India's nuclear question
• IT seemed at the end of the cold war that the nuclear question was not so important anymore. What happened?
PB: There were positive developments: a new kind of movement emerged on nuclear disarmament, not just around arms control. Nuclear weapons were reduced from 70,000-100,000 at the peak around 30,000. Tactical nuclear weapons were removed from warships, even though this was not formalised by treaty. Three countries abandoned nuclear weapons; Byelorussia, Kazakhstan and Ukraine, while South Africa, Brazil and Argentina pulled back from threshold status. Two nuclear weapons free zones were set up in South East Asia and in Africa.
These were positive developments but in the last two or three years things have almost ground to a halt. You had a series of negative developments: in 1995 indefinite extension of the Non Proliferation Treaty, then there was the expansion of NATO, then of course the India/Pakistan tests.
If there was to be one simple one line answer as to why this has happened it is that after the end of the cold war, in the game of nations, the United States has emerged as the unrivalled dominant power.
What you now have in the US is the emergence of a strong, aggressive unilateralist, isolationist approach which says: "we're the top dog and nobody else can rival us. To justify the retention of nuclear weapons they invent all sorts of rogue States.
Now the crucial issue, apart from the US senate non-ratification of the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty (CTBT) is the whole question of the National Ballistic Missile Defence. This is justified with rhetoric - we want to make the United States of America safe in this particular way and we're going to go ahead -we don't care what other countries want whether its Russia or the Chinese or anybody else. Behind this is a deeper ambition of trying to control space - the United States is now dominant and pretty sure of dominance for the future - and space is also a domain that it wants to move towards. That's the kind of political perspective I think is driving the situation.
There is some debate about how
ACHIN Vanaik and Praful
Bidwal are leading Indian anti- nuclear campaigners. Terry
Conway interviewed them for the
British socialist newspaper
Socialist Outlook during their recent visit to London INTERVIEW much the Indian/Pakistan tests came out of a continuity of Indian policy and how much they represented a rupture. Could the tests only have happened under a BJP government?
AV: Its hard to speculate about what might have been - I think its more productive to say that there was both continuity and a rupture. There was continuity in the preparations. From the 60s onwards India started to acquire a nuclear weapons capability and then to upgrade. Capability was established and demonstrated in May 1974 when India conducted its first nuclear test. However they claimed, disingenuously, that this was " a peaceful explosion".
Way back in the 50s, India built a nuclear reactor called Sirus the Canada/India research reactor. This was funded partly by the US who donated the heavy water - and the Canadians designed it. The Indian government signed an agreement with Canada and the US which said that the products of Sirus would only be used for peaceful purposes.
But then, against this agreement, they used the product in the 1974 tests which is why they claimed it was a "peaceful" test. However having acquired this capability they didn't pursue further testing, nor did they say they were going to make the bomb. In part the continuity can be explained by the very logic of acquiring a nuclear weapons capability. But it is also due to the temptation of successive Indian governments to seek a better bargain within the global nuclear order. This was accompanied by the growing hold of a certain type of nationalism on India society, especially on the Indian elite, through much of the 80s and certainly the 90s.
In this period you saw a marked rightward shift in Indian society and politics under the neo-liberal economic policies
India * and structural adjustment programmes dictated by the World Bank and the IMF which was gladly accepted by the Indian bourgeoisie as its own agenda. The elite in
India began to see itself more and more through a northern prism. It wanted to join the club of major powers and saw nuclear weapons as a short cut.
The rupture of 1998 lies in two things. First a clear break at the level of policy -for 50 years before 1998, India rejected the idea that any nation, any state could acquire security through nuclear weapons. It made a powerful plea before the International Court of Justice as late as 1995 and again before the conference on disarmament in 1996 saying that India is opposed to nuclear weapons because they don't give security - ever. Nuclear deterrence was described as an abhorrent doctrine that is strategically irrational.
Between 74-98, the policy followed was that of nuclear ambiguity - along with active preparations. To move from that ambiguity to exercise of the nuclear option was a rupture. India announced that was developing a fully fledged weapons programme - that it was proceeding to acquire a minimal nuclear deterrent - a small nuclear arsenal with all the command and control systems and all the paraphernalia that goes with it.
The BJP was eager to conduct tests as soon as it acquired power. In the book we point out that in 1996 the BJP came to power for 13 days. It was in a hopeless minority in Parliament and no single party was willing to support it - it was quite clear that the government would collapse.
And yet the BJP's own leadership confirmed later that it had ordered nuclear tests even within that short period - in fact the tests were meant to coincide with the vote of confidence in the government in the lower house. This just shows the utter cynicism of that party. In fact these tests didn't take place because the Department of Atomic Energy wasn't ready with all the preparations.
The second time around that the BJP came to power and within a few days of Vajpayee forming the government he ordered the tests, again before he won a vote of confidence. Again it was not a forgone conclusion that he would win International Viewpoint #323 July-August 2000 33
* India because in 1998 there was a minority government which fell within a year or so. We know that the tests were conducted without any consultation with the foreign policy or defence establishments - there was no question of any strategic defence review. The army and the services chiefs were not even told about the tests until two days before they took place. The Home Minister and the Defence Minister were kept in the dark until May 11- the day of the first round of tests.
