Amitav Ghosh - Incendiary Circumstances - A Chronicle of the Turmoil of Our Times

"In the years after 1974, there was a lot of illness," Joshi said. "We had never heard of cancer before. But after the test people began to get cancer. There were strange skin diseases. Sores. And people used to scratch themselves all the time. If these things had happened anywhere else in the country, in Bihar or Kashmir, people would rise up and stop it. But people here don't protest. They'll put up with anything."

Growing up in Pokhran, Joshi had developed a strong interest in nuclear matters. His family hadn't had the resources to send him to college. After high school, he'd started to work in a shop. But all the while he'd wanted to write. He'd begun to send opinion pieces to Hindi newspapers. One of them had taken him on as a stringer.

On the afternoon of May 11, he was preparing for his siesta when the ground began to shake, almost throwing him off his cot. He knew at once that this was no earthquake. It was a more powerful jolt than that of 1974. He recognized it for what it was and called his paper immediately. This, Joshi said proudly, made him the first journalist in the world to learn of the tests.

Joshi told me about a village called Khetolai. It was just six miles from the test site, the nearest human habitation. The effects of the 1974 tests had been felt more severely there, he said, than anywhere else in the district.

We drove off into the scrub, along a dirt road. The village was small, but there were no huts or shanties: the houses were sturdily built, of stone and mortar.

Khetolai was an unusual village, Joshi explained. Its inhabitants were reasonably prosperous — they made their living mainly from tending livestock — and almost everyone was literate, women as well as men. Many were Bishnois, members of a small religious sect whose founder had forbidden the felling of trees and the killing of animals. They thought of themselves as the world's first conservationists.

We stopped to look at a couple of buildings whose walls had been split by the tests, and we were immediately surrounded by eager schoolchildren. They led us into a house where three turbaned elders were sitting on charpoys, talking.

On May 11, at about noon, they told me, a squad of soldiers drove up and asked the villagers to move to open ground. People who owned refrigerators and television sets carried them out-of-doors and set them down in the sand. Then they sat under trees and waited. It was very hot. The temperature was over 120 degrees Fahrenheit.

Some three and a half hours later, there was a tremendous shaking in the ground and a booming noise. They saw a great cloud of dust and black-and-white smoke shooting skyward in the distance. Cracks opened up in the walls of the houses. Some had underground water tanks for livestock. The blasts split the tanks, emptying them of water.

Later, the villagers said, an official came around and offered them small sums of money as compensation. The underground tanks had been very expensive. The villagers refused to accept the money and demanded more.

Party activists appeared and erected a colorful marquee. There was talk that the BJP would hold celebrations in Khetolai. By this time the villagers were enraged, and the marquee was removed for fear that the media would hear of the villagers' complaints.

"After the test," a young man said, "the prime minister announced that he'd been to Pokhran and that there was no radioactivity. But how long was he here? Radioactivity doesn't work in minutes." Since 1974, he said, some twenty children had been born with deformed limbs. Cows had developed tumors in their udders. According to the young man, calves were born blind, or with their tongues and eyes attached to the wrong parts of their faces. No one had heard of such things before.

The young man held a clerical job for the government. He was articulate, and the elders handed him the burden of the conversation. In the past, he said, the villagers had cooperated with the government. They hadn't complained, and they'd been careful when talking to the press. "But now we are fed up. What benefits do we get from these tests? We don't even have a hospital."

Someone brought a tray of water glasses. The young man saw me hesitate and began to laugh. "Outsiders won't drink our water," he said. "Even the people who come to tell us that everything is safe won't touch our water."

My guides were subdued on the drive back. Even though they lived in the neighboring district, it had been years since they were last in Pokhran. What we'd seen had come as a complete surprise to them.

I spent the rest of the day in the town of Bikaner, about a hundred miles away. That evening I walked around its royal palace. It was vast, empty, and beautiful, like a melancholy fantasy. Its pink stone seemed to turn translucent in the light of the setting sun. The palace was of a stupefying lavishness. It was built around the turn of the century by Maharajah Sir Ganga Singh of Bikaner, a luminary who had cut a very splendid figure in the British Raj. He entertained viceroys and sent troops to Flanders. He was a signatory of the Treaty of Versailles. There were photographs in the corridors showing Maharajah Ganga Singh in the company of Churchill, Woodrow Wilson, and Lloyd George.

In New Delhi, many people had talked to me about how nuclear weapons would help India achieve "great power status." I'd been surprised by the depth of emotion that was invested in that curiously archaic phrase "great power." What exactly would it mean, I'd asked myself, if India achieved "great power status"? What were the images that were evoked by this tag?

Now, walking through this echoing old palace, looking at the pictures in the corridors, I realized that this was what the nuclearists wanted: treaties, photographs of themselves with the world's powerful, portraits on their walls. They had pinned on the bomb their hopes of bringing it all back.

The leading advocate of India's nuclear policies is K. Subrahmanyam, a large, forceful man who is the retired director of the Institute for Defence Studies and Analyses in New Delhi. Subrahmanyam advocates an aggressive nuclear program based on the premise that nuclear weapons are the currency of global power. "Nuclear weapons are not military weapons," he told me. "Their logic is that of international politics, and it is a logic of a global nuclear order." According to Subrahmanyam, international security has been progressively governed by a global nuclear order made up of the five nuclear-weapons powers — the United States, Russia, China, Britain, and France. "India," Subrahmanyam said, "wants to be a player and not an object of this global nuclear order."

I had expected to hear about regional threats and the Chinese missile program. But as Subrahmanyam sees it, India's nuclear policies are only tangentially related to the question of India's security. They are ultimately aimed at something much more abstract and very much more grand: global power. India could, if it plays its cards right, parlay its nuclear program into a seat on the United Nations Security Council and earn recognition as a "global player."

Subrahmanyam told me a story about a film. It was called The Million Pound Note, and it featured Gregory Peck. In the film, Peck's character uses an obviously valueless piece of paper printed to look like a million-pound note to con tradesmen into extending credit.

"A nuclear weapon acts like a million-pound note," Subrahmanyam said, his eyes gleaming. "It is of no apparent use. You can't use it to stop small wars. But it buys you credit, and that gives you the power to intimidate."

Subrahmanyam bristled when I suggested that there might be certain inherent dangers to the possession of nuclear weapons. Like most Indian hawks, he considers himself a reluctant nuclearist. He says he would prefer to see nuclear weapons done away with altogether. It is the nuclear superpowers' insistence on maintaining their arsenals that makes this impossible.