The human
misery caused by the bomb has lasted a lifetime
afterwards for many of those who survived. And these
bombs were miniscule in relation to those developed
later.
India and Pakistan will soon have, it seems, missilesarmed with this deadly brightness poised at each other's
large cities. Millions of people in the subcontinent
will be hostage to the questionable sanity of
governments walking the tightrope of ``mutually assured
destruction.'' Americans and Russians lived with the
knowledge of this kind of national insecurity for
decades; why should not others join the nuclear club?
Now the Hindu bomb and the Muslim bomb are poised
against each other, swadeshi and quami weapons of
destruction and the patriotic young men of both
countries are dancing in the streets. Garv se kaho, ham
Hindu hain; ya Muslim hai, it makes not much difference,
the spirit of fanaticism is the same everywhere.
The nuclear tests were ultimately political statementsfor both the countries, statements that we too are
scientific adults, members of the bully club. But to
whom were the statements made? In the case of Pakistan,
it is clear: the tests were a direct response to India,
mutually active determination. In the case of India, it
is not so clear. Were the tests a global statement, to
inform the world that here is a country not to be taken
lightly? It is doubtful if anything like this really was
accomplished. India had a bit of a reputation of being
the land of the Buddha and Mahatma Gandhi, but only a
bit; there was a greater mystique of heat and dust and
hunger and communal riots in the last few years have
torn away much of the theme of morality and peace-
bringing the country had once sought to embody. India
has sought to project itself as ``secular'' in contrast
to Pakistan as a self-proclaimed Muslim nation, but the
world has never taken this seriously, and the overall
image of the recent series of tests simply confirms the
unfortunate popular conception in many other counties of
Muslim Pakistan, Hindu India, traditional enemies at
each others' throats, spending money on arms rather than
on education.
As for their economic results, it is quite clear thatwhatever India's ability to ``withstand'' any economic
sanction, few of the world's business community seemed
to be impressed by the tests. The rapidly declining
rupee and the falling stockmarkets are indications that
both the global and swadeshi business, at lea st, find
the tests more a harbinger of insecurity.
The greatest political statement of the tests isundoubtedly directed at the Indian people. Regardless of
the claims of consensus and non-partisanship, this is a
Hindutva bomb, a BJP bomb, a bomb proclaiming that the
country's foreign policy is going to take a different
and more aggressive direction from the stance it had
taken under Nehru and more recently, under the United
Front. It is a bid for popular support which it seems to
have fairly thoroughly won, at least for the moment. The
tests also seem to have been rather useful in stilling
at least temporarily the clamour of the BJP allies,
though it is doubtful if Ms. Jayalalitha is going to pay
very much attention even to nuclear weapons.
The charges of hypocrisy against the U.S. Government fortrying to prevent other nations from joining the bully
club are quite justified; the only country which ever
used this weapon of death has little right to say
anything about it. American ``patriots'' if anything are
more jingoistic, more racist more chauvinistic than any
of their saffron correlates in India or green correlates
in Pakistan. A couple of years ago when the Smithsonian
Institute proposed an exhibition of Enola Gay, the
airplane from which the bomb was dropped on Hiroshima,
there was a storm of protest from the right because it
included criticism of the Government's decision to drop
the bomb. The exhibition had to be cancelled; the
Americans as a nation are not yet ready to face up to
their responsibility for the havoc of destruction and
misery caused by the use of the atomic bomb.
There are other ironies. The U.S. pressure to formulatea test ban treaty and move away from the weapons of war
is also a recognition of some democratic pressure, not
simply a matter of trying to throw its weight around but
of also being pushed to discipline itself. It is
important to remember that Mr. Bill Clinton is under
pressure from the American rightwing; just as India has
refused to sign the CTBT, the Republican- dominated U.S.
Congress has refused to ratify it. In both the countries
hawks and doves, that is warmongers and peaceniks, are
in conflict and in both the countries the hawks do not
like ``national security'' to be hemmed in by any
international agreement.
The greatest irony of all is the holding of the nucleartests on Buddha Poornima. After 50 years of
Independence, India is seeking to declare itself as a
great power, not by economic achievements, not by
spiritual and moral values, not by addressing science to
the cause of hunger and poverty but through sheer
military power. Seeing the bomb in terms of the
Mahabharata was more fitting; the epic is, after all,
centred round the slaughter of kin, and Indians and
Pakistanis can fairly be called ultimately kin, however
much they may each define their national identity in
terms of the negation of the other. But proclaiming that
the ``Buddha smiled'' is either a deliberate insult or
unconscious arrogance. Buddhism was sidelined a long ago
in the land of its birth; that the cooptation on
nonviolence has only been a matter of rhetoric is shown
in the casual use of such phrases.
The nuclear tests are the BJP's answer to challenges toits power and they project a path away from the `ahimsa'
that the Buddha represented and that Gandhi sought to
harness in the cause of nationalism and
anti-imperialism. The Dalit-Bahujan spokesman, Mr.
Kancha Ilaiah, has been arguing that it is not
accidental that all Hindu gods are armed; there is,
according to him, inherent violence in Brahmanism. The
nuclear tests represent an awesome, deadly upgrading of
the weapons of destruction and while the bomb has
clearly been developed by all the preceding Governments,
it is not surprising that the ``arming'' is being done
by a Hindutva Government.
We might hope that the political opposition will learnto define itself in the very different terms of the
morality and compassion of the Buddhist and Gandhian
traditions and that it might attempt more to devote
science to economic growth and the removal of poverty
rather than military might. The immediate response of
the Opposition parties - criticising only the BJP's use
of the nuclear tests - does not give much scope for this
hope, but the genuine traditions of non-violence and
sanity in India are represented in the signs of a
growing anti-nuclear and peace movement.
(The writer is Professor of Sociology, University ofPune.)
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