The Argumentative Indian

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by Amartya Sen


  The Moral and the Prudential

  Perceptions can deceive. It has to be asked whether powerful weapons in general and nuclear armaments in particular can be expected – invariably or even typically – to strengthen and empower their possessor. An important prudential issue is involved here. There is, of course, also the question of ethics, and in particular the rightness or wrongness of a nuclear policy. That important issue can be distinguished from the question of practical benefit or loss to a nation from a particular policy. We have good grounds to be interested in both the questions – the prudential and the ethical – but also reason enough not to see the two issues as disparate and totally unconnected to each other. Our behaviour towards each other cannot be divorced from what we make of the ethics of one another’s pursuits, and the reasons of morality have, as a result, prudential importance as well.* It is in this light that I want to examine the challenges of nuclear policy in the subcontinent in general and in India in particular.

  Whether, or to what extent, powerful weapons empower a nation is not a new question. Indeed, well before the age of nuclear armament began, Rabindranath Tagore had expressed a general doubt about the fortifying effects of military strength. If ‘in his eagerness for power’, Tagore had argued in 1917, a nation ‘multiplies his weapons at the cost of his soul, then it is he who is in much greater danger than his enemies’.† Tagore was not as uncompromisingly pacifist as Mahatma Gandhi, and his warning against the dangers of alleged strength through more and bigger weapons related to the need for ethically scrutinizing the functions of these weapons and the exact uses to which they are to be put, as well as the practical importance of the reactions and counteractions of others. The ‘soul’ to which Tagore referred includes, as he explained, the need for humanity and understanding in international relations.

  Tagore was not merely making a moral point, but also one of pragmatic importance, taking into account the responses from others that would be generated by one’s pursuit of military might. His immediate concern in the quoted statement was with Japan and its move towards extensive nationalism. Tagore was a great admirer of Japan and the Japanese, but felt very disturbed by its shift from economic and social development to aggressive militarization. The heavy sacrifices that were forced on Japan later on, through military defeat and nuclear devastation, Tagore did not live to see (he died in 1941), but they would have only added to Tagore’s intense sorrow. But the conundrum that he invoked, about the weakening effects of military power, has remained active in the writings of contemporary Japanese writers, perhaps most notably Kenzaburo Oe.*

  Science, Politics and Nationalism

  The leading architect of India’s ballistic missile programme and a key figure in the development of nuclear weapons is Dr Abdul Kalam, a scientist of much distinction.† Dr Kalam, who comes from a Muslim family and is a researcher of great achievement, has a very strong commitment to Indian nationalism. He is also an extremely amiable person (as I had discovered when I had the privilege of his company at an honorary degree ceremony at Jadavpur University in Calcutta in 1990). Kalam’s philanthropic concerns are very strong, and he has a record of helping in welfare-related causes, such as charitable work for mentally impaired children in India.

  Kalam recorded his proud reaction as he watched the Indian nuclear explosions in Pokhran, on the edge of the Thar desert in Rajasthan, in May 1998: ‘I heard the earth thundering below our feet and rising ahead of us in terror. It was a beautiful sight.’1 It is rather remarkable that the admiration for sheer force should be so strong in the reactions of even such a kind-hearted person, but perhaps the power of nationalism played a role here, along with the general fascination that mighty weapons seem to generate. The intensity of Kalam’s strong nationalism may be well concealed by the mildness of his manners, but it was evident enough in his statements after the blasts (‘for 2,500 years India has never invaded anybody’), no less than his joy at India’s achievement (‘a triumph of Indian science and technology’).

