Incendiary Circumstances (12 page)

Growing up in Pokhran, Joshi had developed a strong interest in nuclear matters. His family hadn't had the resources to send him to college. After high school, he'd started to work in a shop. But all the while he'd wanted to write. He'd begun to send opinion pieces to Hindi newspapers. One of them had taken him on as a stringer.

On the afternoon of May 11, he was preparing for his siesta when the ground began to shake, almost throwing him off his cot. He knew at once that this was no earthquake. It was a more powerful jolt than that of 1974. He recognized it for what it was and called his paper immediately. This, Joshi said proudly, made him the first journalist in the world to learn of the tests.

Joshi told me about a village called Khetolai. It was just six miles from the test site, the nearest human habitation. The effects of the 1974 tests had been felt more severely there, he said, than anywhere else in the district.

We drove off into the scrub, along a dirt road. The village was small, but there were no huts or shanties: the houses were sturdily built, of stone and mortar.

Khetolai was an unusual village, Joshi explained. Its inhabitants were reasonably prosperous—they made their living mainly from tending livestock—and almost everyone was literate, women as well as men. Many were Bishnois, members of a small religious sect whose founder had forbidden the felling of trees and the killing of animals. They thought of themselves as the world's first conservationists.

We stopped to look at a couple of buildings whose walls had been split by the tests, and we were immediately surrounded by eager schoolchildren. They led us into a house where three turbaned elders were sitting on
charpoys,
talking.

On May 11, at about noon, they told me, a squad of soldiers drove up and asked the villagers to move to open ground. People who owned refrigerators and television sets carried them out-of-doors and set them down in the sand. Then they sat under trees and waited. It was very hot. The temperature was over 120 degrees Fahrenheit.

Some three and a half hours later, there was a tremendous shaking in the ground and a booming noise. They saw a great cloud of dust and black-and-white smoke shooting skyward in the distance. Cracks opened up in the walls of the houses. Some had underground water tanks for livestock. The blasts split the tanks, emptying them of water.

Later, the villagers said, an official came around and offered them small sums of money as compensation. The underground tanks had been very expensive. The villagers refused to accept the money and demanded more.

Party activists appeared and erected a colorful marquee. There was talk that the BJP would hold celebrations in Khetolai. By this time the villagers were enraged, and the marquee was removed for fear that the media would hear of the villagers' complaints.

"After the test," a young man said, "the prime minister announced that he'd been to Pokhran and that there was no radioactivity. But how long was he here? Radioactivity doesn't work in minutes." Since 1974, he said, some twenty children had been born with deformed limbs. Cows had developed tumors in their udders. According to the young man, calves were born blind, or with their tongues and eyes attached to the wrong parts of their faces. No one had heard of such things before.

The young man held a clerical job for the government. He was articulate, and the elders handed him the burden of the conversation. In the past, he said, the villagers had cooperated with the government. They hadn't complained, and they'd been careful when talking to the press. "But now we are fed up. What benefits do we get from these tests? We don't even have a hospital."

Someone brought a tray of water glasses. The young man saw me hesitate and began to laugh. "Outsiders won't drink our water," he said. "Even the people who come to tell us that everything is safe won't touch our water."

My guides were subdued on the drive back. Even though they lived in the neighboring district, it had been years since they were last in Pokhran. What we'd seen had come as a complete surprise to them.

I spent the rest of the day in the town of Bikaner, about a hundred miles away. That evening I walked around its royal palace. It was vast, empty, and beautiful, like a melancholy fantasy. Its pink stone seemed to turn translucent in the light of the setting sun. The palace was of a stupefying lavishness. It was built around the turn of the century by Maharajah Sir Ganga Singh of Bikaner, a luminary who had cut a very splendid figure in the British Raj. He entertained viceroys and sent troops to Flanders. He was a signatory of the Treaty of Versailles. There were photographs in the corridors showing Maharajah Ganga Singh in the company of Churchill, Woodrow Wilson, and Lloyd George.

In New Delhi, many people had talked to me about how nuclear weapons would help India achieve "great power status." I'd been surprised by the depth of emotion that was invested in that curiously archaic phrase "great power." What exactly would it mean, I'd asked myself, if India achieved "great power status"? What were the images that were evoked by this tag?

