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Journalism of Courage
The National Democratic Alliance8217;s talents as an illusionist have not been sufficiently recognised. One year after Atal Bihari Vajpayee8217;s return to power, it is worth looking at tricks with smoke and mirrors on the food and nuclear fronts and in rewriting history.
The government is sitting on a 45-million tonne mountain of foodgrain, riches beyond imagination in a country where millions go to bed hungry every day. Subsidy cuts in the annual budget have contributed to the twin phenomena though the government maintains otherwise. Even as the mountain threatens to rise to more spectacular heights during the current procurement season, the government sits tight, doing nothing to get the food to those who need it. And it is not as though effective ways of delivering food are not known. Food-for-work programmes could feed the undernourished and produce social and economic assets at the same time.
Holding twice as much grain as the country needs for emergency buffer stocks is a drain on the exchequer. More is lost through corruption and to rodents, mildew and worms than is gained by reducing the subsidy on grain distributed through ration shops. Substandard rice rotting in Food Corporation of India godowns alone accounts for losses close to Rs 3000 crore, Rs 1000 crore more than what is estimated will be saved on food subsidies this year. That is not all. The new chairman of the FCI reveals that he may have no choice the implication is, political pressure but to procure more fast-rotting paddy this season.
It is possible to maintain all this is an example of good economic management, to maintain that food subsidy cuts are reformist measures on a par with opening up insurance or inviting private sector bids for Air India, only because poverty in this country is treated as a statistical illusion and a figment of the imagination.
On the nuclear front, the illusion is that Pokharan put India into the league of nuclear powers. But as the Vajpayee government firms up its commitment to a moratorium on testing and a former chairman of the Atomic Energy Commission publicly urges more tests in order to put the credibility back into the minimum credible deterrent8217;, the illusion is becoming increasingly hard to maintain.
During the prime minister8217;s visit to Washington, the government8217;s commitment to a moratorium was reiterated and carried apace further by asserting that the moratorium would hold until the comprehensive test ban treaty came into force. Since it has been said more than once that India will not block entry into force of the CTBT, the assumption is that when other roadblocks US and Chinese failure to ratify the treaty are out of the way, India will be ready to sign. So the purpose of that additional phrase this September in Washington 8212; that India will continue its moratorium until the CTBT comes into effect 8212; and the fact that it came in a joint statement with the Americans, was to lock India more firmly into its promise not to test.
A moratorium accords with the confidence of India8217;s scientists in 1998 when they pronounced themselves completely satisfied with the results obtained from five tests at Pokharan. It was said then that 8220;full weaponsiation8221; was possible. Therefore, no more tests were needed for the development of a nuclear arsenal and the moratorium would hold.
However, as the months went by it emerged that the tests had not been an unqualified success and that the thermonuclear device the big bomb Vajpayee called it in an unguarded moment, at least, did not perform as well as expected. This latter fact has now been confirmed by Dr P K Iyengar, former chairman of the AEC, who calls for more tests before India signs the CTBT.
The claim that five tests were sufficient to prove the reliability of several weapon designs, weapons for delivery from the ground, air and sea as the draft nuclear doctrine requires, has always strained credibility. But for two years the public has been encouraged to cling to the illusion that satisfactory results were achieved in 1998, that India could move smoothly from there to weaponisation.
Now that position is crumbling publicly. What does the government propose to do? It is committed abroad to bringing about a political consensus on the CTBT and it is committed at home to fashioning a credible minimum deterrent against China, Pakistan or anyone else. What trick mirrors will make these two irreconcilable positions look like one and the same?
The mother of all illusions, surely, is what the government, or important members of it, are encouraging with regard to Harappa. Through a fog of bogus scholarship it is made out that the Indus Valley civilization was an Aryan civilization complete with horse-chariots and the Vedic Sanskrit language; the date of the Rigveda is pushed back two thousand years and the Harappan script is newly discovered to be written from left to right.
There is no rigorous analysis here, just myth-making parading as scholarship. Inconvenient archaeological evidence is tossed out, impossible claims are made and still other evidence is distorted, all in the effort to establish that the Aryans were an indigenous people. It is the magician8217;s art. Why the National Museum in New Delhi and the Archaeological Survey of India have allowed themselves to become the butt of jokes in universities in India and abroad by associating themselves with this shabby enterprise is hard to understand. But it seems any claptrap is good enough for these premier institutions as long as it has the blessings of the NDA government as appears to be the case.
A notion of greatness that requires poor people to be forgotten, nuclear weapons to be rattled and the support of bogus scholarship should be firmly rejected.
