TV anchor Barkha Dutt has said in a new book that India under a previous BJP government considered using nuclear weapons to vacate Pakistan’s transgressions in Kargil during their brief lacerating war in 1999. There have been forceful claims by others about Pakistan bracing to use its deceptively suicidal ‘tactical weapons’ against India.

Has there ever been a serious and sustained awareness campaign to expose the nuclear shenanigans in which the Indian and Pakistani public is trapped without their knowledge? Barkha Dutt has won awards as a TV host but can anyone remember her conducting a discussion on what nuclear weapons can do to a city like Delhi or Karachi? 

We hear dumbed-down claims about what each side can do to the other to teach it a lesson. That’s when you can’t discern a current affairs show from mud wrestling. Has the TV with its powerful reach ever tried to educate both people — even if some or many of them are gung-ho about nuclear weapons — why they should not to be so keen? 

Both sides carry saturated coverage of natural disasters in their countries, an example being the ongoing struggle against the rain deluge in Chennai. How can the two that can’t protect their people from floods cope with vaporised cities, including the smart ones on the anvil? What use is the revelation about someone planning to wage nuclear war, in a book or a newspaper story, if the people are kept assiduously in the dark about what they should expect if or when the unthinkable becomes a reality? 

Educating the people about nuclear weapons, which terrorists of all stripes would love them to use, is primarily the government’s responsibility. Yet, the most compelling narrative of a nuclear scenario from the Cold War came with a 1983 American TV documentary. The Day After was scary, and it was instructive. A plague scare in India in the 1990s saw antibiotics disappearing from medicine shops. There is no antibiotic against nuclear evaporation.

That India and Pakistan have resumed their dialogue at the weekend will be welcomed by those who know a thing or two about the nuclear threat confronting the world.

That both have resumed their dialogue at the weekend albeit secretly for reasons best known to them will be welcomed by everyone who knows a thing or two about the nuclear threat confronting the world today. Whether it is the downing of a Russian warplane by Turkey, or a terror attack on Mumbai by Pakistan-based fanatics it moves the Doomsday Clock forward not back.

A few months after Al Qaeda attacked the Twin Towers I picked up a useful book in New York. The Doomsday Scenario by Doug Keeney was based on secret US emergency war plans, four decades old when the book was published. It described a nuclear calamity in the US and public drill to follow.

In violence-wracked, poorly disciplined countries like our two in South Asia, a large-scale war would set off a gut-wrenching prospect of loot and plunder, a scenario many people for better or worse find more worrying than an atomic attack!

“Bartering, unorganised confiscation and looting are in evidence and threaten further the restoration of any orderly degree of economic activity,” a post-devastation scenario states in the Keeney book.

It is not that awareness of a potential calamity is a deterrent by itself. In fact the biggest hawks on both sides are those who do know the horrific reality but are sworn not to share it with the public.

Barkha Dutt mentioned the fleeting possibility of a nuclear war. What are we to make of the scoop if that is what it is? Should we worry or not about the disaster we evaded? If not why not? Was Dutt troubled by what Brajesh Mishra, a powerful national security adviser with former prime minister A.B. Vajpayee, told her? What stopped her from using the private chat to let the people understand the quandary we could be in? 

When the diplomatic enclaves in Delhi were deserted for fear of a nuclear attack by Pakistan in the post-parliament attack mobilisation in May 2002, the Indian government denied that such a scenario could unfold. What did the supposedly free TV have to say? Do the people know that the war-mongering politicians in both countries have constructed nuclear bunkers for themselves but have callously left the people they are sworn to protect out in the cold? Will some TV channel break the silent vow, if Dutt doesn’t, of not disturbing the sleeping dumbed masses?

In a separate excerpt published from the book in the Hindustan Times, Dutt has claimed that the current leaders of India and Pakistan, though they quarrel publicly, met secretly in Kathmandu last year. The meeting was staged in the hotel room of an Indian industrialist who Delhi summoned urgently to facilitate the “deniable” interlude.

Both subjects — the nuclear threat looming over South Asia and the furtive deployment of tycoons to get warring heads of states — together have a bearing on the people who are kept in the dark. 

Business houses were roped into the diplomatic arena earlier in India. The late R.K. Mishra was the head of Ambani-backed Observer Research Foundation. He doubled as Vajpayee’s envoy in secret talks with Pakistan’s Niaz Naik. Recently, Sudheendra Kulkarni was plastered with insults and black paint by the fascist Shiv Sena for his apparent soft corner for Jinnah and Pakistan. Kulkarni works with the ORF that Mishra founded. The group’s founding patron, the late Dhirubhai Ambani, was said to have saved Nawaz Sharif’s life when the head of Reliance pleaded with Bill Clinton to speak to Pervez Musharraf.

Are the brilliant diplomats of India not worthy of the nation’s trust any longer that their jobs are being farmed out to rich philanthropists with an uncertain agenda? As for the citizens who believe that bilateral trade alone will improve people-to-people ties, they need to switch off their TV sets.

The writer is Dawn’s correspondent in Delhi.

Published in Dawn, December 8th, 2015