Now, walking through this echoing old palace, looking at the pictures in the corridors, I realized that this was what the nuclearists wanted: treaties, photographs of themselves with the world's powerful, portraits on their walls. They had pinned on the bomb their hopes of bringing it all back.

 

The leading advocate of India's nuclear policies is K. Subrahmanyam, a large, forceful man who is the retired director of the Institute for Defence Studies and Analyses in New Delhi. Subrahmanyam advocates an aggressive nuclear program based on the premise that nuclear weapons are the currency of global power. "Nuclear weapons are not military weapons," he told me. "Their logic is that of international politics, and it is a logic of a global nuclear order." According to Subrahmanyam, international security has been progressively governed by a global nuclear order made up of the five nuclear-weapons powers—the United States, Russia, China, Britain, and France. "India," Subrahmanyam said, "wants to be a player and not an object of this global nuclear order."

I had expected to hear about regional threats and the Chinese missile program. But as Subrahmanyam sees it, India's nuclear policies are only tangentially related to the question of India's security. They are ultimately aimed at something much more abstract and very much more grand: global power. India could, if it plays its cards right, parlay its nuclear program into a seat on the United Nations Security Council and earn recognition as a "global player."

Subrahmanyam told me a story about a film. It was called
The Million Pound Note,
and it featured Gregory Peck. In the film, Peck's character uses an obviously valueless piece of paper printed to look like a million-pound note to con tradesmen into extending credit.

"A nuclear weapon acts like a million-pound note," Subrahmanyam said, his eyes gleaming. "It is of no apparent use. You can't use it to stop small wars. But it buys you credit, and that gives you the power to intimidate."

Subrahmanyam bristled when I suggested that there might be certain inherent dangers to the possession of nuclear weapons. Like most Indian hawks, he considers himself a reluctant nuclearist. He says he would prefer to see nuclear weapons done away with altogether. It is the nuclear superpowers' insistence on maintaining their arsenals that makes this impossible.

Issues of safety, he told me, were no more pressing in India than anywhere else. India and Pakistan had lived with each other's nuclear programs for many years. "It was the strategic logic of the West that was madness. Think of the United States building seventy thousand nuclear weapons at a cost of $5.8 trillion. Do you think these people are in a position to preach to us?"

Subrahmanyam, like many other supporters of the Indian nuclear program, sees little danger of the deployment of nuclear weapons. In New Delhi, it is widely believed that the very immensity of the destructive potential of nuclear weapons renders them useless as instruments of war, ensuring that their deployment can never be anything other than symbolic. That nuclear war is unthinkable has, paradoxically, given the weapons an aura of harmlessness.

I went to see an old acquaintance, Chandan Mitra, a historian with an Oxford doctorate. I had come across an editorial of his entitled "Explosion of Self-Esteem," published on May 12. At Delhi University, when I first knew Chandan, he was a Marxist. He is now an influential newspaper editor and is said to be a BJP sympathizer.

"The bomb is a currency of self-esteem," Chandan told me, with disarming bluntness. "Two hundred years of colonialism robbed us of our self-esteem. We do not have the national pride that the British have, or the French, the Germans, or the Americans. We have been told that we are not fit to rule ourselves—that was the justification of colonialism. Our achievements, our worth, our talent, have always been negated and denied. Mahatma Gandhi's endeavor all during the freedom movement was to rebuild our sense of self-esteem. Even if you don't have guns, he said, you still have moral force. Now, fifty years on, we know that moral force isn't enough to survive. It doesn't count for very much. When you look at India today and ask how best you can overcome those feelings of inferiority, the bomb seems to be as good an answer as any."

For Chandan, as for many other Indians, the bomb is more than a weapon. It has become a banner of political insurgency, a kind of millenarian movement for all the unfulfilled aspirations and dreams of the past fifty years.

