• The cultural politics of South Asian nuclearism
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This year, as India marked the 50th anniversary of the assassination of Mohandas Gandhi, the ‘Father of the Nation’ has finally been liquidated. Though the ‘great man of history’ theory holds out little appeal to sophisticated historians, we know that certain women and men require to be assassinated more than once or even twice. Ironically, Gandhi’s friend, the great poet and writer Rabindranath Tagore, may have contributed towards Gandhi’s obliteration when he fatally transformed him from Mohandas into the Mahatma. Students of history might recall also that Gandhi had emerged from his last fast, a final attempt by him to move India away from the degraded politics of the modern nation-state system and to pave the way for better relations between India and Pakistan, barely a few days before Nathuram Godse decided to dispense with his frail body, all ninety-five pounds of him.

In those final days of his life, some of Gandhi’s detractors relentlessly pounded away at him, holding him responsible for India’s partition, and they even taunted him with the word hijra. Gandhi had not been man enough, so it was alleged by Godse at his trial, to protect the motherland from the rapacious ambitions and murderous instincts of the Muslim ‘invader’ and a feminine-like figure, who resorted to spinning, found solace in the inner voice, and employed the weapons of the weak (such as fasting), was scarcely equipped to provide guidance to India’s beleaguered leaders. India had been vivisected, and the Hindus no more wanted a divided nation than they wanted a castrated man. The Muslim was circumcised, "cut up" as militant Hindus jeeringly say; so was Gandhi a castrated man, emaciated and emasculated.

Exorcising Gandhi
First we kill in the flesh, then we must kill in the spirit: Gandhi had yet to be exorcised. In death, as in life, the old man refused to disappear into the dark of the night, and Gandhi would loom large in India’s imagination, even as many people thought that his name existed only to be invoked at rituals and ceremonies, as a specimen of a preeminent Indian spirituality and moral probity.

In 1974, less than three years after concluding a victorious war with Pakistan, India exploded what was called a "peaceful nuclear device", as though even its nuclear explosions had to carry some of the burden of Gandhi’s non-violence. How else can one think of these three words existing in apposition to each other? For the subsequent 24 years, India exercised what was taken to be virtuous restraint, but it has now broken the self-imposed moratorium with a series of five nuclear tests; two weeks later, Pakistan was to follow suit. Writing to Clinton and other political leaders, Prime Minister Atal Bihari Vajpayee pointed to the "deteriorating security environment" in South Asia, and the purportedly aggressive designs of its two principal neighbours, China and Pakistan, as providing India with a sufficient warrant for seeking to acquire nuclear deterrence.

It is no accident that Vajpayee’s Bharatiya Janata Party, whose predecessor was the Jana Sangh, numbers among its members some who have been active in political associations that were implicated in the assassination of Gandhi fifty years ago and which have ever been the ardent champions of Hindu ascendancy. What Godse could only gesture at, and what the Hindu Mahasabha and Rashtriya Swayam Sevak Sangh have willed for a long time, has finally been achieved: Vajpayee has removed the spectre of Gandhi which has been haunting India’s modernising elates. The Indian nation-state will no longer live in consummate fear of Gandhi’s critiques of modernity, big science, instrumental rationality, development, war, and masculinity.

Debate
Consequently, while economists, foreign policy experts, and defence specialists will continue to debate the reasons that led India to assume nuclear testing at this particular juncture, the political and electoral calculations of the Bharatiya Janata party, the cost to India and Pakistan of economic sanctions, the possible escalation of an arms race, the palpable failures of American foreign policy and intelligence gathering, the future of Indian relations with China, and the wider geopolitical consequences of South Asia’s nuclearisation, there are other, more interesting and poignant, considerations to which we should be attentive. No doubt the question, "What is to be done?", acquires an urgency which we ought not to resist, but it is imperative that we not allow our vision of what the future can promise to be shaped by those very policy planners, techno experts and masters of realpolitik who must be held accountable for turning South Asia nuclear. Too often have we turned over our futures to those very men from whom it needs to be protected, and too often have we made the state, which continues to be the most grotesque violator not only of human rights but also of India’s cultural legacy, the custodian of our rights.

