Apocalypse Now, Fallout Tomorrow

The most damaging ex post facto justification of the action lies in the observation that the political class and media circles have mostly welcomed the act-ion. Ergo, there must be a consensus behind it which must be respected. This rather puts a nations leadership out of business, reducing it to following the pack instead of leading it. Indep-endence from British rule could not have come had there not been men of vision who first tau-ght the nation how to dream of freedom and then built up the armies of satyagrahis and the INA to make that dream come true.

At another level, the new economic policies would hardly have come if P V Narasimha Rao was mindful of the fact that most of the electorate and the media had no clear ides of what reforms were all about, not to speak of welcoming them. The reforms, initiated out of fear of bankruptcy, were taken forward by a few leaders like Manmohan Singh and P Chidambaram who were wise enough to foresee that without them the nation would lose out in an era of new emerging global paradigms.

The BJP naturally hopes to ride the jingoistic wave which the bomb will create among the populace. But what good it will do to India? It will not tilt the power equation with China in favour of India. It may achieve that vis-a-vis Pakistan for a day but the latter will certainly explode their own bomb which they also have been storing in their basement for years now. This will let loose a suicidally expensive arms race which will not stop at nuclear delivery systems and arsenals but extend to conventional capabilities. It will also arouse Chinas ire which will after careful thought deliver a symbolic but telling reply that India is scarcely ready to counter, given the state of its armed forces.

The bomb will of course stroke the ego of large sections of the countrys elite. India will no longer be pushed around by superpowers and others, they will assert. But with its gradual emergence as a regional power, that was not happening either. If anything, the move is likely to strengthen Pakistans strategic ties with the US and push back by years the process of Sino-Indian confidence building. A bomb in the basement was as much of a deterrent as one in the hand, minus the sub-continental arms race that is now likely to follow.

Truth is, Indias opinion makers do not feel ashamed about its poverty. They do not consider it a matter of national humiliation that China has left India far behind on the road to economic progress and prosperity, that even Pakistan is ahead of India in the battle against poverty. They do not consider it necessary to declare a war on TB or leprosy or plain old malnutrition. They do not feel there is little credit in establishing Hindutva in India if it continues to account for the largest number of illiterates in the world and, in terms of many human development indicators, is behind even sub-Saharan Africa.

The first immediate economic consequences of the bomb will be a shift in public expenditure to defence and away from development. The second will be a deterioration of the global economic environment for India. Spreads will rise for Indian borrowers and foreign investors will be more hesitant to come to India. US economic sanctions, when they come, may not bite or take some time to do so, and by then India may well have signed the NPT, but this will certainly turn the terms of trade against India at the margin.

Indian business has been groaning under the weight of an economic slowdown and only in the last few days has some heartening news come of improved corporate results in the second half of last year. If the bomb kills this recovery and condemns India to the 5.5 per cent growth rate of the 80s rather than letting it graduate to the 7 per cent of the mid-90s, then that will set back the fight against poverty by years.

At the bottom of the welcome to the bomb is a mindset that looks back, to the days when kings went to war to quell internal rebellions and to offer footloose and hungry peasants the prospects of loot and plunder. It is the Jana Sangh that first latched on to the nuclear platform dec-ades ago when the enfant terrible of the party was Subramanian Swamy. A lot has changed since then. India won a decisive victory against Pakistan in 71 and the cold war ended in 91.

Just as the economic ideology of the BJP is the failed and discredited one of the Congress of the 70s, the same is true of its nuclear option. Mrs Gandhi got great mileage out of the implosion of 1974 but that did not prevent the popular uprising against her which led to the imposition of the Emergency. The BJP, which is more interested in making the bomb than pursuing growth and removing poverty, will surely go the way of Mrs Gandhi. That will be the final fallout of the apocalypse.