I saw on television a picture more awesome than the familiar mushroom cloud of nuclear explosion. The mountain had turned white. I wondered how much pain had been felt by nature, God’s most wondrous creation. The great mountain in Chagai will turn in time to solid ash! And we, who are so proud of our mountains?
India’s mindless right-wing leaders who started it all andthen proceeded to goad Pakistan into baring its nuclear capabilities may neveracknowledge that they have committed a crime against India and its neighbours,and that not one good – strategic or tactical, political or economic – canaccrue from their blunder. An Indian scientist, Dr. Vinod Mubayi, rightly saysthat the RSS has now Killed Gandhi twice: his body in 1948, and his legacy 50years later.
India shall suffer for some time to come from the effects ofthese killings. It had enjoyed what the French call a prejuge favourable inworld opinion, a mystique of being uniquely ancient and pluralistic, a land ofHindus and Muslims, Christians, Buddhists and Zoroastrians, the spiritual homeof Albert Luthuli, Desmond Tutu, Father Daniel Berrigan, and Martin LutherKing. In a single blow, the BJP government has destroyed India’s greatestasset. And more:
After decades of bitter squabble, India’s relations with China, the world’s most populous country and a fast growing economic giant, had been improving for the last six years. The Sino-India amity had reached a level significant enough for Chinese leaders to counsel Pakistan, their old ally, to resolve its disputes with India. In a conversation with e a few weeks ago, former Prime Minister I.K. Gujral cited Sino. Indian cordiality as a model for Indo-Pakistan relations. A high-level Chinese military delegation was in India when Prime Minister Atal Behari Wajpayee proudly announced his first three nuclear tests. These had preceded and followed anti-China rhetoric. India’s greatest single foreign policy achievement of the last two decades was thus buried away like nuclear waste.
For nearly four decades, India’s rate of growth had remainedlow at around four per cent per annum. Economists the world over dubbed thismysterious consistency as the ‘Hindu rate of growth’. Then a decade ago, thecurve began to move upward reaching a whopping 7.5% last year. Hope had neverprevailed so widely in India since independence, and international capital hadbegun to view it as a grand investment prospect. Economists expected that inthe next decade India will maintain a 7% rate of growth, just about wiping outthe abject poverty that so assails its people. This expectation too has beeninterred in the Pokhran wasteland. International economists now estimate thatin the financial year that ended on March 31, India’s growth would show adecline from the projected 7.5% to 5%; these estimates are based not on theeffects of sanctions but on the adverse turn in the investment climate.
Excepting a few interregnums, such as the short-livedgovernment of I.K. Gujral, India’s governments have not been very sensitivetoward their neighbours. At regional and international conferences, aparticipant is often astonished at the antipathy delegates from Sri Lanka,Nepal, Maldives and Bangladesh express towards India’s policies. But I believenothing had shocked and angered its 3+2nuclear tests, thus starting a spiral ofnuclear arms race and open the way to potential holocaust in South Asia. Theyhave a right to anxiety and anger as nature has so willed that they are no moresafe than Indians and Pakistanis are from the nuclear fallout.
Eqbal Ahmad Reader
Writings on India, Pakistan and Kashmir
Edited by: Sarthak Tomar