To reclaim our future, then, we should seek to understand the real significance of India’s turn towards nuclearisation. During the height of the Cold War, Nehru attempted to place India in a ‘third camp’, indeed at the helm of the leadership of the non-aligned movement. This was even, in some measure, a continuation of Gandhi’s policy of repudiating realpolitik and the grossly functionalist politics of cold war deterrence, and it was certainly an acknowledgement that neither the Untied States nor the Soviet Union, nor the political and economic systems of which they were the supreme representatives, had a monopoly on truth. As Nehru appeared to be indicating, there were yet other ways of imagining the world. It is in the forums of the United Nations, an organization itself founded to free human kind of the scourge of war, that India most made visible its presence, and likewise its disproportionately large contributions to the various UN-sponsored peace-keeping operations, to which it continues to commit more men then do the ‘great powers’, were an endeavour to persist with Gandhi’s legacy of what might be termed militant non-violence.

However, in the hostile environment of the Cold War, where the United States in particular adopted the view that any country purporting to advocate neutrality was clearly aligning itself with the enemies of ‘freedom’ and ‘democracy’, the non-aligned movement would over time become increasingly irrelevant, until the fall of the Soviet Union rendered it altogether obsolete. With the turn towards globalisation, and the continuing American quest for markets, China took on an importance that, ever since its ascendancy to nuclear power status three decades ago, the other powers had always been willing to recognize. Once again, India seemed to be left out in the cold, and commentators have consequently interpreted the nuclear tests as India’s cry for attention. Clinton appeared to have echoed this view when he noted that India, perhaps lacking in self-esteem, thought itself "under appreciated" as a "world power".

Complex
There is, perhaps, yet a more complex history to India’s nuclear tests, a history that extends back, in a manner of speaking, to the early days of India under colonial rule. The British were apt to describe Indians as an "effeminate" people, leading lives of indolence and womanly softness. That India had been under the rule of ‘foreigners’ for centuries was for the British proof enough that, abandoning the work of fighting to men better endowed with military prowess and prepared to wield the sword, Indians were content to plough the land and lead the lives of agriculturists. The rebellion of 1857-58 was attributed not to a resurgence of military pride among Indians, but to ill-advised policies, and after its brutal suppression, the entire country was divided between "martial" and "non-martial" races. Among the "martial races" were the Rajputs, Pathans, and what the British termed "Muhammadans"; prominent among the non-martial races were the majority of the vast number of Hindus living in Bengal and the Gangetic plains.

The contempt for the supposed effeminacy of Hindus continued to run deep among British officials, and in 1879 the Viceroy could state with barely concealed disgust that "the Baboodom of Lower Bengal, though disloyal is fortunately cowardly and its only revolver is its ink bottle; which though dirty, is not dangerous." One response among Indian nationalists was to embrace a certain kind of hyper-masculinity, which would enable Indians to be construed as a people just as "manly" as the British. As numerous social and cultural historians have documented, the masculinization of Indian nationalism took on many manifestations: the cult of exercise and muscle-building was encouraged, martial figures from India's past were evoked, the rewriting of Indian history from the point of view of highlighting the resistance offered to invaders was attempted, and armed revolutionary activity gained many adherents.

Effeminacy
Hindus, have, nonetheless, never been able to live down the taunt of "effeminacy", and those who know of the cultural nuances of South Asian history are aware that some Indians imagine Pakistani Muslims as a meat-eating, virile, robust, and militaristic people. Consider, too, that where in the traditional iconography of Rama he appeared as a smiling, compassionate, and serene god, possessed even of a feminine softness and androgynous appeal, in more recent years, under the inspiration of the advocates of the Ramjanmabhoomi movement, he has been transformed into an angry, militant, and punishing god, whose bow and arrow no longer adorn him but carry the triumphant promise of annihilating defeat. It is a telling fact that the first comment of Balasaheb K. Thackeray, the chauvinist leader of the militantly Hindu Shiv Sena party who is an open admirer of Hitler, upon hearing of India's nuclear tests was, "We have to prove that we are not eunuchs."

By signalling its departure from the body of world opinion, India has sought to arrive on the world stage, though it may find that the place where it seeks to arrive is one from which others seek to leave. No doubt the present world order tolerates and encourages vast inequities in power, and the spectacle of having the only world power that has ever deployed nuclear weapons, and that too twice, moralizing to the rest of the world on the virtues of non-proliferation is too nauseating for many other countries to contemplate with equanimity. The emulation of those who have degraded themselves, worshipping at the altar of naked power, can however never be anything more than a Barmecidean feast, an empty thrill and a false hope.

