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Shaping of a nightmare

In his short innings as foreign minister in the Janata Party experiment of 1977-79, Atal Behari Vajpayee drove down to the L3 lecture hall at Jawaharlal Nehru University.

The predominantly leftist academic community in the packed room heartily welcomed his speech about the restoration of democracy in India after Indira Gandhi briefly flirted with dictatorship.

Vajpayee then produced one of his less reported one-liners. “You were all opposed to my party’s campaign for nuclear deterrence, so we decided to drop the bomb.”

I can clearly remember how the anti-nuclear declaration had invited the loudest cheers. His prime minister, Mr Morarji Desai, was vehemently opposed to atomic weapons, and that had prompted the tactical decision by Vajpayee’s religio-fascist Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS) to lie low on its cherished militarist project to capture power in India.

It would be another 20 years before Vajpayee eventually got his chance to break the 1978 vow against nuclear weapons and to follow to fruition the military path his party had prescribed for years. Four years after declaring India an atomic power Vajpayee was swiftly engaged in a military standoff with Pakistan. May 2002 saw the streets around Delhi’s diplomatic enclave deserted out of fright as Western leaders and their senior representatives rushed between Islamabad and New Delhi to arrest the strange enthusiasm for mass suicide both countries harboured.

Vajpayee is erroneously regarded as a moderate Hindu leader. Those who assess him thus have conveniently forgotten his involvement in the horrific Nelli massacre of Muslim women and children in Assam in 1983.

They have also failed to remember the 1996 presidential address read by Shankar Dayal Sharma, which was a blueprint for Hindutva rule in India. Vajpayee had dictated the mandatory presidential address although his 13-day rule ended without him facing the trust vote in the Lok Sabha.

Ironically, the current ‘agreeable’ man from the Hindutva stable happens to be Lal Krishna Advani, author of a nationwide communal frenzy after he helped raze the Babri mosque in Ayodhya.

Given their level of political subterfuge that passes for democratic aspiration, can we even begin to imagine the havoc that could be wreaked on India by someone who even Vajpayee and Advani regarded as an extremist from the Hindutva stables?

Narendra Modi may or may not get to become the prime minister of India. Caution, however, dictates that we know his mind on the most crucial issues the world would confront under his stewardship.

What will be his attitude to his nuclear-armed neighbours, China and Pakistan? And what will be his militarist choices to coerce the country to accept his neoliberal economic model that has the support of the industry?

It would be a grievous folly to disregard the bone-chilling interview on India’s nuclear stance the late K.S. Sudarshan gave shortly after he retired as the head of the RSS. Mr Modi, who sees himself as a loyal foot soldier of the RSS, will have to make his opinion crystal clear on the Sudarshan doctrine on nuclear war.

Mr Sudarshan had pronounced a few core benefits to India of a nuclear war with Pakistan or even a wider Third World War. The late RSS chief was a virtual patron saint of the main opposition Bharatiya Janata Party and had pockets of influence within the ruling Congress.

In the unusual interview, which would put a bellicose Iranian cleric or a North Korean party apparatchik to shame, Mr Sudarshan had proposed a conflict (including a nuclear conflict) because it becomes inevitable when aasurs (literally demons) become a dominant force.

In his scheme of things the aasurs were evidently Pakistanis. It would be useful to quote him directly, since the utterances could imply a future Indian nuclear doctrine should ‘Hindu nationalists’ represented by the RSS take power on their own in India.

Mr Sudarshan was asked if India should go to war with Pakistan over the Mumbai carnage of November 2008. He said war should be the last option because it would not stop there. He also said when “aasuri powers” start dominating the planet there is no other way but war.

“It will be nuclear war and a large number of people will … [perish]. In fact, not me but many people around the world have expressed their apprehension that this terrorism may ultimately result in a third world war. And this will be a nuclear war in which many of us are going to be finished.

“But according to me, as of now, it is very necessary to defeat the demons and there is no other way. And let me say with confidence that after this destruction, a new world will emerge which will be very good, free from evil and terrorism.”

Let it not go unsaid that the groundwork for Sudarshan-style militarism was carried out by the less maligned Congress. It was Indira Gandhi after all who cast the first stone in the South Asian brinkmanship by testing the bomb in 1974.

Much of India’s militarism has been directed at cultivating domestic constituencies. It was the Congress, which gave unbridled powers to the armed forces to tame and crush the people’s voices in the border region of Kashmir and the northeast.

Whether it concerns providing for a 30,000-strong troop deployment on the China border (and no money for schools and hospitals) or preparing a multi-headed nuclear missile, Mr Modi will only be slipping into the shoes of the Congress.

It is his messianic zeal that is more worrying, not unlike the feeling you get from men in North Korea and Iran, and from sections of the ruling elite in Pakistan.

The writer is Dawn’s correspondent in Delhi.

Jawed Naqvi, "Shaping of a nightmare," Dawn. 2013-07-25.
Keywords: Political science , Political issues , Political relations , Political leaders , Political parties , Atomic weapons , Atomic power-India , World war III , Political history , Democracy , Diplomacy , Terrorism , Shankar Dayal Sharma , Atal Behari , Indira Gandhi , Narendra Modi , Morarji Desai , Pakistan , Islamabad , India , China , Mumbai , North Korea , Iran , RSS , BJP