The landscape of India teems with such insurgencies: the country is seized, in V. S. Naipaul's eloquent phrase, with "a million mutinies now." These insurrections are perhaps the most remarkable product of Indian democracy: this enabling of once marginal groups to fight for places at the table of power. The bomb cult represents the uprising of those who find themselves being pushed back from the table. It's the rebellion of the rebelled against, an insurgency of an elite. Its leaders see themselves as articulating the aspirations of an immeasurably vast constituency: more than 900
million people, or "one sixth of humanity," in the words of the Indian prime minister. The reality, however, is that the number is very much smaller than this and is dwindling every day. The almost mystical rapture that greeted the unveiling of the cult's fetish has long since dissipated.

While in New Delhi, I visited the Lok Sabha, the lower house of India's parliament, to watch a debate on foreign policy consequences of the nuclear tests. Most of the speakers were vociferously critical of the government for permitting the tests. Several of the speeches were ringing denunciations of the BJP's nuclear policies. Later I went to see one of the speakers, Ram Vilas Paswan. Paswan is a Dalit—a member of a caste group that was once treated as untouchable by high-caste Hindus. He holds the distinction of winning his parliamentary seat by record margins and is something of a cultural hero among many of the country's 230 million Dalits.

Paswan is a wiry man with a close-cropped beard and gold-rimmed eyeglasses. "These nuclear tests were not in the Indian national interest," he told me. "They were done in the interests of a party, to keep the present government from imploding. In the last elections in Pakistan, Nawaz Sharif campaigned on a platform of better relations with India. For this he was pilloried by his opponent, Benazir Bhutto, but he still won. The people of Pakistan want friendship with India. But how did our government respond? It burst a bomb in the face of a man who had reached out to us in friendship. And this in a country where ordinary citizens don't have food to eat. Where villages are being washed away by floods. Where two hundred million people don't have safe drinking water. Instead, we spend thirty-five thousand crores of rupees a year [about $8 billion] on armaments."

On August 6, Hiroshima Day, I was in Calcutta. More than 250,000 people marched in the streets to protest the nuclear tests of May 11. It was plain that the cult of the bomb had few adherents here, that the tests had divided the country more deeply than ever.

 

In New Delhi, I went to see George Fernandes, the defense minister of India.

I have known Fernandes, from a distance, for many years. He has a long history of involvement in human rights causes, and when I was a student at Delhi University, he was one of India's best-known antinuclear activists.

New Delhi is a sprawling city of some 10 million people, but its government offices and institutions are concentrated in a small area. The capital was designed by Sir Edwin Lutyens in the waning years of the British Raj. Two gargantuan buildings form the bureaucratic core of the city. They are known simply as North Block and South Block, and they face each other across a broad boulevard. The buildings are of red sandstone and are ornamented with many turrets and gateways of Anglo-Oriental design. From this fantastically grandiose complex the power of the Indian state radiates outward in diminishing circles of effectiveness.

I was taken to Fernandes's office, in South Block, by Jaya Jaitly, the general secretary of Fernandes's political party, the Samata (Equality) Party. The idea of my striding into the Defense Ministry was no more unlikely than the thought that these offices were presided over by George Fernandes, that perennially indignant activist.

At the age of sixteen, Fernandes, who had harbored ambitions of becoming a Catholic priest, joined a lay seminary. At nineteen he left, disillusioned (he remembers being appalled that the rectors ate better food and sat at higher tables than the seminarians), and went to Bombay, where he joined the socialist trade union movement. For years he had no permanent address and lived with members of his union on the outskirts of the city. Disowned by his father, he did not visit his home again until he was in his forties.

Fernandes still considers himself a socialist. In India's most recent elections, last February, the Samata Party won a mere 12 seats out of a total of 545. There was a time when the Congress—the party of Mahatma Gandhi—regularly commanded a decisive majority. But today no single party controls a sufficient number of
seats to form a stable government. The country has gone to the polls twice in the past three years. Last February's elections gave the BJP, with 181 seats, a slight edge over the Congress. For the first time, the BJP was able to form a government, but only after fashioning a coalition with smaller parties. (The Samata Party entered on very advantageous terms, securing two positions in the cabinet, Fernandes's included.) The BJP's program is based on an assertive, militant Hinduism. In 1992 members of the BJP were instrumental in organizing the demolition of a sixteenth-century mosque that stood upon a site that they believed to be sacred to Hindus. In the aftermath, there were riots across the Indian subcontinent and thousands of people died.