An absurd choice of catastrophes

The recent tsunami has thrown up a disquieting irony. It was only 20 years ago, in March 1983, to be precise, that both India and Pakistan had signed the Non-Aligned Movement's petition at its Delhi summit, which called for the Indian Ocean to be made a nuclear weapons free zone as also for the removal of American bases from Diego Garcia.

The timing of that resolution was hardly curious. South Africa, then firmly in the Western camp, was to test its first usable nuclear device that year. And of course the crisis in Afghanistan had made the rest of the Indian Ocean so volatile that military armadas from everywhere were roaming the Arabian Sea.

Even the Gulf was crawling with warships despite the looming sea-mines laid there in the Iran-Iraq stand off. Then by a quirk of fate, South Africa became a democratic country and threw out its nuclear weapons, calling them a liability, not an asset.

Some years later, India and Pakistan for reasons of their own marched off in the opposite direction and declared themselves as nuclear weapons states.The fig leaf was off and all talk about declaring Indian Ocean a nuclear weapons free zone drifted into the whirlpool of spanking new geopolitics.

India and Pakistan were big boys now who would never miss an opportunity to put on display their macho prowess. The tsunami trajectory ironically enough traversed an entire stretch that is saturated with nuclear weapons, nuclear submarines, warships and so on.

It hit with full force an Indian nuclear reactor at Kalpakam, which the government says is safe. It has devastated an entire air force base in the Andaman Islands whose potential or real fallout may never be known.

And we have the curious case of Diego Garcia, bang in the path of the raging tidal waves going unscathed. Is that really so? We may never know the true military toll of the destructive earthquake on India, the United States and other countries which stood in the way or whose lethal armadas were stationed in the region at the fateful moment.

Suggestions that an American nuclear submarine that ran aground off the Guam military base was unrelated to the havoc in the Indian Ocean will have to be pondered before they are accepted.

These are of course a few examples of the risks that any natural calamity holds in an area saturated with nuclear devices, military or peaceful. It is in this context that it is hard to believe that only two years ago the Indian government was calmly calculating the gains from a war it nearly had with Pakistan.

It was a callous, spine shilling calculation involving a nuclear exchange, nothing less. If India were to lose a few million of its own, Pakistan would be wiped out with its 120 million plus.

These claims could be excused if they were made merely by rightwing Hindutva fanatics. In this case though it was government ministers, including the one holding the defence portfolio in 2002, who were engaged in the nuclear chest thumping.

It must seem odd but also gratifying that a nation state, which was prepared to sacrifice millions of its own people in the name of that banal objective called supreme national interest, is today caringly tending to the victims of the tsunami disaster.

It is also a relief to see Indian navy and air force resources, only recently mobilized threateningly, galvanized today not only to benefit Indian victims of tsunami but also Sri Lankans, Maldivians and others in the vicinity.

For India and Pakistan, as indeed for the rest of the world, the tsunami episode offers a stark lesson for all time to come because it has changed the traditional meaning of neighbourhoods as also the concept of neighbours per se.

If an earthquake in Indonesia can wreak devastation in far away Africa simply because the two continents happen to be linked by vast stretches of water, can we fathom the fallout of any nuclear misadventure among adversaries who are immediate neighbours with a common border?

I distinctly remember how the UAE government had banned milk powder from Turkey following the 1986 Chernobyl nuclear disaster in Ukraine. The Chernobyl accident's impact on Turkey came by way of contaminated rain clouds, which in turn affected the grass that went into the blood stream of the grazing cattle.

If a country genuinely cares for its people as seems to be the case with India in the wake of the killer wave, how do we explain that it also deliberately put at risk the lives of the same people in the name of some higher, even if still debatable cause?

Apart from the humanitarian appeal inherent in the quest for nuclear disarmament there is a blunt logic too to bring countries like India and Pakistan to their senses.

The doomsday scenario, written by the US government, says that during the Cold War the US government spent more than $45 billion to protect both senior government officials and the general public in the event of a nuclear attack. Have India or Pakistan spent even a cent to protect their people from the consequences of the insane military pursuits?

After taking a stand against foreign help for its tsunami victims, India was forced to go (somewhat surreptitiously) to the World Bank for help. A World Bank statement on Tuesday quoted initial government estimates as putting the loss of life in excess of 10,000 and the loss of property at about $1.5 billion. Which financier would India turn to when the costs of a tragedy become truly forbidding?

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Suzanne Roshan and Gauri Khan were being interviewed on television. As wives of celebrated film stars Hritik Roshan and Shahrukh Khan they lead tense lives and are similar in many ways. Except one. What if their husbands fall in love with some beautiful heroine, they were asked.

Suzanne said she simply could not imagine life without Hritik and never failed to pray for their marriage to last and prosper. Gauri, it turned out also prays daily with this fear in mind, but with a different conclusion. "I tell God, O God please if Shahrukh leaves me for someone else, please find me someone else too."