  This was, in fact, the second round of nuclear explosions in the same site, in Pokhran; the first was under Indira Gandhi’s Prime Ministership in 1974. But at that time the whole event was kept under a shroud of secrecy, partly in line with the government’s ambiguity about the correctness of the nuclear weaponization of India. While China’s nuclearization clearly had a strong influence in the decision of the Gandhi government to develop its own nuclear potential (between 1964 and 1974 China had conducted fifteen nuclear explosions), the official government position was that the 1974 explosion in Pokhran was strictly for ‘peaceful purposes’, and that India remained committed to doing without nuclear weapons. The first Pokhran tests were thus followed by numerous affirmations of India’s rejection of the nuclear path, rather than any explicit savouring of the destructive power of nuclear energy.

  It was very different in the summer of 1998 following the events that have come to be called Pokhran-II. By then there was strong support from various quarters. This included, of course, the Bharatiya Janata Party (or the BJP), which had included the development of nuclear weapons in its electoral manifesto, and which led the political coalition that came to office after the February elections in 1998. While some of the previous Indian governments had taken steps to make it easier to follow up the 1974 blast by new ones, they had stopped short of making fresh explosions, but with the new – more intensely nationalist – government the lid was lifted, and the blasts of Pokhran-II occurred within three months of its coming to power. The BJP, which has built up its base in recent years by capturing and to a great extent fanning Hindu nationalism, received in the elections only a modest minority of Hindu votes, and a fortiori a minority of total votes in the multi-religious country (India has nearly as many Muslims as Pakistan and many more Muslims than Bangladesh, and also of course Sikhs, Christians, Jains, Parsees and other communities). But even with a minority of parliamentary seats (182 out of 543 elected members), BJP could head an alliance – a fairly ad hoc alliance – of many different political factions, varying from strictly regional parties (such as AIDMK, PMK and MDMK of Tamil Nadu, Haryana Lok Dal and Haryana Vikas Party of Haryana, Biju Janata Dal of Orissa, Trinamool Congress of West Bengal) to specific community-based parties (including the Akali Dal, the party of Sikh nationalism), and some breakaway factions of other parties. As the largest group within the coalition, the BJP was the dominant force in the 1998 Indian government (as it was again after the 1999 general elections), which gives it much more authority than a minority party could otherwise expect to get in Indian politics.

  The BJP’s interest in following up the 1974 blast by further tests and by actually developing nuclear weapons received strong support from an active pro-nuclear lobby, which includes many Indian scientists.2 The advocacy by scientists and defence experts was quite important in making the idea of a nuclear India at least plausible to many, if not quite fully acceptable yet as a part of a reflective equilibrium of Indian thinking. As Praful Bidwai and Achin Vanaik put it in their well-researched and well-argued book: ‘The most ardent advocates of nuclear weapons have constantly sought to invest these weapons with a religious-like authority and importance – to emphasize the awe and wonder rather than the revulsion and horror – to give them an accepted and respectable place in the mass popular culture of our times.’3

  The Thrill of Power

  Kalam’s excitement at the power of nuclear explosions was not, of course, unusual as a reaction to the might of weapons. The excitement generated by destructive power, dissociated from any hint of potential genocide, has been a well-observed psychological state in the history of the world. Even the normally unruffled J. Robert Oppenheimer, the principal architect of the world’s first nuclear explosion, was moved to quote the two-millennia-old Bhagavad Gītā (Oppenheimer knew Sanskrit well enough to get his Gītā right) as he watched the atmospheric explosion of the first atom bomb in a United States desert near the village of Oscuro on 16 July 1945: ‘the radiance of a thousa
nd suns … burst into the sky.’4

  As was discussed in Essay 1, Oppenheimer went on to quote further from the Bhagavad Gītā: ‘I am become death, the destroyer of worlds.’ That image of death would show its naked and ruthless face next month in Hiroshima and Nagasaki (what Kenzaburo Oe has called ‘the most terrifying monster lurking in the darkness of Hiroshima’5). As the consequences of nuclearization became clearer to Oppenheimer, he went on to campaign against nuclear arms, and with special fervour against the hydrogen bomb. But in July 1945, in the experimental station in the US desert, ‘Jornala del Muerto’ (translatable as ‘Death Tract’), there was only sanitized abstractness firmly detached from any actual killing.

