Indians gloating over nuclear tests irritates US

Even Indian officials here are aghast at some of the statements emerging out of New Delhi while they are fighting an uphill battle –literally, on the Hill — to retain the vast legislative support they had assiduously built up over the last four years.

“Expressing pride in our achievements is one thing. But resorting to jingoism and belligerence is counterproductive,” a senior official said in despair.

The Indian Caucus on the Hill is over 100 lawmakers strong and its influence can be estimated by the margin (nearly 150) with which it has defeated the annual Dan Burton sponsored amendment to cut aid to India the last two years.

In ordinary circumstances, the Caucus could have been rallied to put up a fight to stop the proposed revocation of the Pressler Amendment which will allow the administration to return the F-16s to Pakistan. But New Delhi’s new found swagger has upset even its friends on the Hill and the India Caucus has been embarrassed into silence. “At this time, don’t even dream of stopping the planes from going to Pakistan if the administration begins to push for it,” a legislative aide said.

A prominentIndian-American also called this correspondent to fret about the “appalling scenes and sounds” emanating from India, saying it was most un-Indian. “Instead of being justly proud and behaving responsibly, they have turned it into a drum beating tamasha,” he said.

The strutting, which appears to have increased over the last few days, is also being painted in religious hues.

Vajpayee has been described here as a “Hindu Prime Minister,” and a newspaper caption showed him sharing “Hindu sweets” with L K Advani and footage of him in a saffron Hindu head-dress made it to prime time news.

The Indian ambassador Naresh Chandra expressed frustration with such characterisation, saying the media did not describe Nawaz Sharif as a Muslim Prime Minister or Benjamin Netanyahu as a Jewish Prime Minister.

But the damage, others argue, is self-inflicted. Reports of the Bharatiya Janata Party planning a yatra of the soil from Pokhran and the Vishwa Hindu Parishad building a monument at the test site hascontributed to the impression that there is an officially sponsored upsurge of zealotry.

Chandra has appeared on nearly a dozen television and radio talk shows to put across the Indian view point but his efforts are largely lost in the fervour coming from India.

The American establishment, already smarting under the intelligence flub which left the tests undetected, is also bristling at the Indian bragging. One official referred to Prime Minister Vajpayee’s adviser Pramod Mahajan’s statement about the news of the day being `India defies world opinion’ and said, “A lot of countries tested in the face of adverse world opinion, but no one poked a finger in the eyes of the world.”

All this flaunting has diminished the effort of a small but influential constituency which sees the Indian tests through a different prism which takes into account New Delhi’s security concerns and its despair over the lack of international disarmament. Important voices like former President Jimmy Carter and former Secretary ofState Henry Kissinger have pressed the administration not to put India in the doghouse over the tests.

But the non-stop crowing has exacerbated the American anger. Indian officials fear this will only result in a tightening of sanctions and make it more difficult for things to return to any state of normalcy.