An exhibition of official sensitivity

The panels dealt with the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty (CTBT) and one of them clubbed India along with Israel and Pakistan as a non-signatory state "suspected to possess nuclear weapons." Hiraoka had inaugurated the exhibition yesterday along with Delhi Mayor Shakuntala Arya.

What has raised the scientific community’s hackles is that in the first leg of the travelling exhibition in Mumbai in February, all the 52 panels, including the seven disputed ones, were on display. And they made their disagreement known at an India International Centre meeting attended byformer prime minister Inder Kumar Gujral as well as Hiraoka today.

But the exhibition co-organiser, the Delhi Science Forum, feels that all but one of the seven disputed panels had an unmistakable American slant. "We are only telling the truth about nuclear weapons," Hiraoka said. "Why should the Government be afraid of the people knowing the truth? It seems weird to me."

Well-known pacifist and Director of the Centre for Science and Industrial Policy Research, Dhirendra Sharma, who is leading the protest against what he calls "an attack on freedom of speech," said: "When the world knows about our official position on the CTBT, why should we be overly sensitive to others raising the issue? The panels simply say India is a non-signatory state. Doesn’t everyone know about it?"

Sharma suspects the hand of some over-zealous Nuclear Science Centre official who, fearing the wrath of the new government at the Centre, alerted the Department of Atomic Energy.

Delhi Science Forum Joint Secretary N D Jayaprakashhowever took an entirely different view. "The show was mounted by a New York arts college for the Hiroshima Peace Culture Foundation, so it definitely has an American slant," he said. "It supports partial measures like CTBT, without demanding the complete elimination of nuclear weapons, which is what people want. It is a political stand, not a humanitarian one, which is expected of an exhibition of its kind." Jayaprakash pointed out that the exhibition was incomplete in many other ways. "There’s no mention of who dropped the bomb on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Even Hiraoka’s petition to the International Court of Justice for complete elimination of nuclear weapons has not been mentioned," he said.