  The thousand suns have now come home to the subcontinent to roost. The five Indian nuclear explosions in Pokhran on 11 and 13 May 1998 were quickly followed by six Pakistani blasts in the Chagai hills the following month. ‘The whole mountain turned white’, was the Pakistani government’s charmed response. The subcontinent was by now caught in an overt nuclear confrontation, masquerading as further empowerment of each country.

  These developments have received fairly uniform condemnation abroad, but considerable favour inside India and Pakistan, though we must be careful not to exaggerate the actual extent of domestic support. Pankaj Mishra did have reason enough to conclude, two weeks after the blasts, that ‘the nuclear tests have been extremely popular, particularly among the urban middle class’.6 But that was too soon to see the long-run effects on Indian public opinion. Furthermore, the enthusiasm of the celebrators is more easily pictured on television than are the deep doubts of the sceptics. Indeed, the euphoria that the television pictures captured on the Indian streets immediately following the blasts concentrated on the reaction of those who did celebrate and chose to come out and rejoice. It was accompanied by doubts and reproaches by a great many people who took no part in the festivities, who did not figure in the early television pictures, and whose doubts and opposition found increasingly vocal expression over time. As Amitav Ghosh, the novelist, noted in his extensive review of Indian public reactions to the bomb for the New Yorker, ‘the tests have divided the country more deeply than ever’.7

  It is also clear that the main political party that chose to escalate India’s nuclear adventure, namely the BJP, did not get any substantial electoral benefit from the Pokhran blasts. In fact quite the contrary, as analyses of local voting since the 1998 blasts tend to show. By the time India went to the polls again, in September 1999, the BJP had learned the lesson sufficiently well to refrain from bragging about the nuclear tests in their campaign with the voters. And yet, as N. Ram (the political commentator and editor of Frontline) has cogently argued in his anti-nuclear book Riding the Nuclear Tiger, we ‘must not make the mistake of assuming that since the Hindu Right has done badly out of Pokhran-II, the issue has been decisively won’.8

  Indian attitudes towards nuclear weaponization are characterized not only by ambiguity and moral doubts, but also by some uncertainty as to what is involved in making gainful use of these weapons. It may be the case, as several opinion polls have indicated, that public opinion in India has a much smaller inclination, compared with Pakistani public opinion, to assume that nuclear weapons will ever be actually used in a subcontinental war.9 But since the effectiveness of these weapons depends ultimately on the willingness to use them in some situations, there is an issue of coherence of thought that has to be addressed here. Implicitly or explicitly, an eventuality of actual use has to be among the possible scenarios that must be contemplated, if some benefit is to be obtained from the possession and deployment of nuclear weapons. To hold the belief that nuclear weapons are useful but must never be used lacks cogency and can indeed be seen to be a part of the odd phenomenon that Arundhati Roy (the author of The God of Small Things) has called ‘the end of imagination’.10

  As Roy has also brought out with much clarity, the nature and results of an actual all-out nuclear war are almost impossible to imagine in a really informed way. Arundhati Roy describes a likely scenario thus:

  Our cities and forests, our fields and villages will burn for days. Rivers will turn to poison. The air will become fire. The wind will spread the flames. When everything there is to burn has burned and the fires die, smoke will rise and shut out the sun.11

  It is hard to think that the possibility of such an eventuality can be a part of a wise policy of national self-defence.

  Established Nuclear Powers and Subcontinental Grumbles

  One of the problems in getting things right arises from a perceived sense of inadequacy, prevalent in India, of any alternative policy that would be entirely satisfactory and would thus help to firm up a rejection of nuclear weapons through the transparent virtues of a resolutely non-nuclear path (as opposed to the horrors of the nuclear route). This is perhaps where the gap in perceptions is strongest between the discontent and disgust with which the subcontinental nuclear adventures are viewed in the West and the ambiguity that exists on this subject within India (not to mention the support of the nuclear route that comes from the government, the BJP and India’s pro-nuclear lobby). It is difficult to understand what is going on in the subcontinent without placing it solidly in a global context.