Shallow triumph
The recent nuclear tests may represent the shallow triumph of India as a nation-state, but they signify the saddening defeat of India as a civilization, an irony made all the more bitter by the posturing in which Vajpayee's Bharatiya Janata Party engages as the vanguard of "Hindu civilization". Only a people who have abandoned their civilization, and their civility, for the imagined munificence of 'great power' status would have had the effrontery to test nuclear bombs on the auspicious occasion of Buddha Purnima. If in 1974 Mrs. Gandhi was informed by her scientists and generals, after the apparently unsuccessful nuclear test at Pokhran, that the "Lord Buddha is smiling", then the Buddha must now be roaring with laughter. This macabre display of enlightened hyper-masculinity is only as grotesque as the pretensions of a nation-state that, while it has been grossly negligent in feeding, clothing, and educating its people, aspires to be taken seriously as a great power. With what face can the present Indian government dare at all to evoke, even on purely ceremonial occasions, the name of Gandhi, who late in his life had this "talisman" to offer:

"Whenever you are in doubt or when the self becomes too much with you, apply the following test: 'Recall the face of the poorest and the weakest man whom you may have seen and ask yourself if the step you contemplate is going to be of any use to him. Will he gain anything by it? Will it restore him to a control over his own life and destiny? In other words, will to lead to Swaraj for the hungry and spiritually starving millions?' Then you will find your doubts and your self melting away"?

Great player
It is not unnatural, given the modern nation-state system and the xenophobia that it promotes, that India should seek to be a great player in the world. Not every country will have this ambition, but India will be unable to avoid this temptation. Its detractors and admirers alike are cognizant of India's densely layered pasts, and though reverence for the past leads to no tangible good in the modern marketplace, its population of nearly a billion elevates it into the rank of nations that are stamped on our consciousness. As a nation-state, however, India will never be much of a great player, not even with nuclear weapons, and the increasing nuclearisation of the world will only erode the few advantages, such as its scientific the technical manpower, of which it is presently possessed.

Indeed, by having conducted its own nuclear tests, Pakistan has already considerably undermined the reputation of India's much-feted scientific establishment. But if it is the one resounding cruelty of our times that no nation-state which refuses to partake in realpolitik and the brutal zero-sum politics of our times can receive much of a hearing, then how might India be a great player? If Indians were not so consumed by the anxieties generated by colonial and neo-colonial modernity, and if they had the capacity to listen to the deep, still voices of their saints, savants, and literatures, they would surely understand that as a civilization, India has played, and will continue to play, an incalculable part in the continuing evolution of the human sensibility and spirit.

While everyone else speaks of the "arms race" into which India and Pakistan have now entered, we may gain a deeper insight into the problem unfolding before us by thinking of it as a game. If there are, as James Carse so elegantly argued, finite and infinite games, then the nuclearisation of the Indian sub-continent represents a finite game which is played only for the purpose of winning. It is a different matter that, in this game, neither Pakistan nor India will be winners, only losers; this is not to say that there will be no winners, since in such situations the modern nation-state system, the armaments industry, the military and political elites, and the proponents of big science are always triumphant.

There is still the other game, the infinite game the purpose of which is to keep playing, and so continue too the conversation, which can only remain inconclusive, in which we must always engage to ensure a communicative universe. This is a game in which the rules are not set, and where ambiguity is not only tolerated but prized. Advocates of Indian nuclearisation have argued that, in exploding the nuclear devices, India removed the ambiguity in which its nuclear program has been shrouded; moreover, by compelling Pakistan to demonstrate its prowess, it unmasked the naked reality of Pakistan's own nuclear program. This is the characteristic aspect for finite games, and of the particularly modern sensibility of which they are supremely emblematic: ambiguity, uncertainty, and liminality are equally feared, and it is demanded of humans that they unequivocally declare whether they wish to be construed as Hindu or Muslim, secular or religious, modern or traditional.

Dissent
Dissent in our times has become a difficult proposition, since the only forms in which we are allowed to express dissent are those which have rational, reasonable, legitimate, and conforming to the norms of what is construed as democratic. To do otherwise is to open oneself to the charge of being a lunatic, dictator, or religious fanatic, presiding over what the American leaders and commentators describe as "rogue" nations. It would be most emphatically a mistake, however, to describe India as a non-player, since in emulating the power politics of the modern nation-state system, India has shown its willingness to be a player, albeit no longer (as it imagines) an insignificant one. Now that the ambiguity of South Asia's nuclear programs has been dispelled, it remains to see whether anything noble can be salvaged from so ignominious a political decision. In true Gandhian fashion, one must allow the hermeneutic and moral possibilities to flower. True bravery and courage surely consist, not in an empty renunciation, but in forsaking the military force that one has at one's command. Thus might what Gandhi called "non-violence of the weak", which is no non-violence at all, be transformed into "non-violence of the strong", and from India's descent into nuclear madness might some good emerge.