The first nuclear mistrust was sown on that fateful day in July 1945. We continue to live the lie today. —FILE PHOTO

Indira Gandhi conducted India’s first nuclear test in 1974, which she euphemistically called a peaceful nuclear device. If it won her plaudits from fawning Indians it wasn’t evident. By 1975 she was forced to suspend democracy and put her political opponents in prison. When she ordered elections in 1977 she was routed.

In May 1998, the Bharatiya Janata Party-led government carried out more nuclear tests. The party lost all three states – Madhya Pradesh, Delhi and Rajasthan – where it had governments that year, to the Congress – so much for the macho appeal of bombs.

Clearly atom bombs can’t win elections for their advocates nor can they win a war against an atomic rival. Sadly the biggest Pakistani champion of nuclear weapons was the iconic Zulfiqar Ali Bhutto. His army hanged him and usurped his pointlessly bilious agenda. Bhutto had said his countrymen would eat grass if required but they would still make the bomb.

I acidly asked the late Benazir Bhutto during her trip to Delhi, when she was visiting here to canvass support against Gen Musharraf’s dictatorship, whether the cuisine in her country had improved after the Chaghai tests. She cancelled the TV interview she was scheduled that day to give to my journalist brother. Mao had said it didn’t matter if half of China perished in a nuclear war. But he never had to stand for elections.

President Obama’s initiative for global nuclear disarmament invoked a defiant response from India, whose permanent representative rejected its relevance for India. The fact that the Obama initiative was upheld unanimously by the UN Security Council makes it legitimate to see countries that stand in defiance to its resolve as rogue states.

The most outrageous untruth in India’s opposition to the Obama initiative was the claim by the Indian envoy that the nuclear debate in India falls within the ambit of the Indian parliament. The fact is that both the tests – 1974 and 1998 – were carried out surreptitiously without any mandate or sanction from the parliament.

I was interviewing then Andhra Pradesh Chief Minister Chandrababu Naidu the day the first tests were conducted in 1998. He was sweating profusely, clasping his head with disbelief. How could the coalition government of which he was a make-and-break partner, do something so suicidal, he had wondered loudly. Naidu’s dream of support from the World Bank for his e-governance agenda lay in tatters. No coalition partner of the BJP was informed of the tests, much less the parliament.

What else was the Indian envoy to the UN claiming last week? ‘India cannot accept externally prescribed norms or standards on matters within the jurisdiction of its parliament or which are not consistent with India’s constitutional provisions and procedures, or are contrary to India’s national interests or infringe on its sovereignty. India cannot comply with non-proliferation obligations to which it has not provided its sovereign consent.’

How one wishes the same zeal was applied to the parliament’s other statutes, for example, the various fundamental rights to food, education and so forth. The one occasion the nuclear issue was discussed with any degree of sincerity in the Indian parliament, opposition MPs claimed they were bribed to help win the vote for Prime Minister Singh’s government. Bundles of currency notes were displayed by MPs in the Lok Sabha.

Defending the government’s agreement with the United States for civil nuclear cooperation (which is but a backdoor route to shore up the country’s nuclear weapons capability) during that particular debate the young Congress MP Rahul Gandhi highlighted the tragedy of a widow whose farmer husband had committed suicide. Tens of thousands of indebted farmers have killed themselves in India because of flawed free market policies and there is no end to their tragedy in sight.

Should their families believe that the government is working overtime to improve their lot by making India prosperous not the least by defending it with prohibitively expensive weapons? No wonder the headline in the Italian newspaper, reporting Arundhati Roy’s recent address in Turin, screamed: ‘Superpoor superpower’.

Advocates of India’s deterrent, such as former foreign minister Jaswant Singh, say that the country was opposed to nuclear apartheid (which the NPT actually spawns) and that is what justified its current doctrine. The Indian envoy at the UN adlibbed this view the other day.

‘We cannot accept any obligations arising from treaties that India has not signed or ratified,’ he declared. ‘This position is consistent with the fundamental principles of international law and the Law of Treaties. India cannot accept calls for universalisation of the NPT.’

He quoted Prime Minister Singh as saying in parliament on July 29 that there was no question of India joining the NPT as a non-nuclear weapon state. ‘Nuclear weapons are an integral part of India’s national security and will remain so, pending non-discriminatory and global nuclear disarmament,’ the envoy added.

Technically, after last week’s resolution, North Korea, Pakistan, India, and Israel – the non-NPT nuclear gatecrashers – have become a key obstruction to the promise of a nuclear-free world. However, the international community is so used to playing favourites that it may not notice this bitter reality. How can we justify the brouhaha over Iran’s alleged nuclear weapons programme when we are not prepared to bell the cat, starting with Israel?

Returning home from the G-20 summit in Pittsburgh, Dr Manmohan Singh was asked to comment on the issue of Iran’s nuclear pursuit. He said: ‘As far as India is concerned our position has been in principle that Iran is a signatory to the NPT and as a signatory to the NPT, it has all the rights, which go with its membership that is peaceful use of atomic energy. And it must also carry out all its obligations. I think that is our position and that’s the principled position that we have taken in the last five years.’

Nothing could be less convincing. India’s stand in 1983 was about declaring the Indian Ocean a nuclear-free zone not to have nuclear weapons of its own. This was the resolve expressed unanimously by the Non-aligned summit in Delhi that year. Both Iran and Iraq were present even though they were locked in a brutal war. Then India broke ranks and changed its policy. But it maintains that Iran can’t because it is a signatory to the NPT. Why should Iran not take this as an invitation to walk out of the NPT? Would India then support its nuclear weapons quest?

For countries like India and Pakistan there are better examples to follow. South Africa is one such. It has the nuclear capability but chose to dismantle its nuclear arsenal. Diplomatic subterfuge can be dangerous.

At the Potsdam Conference on July 24, 1945, President Truman told Stalin that the US now possessed ‘a new weapon of unusual destructive force’. Churchill, who was present, says he saw hardly any reaction from Stalin, except that he encouraged Truman to use whatever special weapon the Americans claimed to have found against the Japanese.

They were all of course totally misled. Soviet Marshal Georgii Zhukov, present at the meeting, later recorded: ‘Both Churchill and many other Anglo-American authors subsequently assumed that Stalin had really failed to fathom the significance of what he had heard. In actual fact, on returning to his quarters after this meeting Stalin, in my presence, told Molotov about his conversation with Truman. The latter reacted almost immediately. ‘Let them. We’ll have to talk it over with Kurchatov and get him to speed things up.’ I realised that they were talking about research on the atomic bomb.’

The first nuclear mistrust was sown on that fateful day in July 1945. We continue to live the lie today. The difference is that we have started lying to our own people, including certain grief-stricken widows of impoverished farmers who killed themselves for less pretentious reasons than national sovereignty.

jawednaqvi@gmail.com