  Nuclear strategists in South Asia tend to resent deeply the international condemnation of Indian and Pakistani policies and decisions that does not take note of the nuclear situation in the world as a whole. They are surely justified in this resentment, and also right to question the censoriousness of Western critics of subcontinental nuclear adventures without adequately examining the ethics of their own nuclear policies, including preservation of an established and deeply unequal nuclear hegemony, with very little attempt to achieve global denuclearization. The Defence Minister of India, George Fernandes, told Amitav Ghosh: ‘Why should the five nations that have nuclear weapons tell us how to behave and what weapons we should have?’ This was matched by the remark of Qazi Hussain Ahmed, the leader of Jamaat-e-Islami (Pakistan’s principal religious party), to Ghosh: ‘we don’t accept that five nations should have nuclear weapons and others shouldn’t. We say, “Let the five also disarm.” ’12

  The enquiry into the global context is indeed justified, but what we have to examine is whether the placing of the subcontinental substory within the general frame of a bigger global story really changes the assessment that we can reasonably make of what is going on in India and Pakistan. In particular, to argue that their nuclear policies are deeply mistaken does not require us to dismiss the widespread resentment in the subcontinent of the smugness of the dominant global order. These complaints, even if entirely justified and extremely momentous, do not establish the sagacity of a nuclear policy that dramatically increases uncertainties within the subcontinent without achieving anything to make each country more secure. Indeed, Bangladesh is probably now the safest country to live in, in the subcontinent.

  Moral Resentment and Prudential Blunder

  There are, I think, two distinct issues, which need to be carefully separated. First, the world nuclear order is extremely unbalanced and there are excellent reasons to complain about the military policies of the major powers, particularly the five that have a monopoly over official nuclear status as well as over permanent membership in the Security Council of the United Nations. The second issue concerns the choices that other countries – other than the big five – face, and this has to be properly scrutinized, rather than being hijacked by resentment of the oligopoly of the power to terrorize. The fact that other countries, including India and Pakistan, have grounds enough for grumbling about the nature of the world order, sponsored and supported by the established nuclear powers without any serious commitment to denuclearization, does not give them any reason to pursue a nuclear policy that worsens their own security and adds to the possibility of a dreadful holocaust. Moral resentment cannot justify a prudential blunder.

  I have so far not commented on the economic and social costs of nuclearization and the gener
al problem of allocation of resources. That issue is, of course, important, even though it is hard to find out exactly what the costs of the nuclear programmes are. The expenses of this are carefully hidden in both countries. Even though it is perhaps easier to estimate the necessary information in India (given a greater need for disclosure in the Indian polity), the estimates are bound to be quite rough.

  Recently, C. Rammanohar Reddy, a distinguished commentator, has estimated that the cost of nuclearization is something around half of one per cent of the gross domestic product per year.13 This might not sound like much, but it is large enough if we consider the alternative uses of these resources. For example, it has been estimated that the additional costs of providing elementary education for every child with neighbourhood schools at every location in the country would cost roughly the same amount of money. * The proportion of illiteracy in the Indian adult population is still about 40 per cent, and it is about 55 per cent in Pakistan. Furthermore, there are other costs and losses as well, such as the deflection of India’s scientific talents to military-related research away from more productive lines of research and also from actual economic production. The prevalence of secretive military activities also restrains open discussions in the parliament and tends to subvert traditions of democracy and free speech.

  Despite all this, the principal argument against nuclearization is not ultimately an economic one. It is rather the increased insecurity of human lives that constitutes the biggest penalty of the subcontinental nuclear adventures. That issue needs further scrutiny.

  Does Nuclear Deterrence Work?

 

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