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

Issues of safety, he told me, were no more pressing in India than anywhere else. India and Pakistan had lived with each other's nuclear programs for many years. "It was the strategic logic of the West that was madness. Think of the United States building seventy thousand nuclear weapons at a cost of $5.8 trillion. Do you think these people are in a position to preach to us?"

Subrahmanyam, like many other supporters of the Indian nuclear program, sees little danger of the deployment of nuclear weapons. In New Delhi, it is widely believed that the very immensity of the destructive potential of nuclear weapons renders them useless as instruments of war, ensuring that their deployment can never be anything other than symbolic. That nuclear war is unthinkable has, paradoxically, given the weapons an aura of harmlessness.

I went to see an old acquaintance, Chandan Mitra, a historian with an Oxford doctorate. I had come across an editorial of his entitled "Explosion of Self-Esteem," published on May 12. At Delhi University, when I first knew Chandan, he was a Marxist. He is now an influential newspaper editor and is said to be a BJP sympathizer.

"The bomb is a currency of self-esteem," Chandan told me, with disarming bluntness. "Two hundred years of colonialism robbed us of our self-esteem. We do not have the national pride that the British have, or the French, the Germans, or the Americans. We have been told that we are not fit to rule ourselves — that was the justification of colonialism. Our achievements, our worth, our talent, have always been negated and denied. Mahatma Gandhi's endeavor all during the freedom movement was to rebuild our sense of self-esteem. Even if you don't have guns, he said, you still have moral force. Now, fifty years on, we know that moral force isn't enough to survive. It doesn't count for very much. When you look at India today and ask how best you can overcome those feelings of inferiority, the bomb seems to be as good an answer as any."

For Chandan, as for many other Indians, the bomb is more than a weapon. It has become a banner of political insurgency, a kind of millenarian movement for all the unfulfilled aspirations and dreams of the past fifty years.

The landscape of India teems with such insurgencies: the country is seized, in V. S. Naipaul's eloquent phrase, with "a million mutinies now." These insurrections are perhaps the most remarkable product of Indian democracy: this enabling of once marginal groups to fight for places at the table of power. The bomb cult represents the uprising of those who find themselves being pushed back from the table. It's the rebellion of the rebelled against, an insurgency of an elite. Its leaders see themselves as articulating the aspirations of an immeasurably vast constituency: more than 900 million people, or "one sixth of humanity," in the words of the Indian prime minister. The reality, however, is that the number is very much smaller than this and is dwindling every day. The almost mystical rapture that greeted the unveiling of the cult's fetish has long since dissipated.

While in New Delhi, I visited the Lok Sabha, the lower house of India's parliament, to watch a debate on foreign policy consequences of the nuclear tests. Most of the speakers were vociferously critical of the government for permitting the tests. Several of the speeches were ringing denunciations of the BJP's nuclear policies. Later I went to see one of the speakers, Ram Vilas Paswan. Paswan is a Dalit — a member of a caste group that was once treated as untouchable by high-caste Hindus. He holds the distinction of winning his parliamentary seat by record margins and is something of a cultural hero among many of the country's 230 million Dalits.

Paswan is a wiry man with a close-cropped beard and gold-rimmed eyeglasses. "These nuclear tests were not in the Indian national interest," he told me. "They were done in the interests of a party, to keep the present government from imploding. In the last elections in Pakistan, Nawaz Sharif campaigned on a platform of better relations with India. For this he was pilloried by his opponent, Benazir Bhutto, but he still won. The people of Pakistan want friendship with India. But how did our government respond? It burst a bomb in the face of a man who had reached out to us in friendship. And this in a country where ordinary citizens don't have food to eat. Where villages are being washed away by floods. Where two hundred million people don't have safe drinking water. Instead, we spend thirty-five thousand crores of rupees a year [about $8 billion] on armaments."

On August 6, Hiroshima Day, I was in Calcutta. More than 250,000 people marched in the streets to protest the nuclear tests of May 11. It was plain that the cult of the bomb had few adherents here, that the tests had divided the country more deeply than ever.

In New Delhi, I went to see George Fernandes, the defense minister of India.

I have known Fernandes, from a distance, for many years. He has a long history of involvement in human rights causes, and when I was a student at Delhi University, he was one of India's best-known antinuclear activists.

New Delhi is a sprawling city of some 10 million people, but its government offices and institutions are concentrated in a small area. The capital was designed by Sir Edwin Lutyens in the waning years of the British Raj. Two gargantuan buildings form the bureaucratic core of the city. They are known simply as North Block and South Block, and they face each other across a broad boulevard. The buildings are of red sandstone and are ornamented with many turrets and gateways of Anglo-Oriental design. From this fantastically grandiose complex the power of the Indian state radiates outward in diminishing circles of effectiveness.

I was taken to Fernandes's office, in South Block, by Jaya Jaitly, the general secretary of Fernandes's political party, the Samata (Equality) Party. The idea of my striding into the Defense Ministry was no more unlikely than the thought that these offices were presided over by George Fernandes, that perennially indignant activist.

At the age of sixteen, Fernandes, who had harbored ambitions of becoming a Catholic priest, joined a lay seminary. At nineteen he left, disillusioned (he remembers being appalled that the rectors ate better food and sat at higher tables than the seminarians), and went to Bombay, where he joined the socialist trade union movement. For years he had no permanent address and lived with members of his union on the outskirts of the city. Disowned by his father, he did not visit his home again until he was in his forties.

Fernandes still considers himself a socialist. In India's most recent elections, last February, the Samata Party won a mere 12 seats out of a total of 545. There was a time when the Congress — the party of Mahatma Gandhi — regularly commanded a decisive majority. But today no single party controls a sufficient number of seats to form a stable government. The country has gone to the polls twice in the past three years. Last February's elections gave the BJP, with 181 seats, a slight edge over the Congress. For the first time, the BJP was able to form a government, but only after fashioning a coalition with smaller parties. (The Samata Party entered on very advantageous terms, securing two positions in the cabinet, Fernandes's included.) The BJP's program is based on an assertive, militant Hinduism. In 1992 members of the BJP were instrumental in organizing the demolition of a sixteenth-century mosque that stood upon a site that they believed to be sacred to Hindus. In the aftermath, there were riots across the Indian subcontinent and thousands of people died.

We went up to Fernandes's office in the minister's elevator. A soldier in sparkling white puttees and a red turban pressed the buttons.

Fernandes is sixty-eight but could pass for a man in his mid-forties — lean, with a full head of curly graying hair. He always dresses in long, handwoven cotton kurtas and loose pajamas. He wears leather sandals — no socks or shoes — and washes his clothes by hand.