India's Hiroshima Day
* India Protests across India on Hiroshima Day (6 August) revealed the growing strength of the new anti-nuclear movement. Over 400 000 people marched in Calcutta, West Bengal on Hiroshima Day, August 6th. It was the largest anti-nuclear demonstration in recent history. The March was supported by 66 mass organisations and convened by the "6th August Committee" set up in July to co-ordinate actions and coalitions in reaction to Indian nuclear tests, and the nuclear arms race with neighbouring Pakistan.
Like the huge European peace marches of the 1980s, the procession showed the tremendous variety and inventiveness of the peace movement. Roadside displays by scientific groups explained the all-pervasive pollution that affects humanity even when comparatively 'smaller' building on a highly successful Convention Against Nuclear Weapons on July 26, attended by over 2 000 people. On Hiroshima Day they organised a three-kilometre human chain between the city's bus and rail stations. The composition of the crowd was as interesting as its size was impressive. There were at least two to three hundred children, a sizeable contingent of women and a not insignificant number of senior citizens including some who could vividly remember the Hiroshima and Nagasaki horrors. Among the more famous participants were trade union leaders, academics, and personalities from the independence struggle.
In Mumbai (Bombay) over 2,000 demonstrators took part in the Silent Procession, organised by a broad "Citizens Committee for Commemoration of Hiroshima and Nagasaki" brings together 50 organisations including the Left parties, Left trade unions, Gandhians, progressive women's organisations, artists, intellectuals, environmentalists, civil liberties organisations, students and youth organisations and many voluntary organisations, as well as personalities
Despite the artificial "riots scare" created by the Shiv Sena-BJP government in the context of the publication of the Srikrishna Commission Report [into the communal riots in 1992-93 in Bombayl on the same day, there was a big turn out. As in other cities, a significant number of participants were children. One carried a placard "I want to Grow Up - Not Blow Up."
Though the procession was silent, the demonstrators carried placards and banners with slogans for peace, disarmament and development protesting the arms race and criticising the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) government for its nuclear war-mongering on the one hand and abject surrender to US imperialism on the other nuclear devices are exploded, whether above the ground, below the ground, or under water. Carcinogenic disease proliferates, Imperialism, revolution and nuclear threats: babies are born with deformities. Genetic structures undergo horrible mutations. lessons from Korea, Cuba and Vietnam Vegetation and crops continue to die long after nuclear 'experiments' are terminated. The atmospheric conditions develop unpredictable changes with natural disasters rapidly increasing.
The procession also included bands of "tribal' (adivasi) people from most of the twelve districts of south Bengal In their own, unique manner, their song-and-dance ensembles voiced their protest against all kinds of nuclear 'experiments' that would ultimately harm the green earth and the people who inhabit it. Songs, dances, mimed-plays, street-theatre, recitations and on-the-spot paintings marked the progress of the marchers.
Just before the March, a Convention was held in the packed-to-capacity Netaji Indoor Stadium. The Convention was addressed, among others, by the writer Sunil Gangopadhyay, the poet Sankho Ghosh and film director Mrinal Sen.
The mayors of Hiroshima and Nagasaki were not able to attend the Calcutta rally but they sent their best wishes for the success of the programme to the mayor of
There were smaller protests across India, including significantly large demonstrations in Tripura, Lucknow, Patna and Thiruvananthapuram.
In Chennai, Tamil Nadu a Committee Against Nuclear Weapons, consisting of many mass organisations including trade unions and organisations of students, women and youth, had been formed recently to observe Hiroshima Day and 20 International Viewpoint #303
By Kunal Chattopadhyay nuclear weapons testing in Pokhran fulfilled part of the agenda of the RSS, a Hindu fascist party which is now the dominant partner in India's coalition government. RSS deputy-leader M.S. Golwalkar explicitly calls for a militarily powerful India, capable of exercising hegemony over much of South and SouthEast Asia. Prime Minister Vajpayee has reiterated the need for nuclear weapons as a strategic element in India's foreign
Weaponisation is the outcome of long years of efforts by all Indian governments. How, then, to understand the hypocrisy or naiveté of those on the left who justified India's refusal to sign the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty (CTBT) as a form of resistance to US imperialism. Even after the latest tests, N. Ram, editor of Frontline, and close to the CPI(M) in many of his positions, has taken such a position. Indeed, his position seems to be that the main issue now is to ensure that hawkishness does not give way compromise with U.S. imperialism.
This is low-grade sophistry. One cannot separate the government of India's refusal to sign the CTBT from its ongoing nuclear programme. The main reason for not signing the CTBT was because India intended to make nuclear weapons. In the long years of planning India's nuclear debut, leading left politicians must have seen the top-level files describing the programme. None reacted by calling for or forcing a public debate. Despite knowledge of India's nuclear plans, they publicly opposed signing the CTBT, while pretending to occupy the high moral ground of non-testing, of "peaceful use of nuclear energy", and all the assorted garbage
This has to be reiterated sharply, and again and again, in order to differentiate genuine anti-imperialism from the variety put forward today, not only by would-be patriotic leftists, but even by the RSS mouthpiece Organiser.