The BJP have a peculiar obsession with nuclear weapons. The party and its predecessor, the Jan Sangh, have demanded the bomb ever since the early 50s. The Jan Sangh in its very first manifesto demanded that India crossed the nuclear threshold. Of course this had nothing to do with the security environment because China's nuclear tests didn't take place till 1964.
So you have both a continuity of preparation but also a rupture at the doctrinal and political level.
After the tests, what was the response on the ground? Were people shocked that the BJP moved so quickly?
PB: I think the initial image that that was broadcast all over the world of people dancing in the streets of New Dehli and Lahore was profoundly misleading - a CNN driven image which is sensationalist. That same week many more people protested against the test than the number that celebrated.
People shouldn't have been shocked but many were. After all the BJP promised that if they ever came to power they would go ahead and do it. I suppose people have still not got a handle on the nature of the BJP and if you live outside it is even more difficult to understand. Perhaps one way for an audience in the West to understand what is happening in India is to try to understand that what we are taking about with the BJP and the forces behind it, is that this party we have in power is worse than Jorge Haider's Freedom Party.
What you saw in the media represented a minority of the urban elite but for most people in India nuclear weapons is not an from those you have some respect for. Given that all the parties apart from sections of Congress and the left said the tests were good then this is bound to have a major impact. But opposition has been growing. There were demonstrations in 35-40 cities in protest. Last year you had the development of a major mass movement called the National Alliance of Peoples Movement (NAPM): an alliance of all kinds of groups some of which have a truly mass base. These include the movement against the Narmada damn and the National Union of Fishworkers with around 8 million members.
In the parliamentary debates that followed the tests in 1998 more than 2/3 of those that spoke opposed the tests - criticised the BJP for imposing its own minority sectarian agenda on the nation. And the BJP had only 23% of the vote so it doesn't represent anything like a large consensus of a broad cross section of public opinion. Its base is confined largely to the North of the country and mainly to the upper and middle castes of Indian society, not to the plebeian masses where it has no particular appeal. It's a very elitist and hierarchically minded religious sectarian right-wing party which has never come anywhere near the Tories for example in terms of its voting base in relatively large chunk of the population.
There were elections for 4 state legislatures soon after the tests and the BJP made those elections into a referendum. It lost those elections very badly with unprecendentrdly high margins - so if it was a referendum the verdict was clear.
• Can you give a flavour of how the anti-nuclear movement has developed?
PB: The NAPM, together with many other organisations, organised a three month march from Pokran - the village near where the test site was - to a place of Buddhist pilgrimage more than 1,000 miles away in the east of India. Every day there were people marching - sometimes 20 sometimes 200 - for three months and that gives you an indication of the kind of movement. This autumn we will have a are against nuclear energy are grass roots organisations concerned with the victims of radiation exposure to uranium mining in central India. Like everywhere else all over the world when you are talking about uranium mining its always the indigenous people whether its Australia with the Aborigines, whether it's the United States of America and native Americans or whether it's the tribals in India, they are the ones that are affected. It is their areas where the mining takes place and where the reactor leakages happen.
Then you have a whole other series of groups focused on different issues: women's issues, civil liberties issues, development issues which also see the importance of taking up the nuclear issue.
What we are trying to do is move towards a national network of all types of different groups - and this is a significant development. We should be realistic and realise that at this stage we can't alter government policies on the nuclear question -instead we are attacking the legitimisation of those policies by the government. When we become bigger and stronger then we hope to be able to move on and challenge the basis of the policies themselves
Since then we've seen much more opposition and I would say that a very large proportion of people in the liberal intellegensia are opposed to the tests. So Arhudita Roy, the Booker prize winner wrote a very good powerful peace on "The Bomb and I" but this is true of other writers.
Behind the BJP's nuclear nationalism and nuclear obsession is the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS) which is an organisation going back to the 20s with a totally and overtly fascist makeup. Its leaders are self confessed admirers of Hitler and Mussolini and of authoritarianism as a political ideology. The RSS controls the BJP ideologically, organisationally and in terms of its political agenda. The RSS's slogan has been "unite the Hindus and militarise Hindu society" and what better way of militarisation than the bomb.
The bomb is the most adequate, the most developed, symbol of a particular bellicose, national convention at which 80-100 kind of macho, aggressive, issue that touches them directly in their every day life. Not long after the tests there was a poll that showed that 45% had not even heard about them.
In so far as there was support for the tests, apart from this minority, it was passive support. If you don't have a clear idea of what you think then you take a lead
34 International Viewpoint #323 July-August 2000 groups will be represented - a more organised opposition is beginning to stir.
There are two different types of groups involved in the Indian movement. Firstly there are those that have a specific focus against nuclear weapons and also against nuclear energy - many of the groups which
Hindu communal anti Muslim nationalism There is a broad constituency of opinion in India that opposes that kind of nationalism as well the significant current of opinion that opposes nuclear weapons so there is a potential for much larger scale mobilisations than we have seen so far. *