But that does not mean that US criticism of India's actions should be given the least credence. In fact, it is necessary to remind people today, not only that the only cases of actual use of the atom bomb in war was undertaken by the USA, but also that the USA has several times come close to using the bomb
Writers on international conflicts, as well as major peace and anti-nuclear movements, often assumed that the major threat of nuclear weapons existed against Europe. This bias stemmed from the cheek-by-jowl existence of NATO and the Warsaw Pact, the supposedly offensive character of superpower military deployments on European soil, and the
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by acceding to the Convention To Ban
Meanwhile in the Indian capital, New Delhi, thousands of people including large numbers of schoolchildren shouted slogans and carried placards proclaiming "We Want Bread Not Bombs" Pokhrans, No More Hiroshimas, No More Nagasakis" and "No Weaponisation, No Deployment."
Among those participating in the March were leaders of the Communist Party of India (CPI), Communist Party of India (Marxist), actor Raj Babbar and Janata Dal leader Surendra Mohan. The Booker prize winning novelist Arundhati Roy was also present. Her passionate and moving essay The End of Imagination" condemning the nuclearisation of the subcontinent has been syndicated in newspapers around the world to mark Hiroshima Day. Roy had previously read from it at the Chennai Convention on July 26th.
The March ended at the Ferozeshah Kotla grounds where a resolution was read in Hindi and English by veteran Gandhian Nirmala Deshpande and historian Romila Thapar. The resolution noted that the tests carried out in May 1998 and the consequent provocative retoric of the BJP
"have only heightened tensions in the region, worsened relations with our fact that the major stockpile existed in Europe. As for the likely causes of such a nuclear war, a whole series of factors were
But the post-Hiroshima history of the near use of nuclear weapons shows a different picture. This is not meant to belittle those Europeans who mobilised in first thousands, then millions, in response to the threat of nuclear confrontation in Europe. But actually, Asia and Latin America appear as the most threatened areas. Practically every US nuclear threat from the 1950s to the 1970s was related to US opposition to forces of national liberation or social revolution. In other words, nuclear weapons have a clear class bias - for capitalism and imperialism, against the toilers, against the struggles for national liberation.
In attempting to establish, sustain or regain global hegemony, US imperialism made nuclear weapons a key element of its militaristic diplomacy. This was a bipartisan (Republican and Democrat) matter, stretching from Truman to Nixon. Nor should the racist dimensions of this imperialist nuclear policy be overlooked Korea, Vietnam and Cuba, the three best-known cases, where the US went to the brink of unleashing its nuclear thunderbolts, were all occupied by allegedly racially inferior people.
In all three cases, imperialism was neighbours and undermined popular initiatives aimed at forging peace among the people of the region... India must return to a path of peace and disarmament. India. which always called for nuclear disarmament and did not wish to be a party to a discriminatory global nuclear regime, is now seen to be only demanding to join the Nuclear Weapons Club." Korea in September 1945, a revolutionary Cummings, in his study of the origins of the Korean War, traces how movement had developed independent of any external intervention. Korea had a long history of communist activity. Local militancy had reason as a result of World War Il and its end. Had there been no interference by any outside power, a revolution of sorts would have been inevitable. But the USA had already decided its post-war priorities, and it had assigned a key role to Korea. Hence a client state was set up in the south, under Syngman Rhee. When the revolutionaries overwhelmed the Rhee regime, the US, using the UN as a fig leaf, intervened.
Chinese counter-intervention evened the odds, and the US was again on the defensive. First the Pentagon, then the White House, seriously began considering the deployment of nuclear weapons. In September-October 1951, the US army, with the knowledge and approval of the White House, carried out simulated atomic strikes in Korea in support of US forces. Truman in 1952, and Eisenhower in 1953, planned the use of atomic weapons. General Mark Clark was at one stage instructed to end truce talks if certain US
Calling the West's imposition of sanctions against India and Pakistan "hypocritical" , the resolution said "if they are serious about non-proliferation, they must pursue a credible programme for destruction of nuclear weapons globally, starting with their own." * Source and © India News Network/BS arguments were not accepted, and carry out the war "in new ways". Dulles told Nehru around the same time that "unless the logjam is broken it will lead to the use of nuclear weapons". Missiles with atomic warheads were placed in Okinawa, threatening China. Rosemary Foot has shown that Truman and Eisenhower alike thought about using the nuclear weapons against China. Clearly, in this case, Moscow and Warsaw, to say nothing of Paris and London were not under the shadow of the mushroom cloud.
Truman and Eisenhower both said that in Korea and Vietnam, where the French were fighting to regain their colony, "the enemy wore a single face". In Indo-China, the situation was a little different, with the Communist party and the imperialists separately, but in effect not much different from jointly, acting to crush Trotskyists and their radical nationalist allies. But as the French later tried to regain full power, and as the Cold War developed, the Vietnamese Communist Party did lead the war of national liberation. As the fall of the French power became a certainty, days before Dien Bien Phu fell, the USA seriously considered the use of nuclear weapons. Eisenhower was willing to loan a few bombs to the French.
INTERNATIONAL INSTITUTE FOR RESEARCH AND EDUCATION engaged in a high-intensity conflict with
Do the workers have a country?
revolutionaries in underdeveloped countries, where the revolutionaries were expected to defeat the imperialists, as long as only conventional weapons were being used.
Before the full-scale US occupation of by José riarte "Bikila"
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