The Kargil confrontation was the first in human history in which two nuclear powers found themselves in an eyeball-to-eyeball military conflict on such a scale. It was this factor, more than any other, that led to the inordinate international attention being paid to it. Of course, neither India nor Pakistan had openly deployed nuclear weapons and the threat of nuclear attack was to that extent remote, but this did not prevent ``responsible'' politicians and officials on both sides of the border from voicing nuclear-tipped threats and counter-threats.This irradiated dialogue seemed totally out of sync in a world that has had to confront and grapple with the ugly legacy of the nuclear genie for over 50 years, in a world where nations have evolved other sources for their self-esteem than devices like the bomb. But all this seem lost on the political elites of India and Pakistan as they desperately try to gain purchase from the anachronistic currency of nuclear weapons.Occasionally, a sense of uneaseemerged from amidst the bluster. The euphemisms that marked the recent exchange of words between both nations amply testified to this. In Pakistan, politicians and officials routinely claimed that they may be forced to use their ``ultimate option''. Their Indian counterparts responded by stating that they were prepared for ``every eventuality''.Yet, even these attempts at polite speech sometimes broke down. The Panchjanya editorial of June 20 was a sterling example of this. Although it was later dismissed by the BJP as just ``an emotional outburst'' it nevertheless carried the authority of being the official view of the official mouthpiece of the RSS, which in turn is closely linked to the ruling party. Employing the resonance of religious mythology, the editorial built on the image of India's Bheema tearing open the breasts of infidels and purifying the soiled tresses of Draupadi with blood. ``Pakistan will not listen just like that,'' it screamed. ``We have a centuries-old debt to settle with themindset''. It follows this up with a rousing call to the Prime Minister. ``Arise, Atal Behari! Who knows if fate has destined you to be the author of the final chapter of this long story. For what have we manufactured bombs? For what have we exercised the nuclear option? ..To teach them a lesson now is the only dharma''.Interestingly, Raja Zafarul Haq, Pakistan's religious affairs minister, seemed to have read the Panchjanya editorial very carefully, because he employed similar language while debating the Kargil situation in the Senate on June 30. ``Nuclear weapons are not meant to be kept on the shelf if security of the motherland is threatened,'' he said.But how far do these words of mimic-men poised at catastrophe's edge carry? How do ordinary people in both nations respond to the prospect of nuclear war? It is one of the great ironies of our time that while people cannot exercise control over this process of nuclear legitimisation and deployment, they ultimately will be the target of anuclear attack if it were to come.In India the twinges of trepidation over a possible nuclear holocaust were quickly swamped by the growing - often deliberately manipulated - euphoria over certain victory at Kargil. Thus even something as horrifying as nuclear warfare gets sanitised by the fact that it is waged in the cause of ``national honour'', which inevitably translates into my honour.In the afterglow of Pokharan II, grey-haired housewives confronted by TV mikes in marketplaces mouthed their phrases of pride and joy over the fact that India had gone nuclear. ``Now the world will take us seriously at last,'' was the subtext. Today this tacit approval continues to be the dominant response - at least in the middle-class enclaves of urban India. Last week, a Net poll carried by a newspaper asked people if being a nuclear state helped India in managing its international relations in a better way. While 15 per cent disagreed and another 5 per cent could not make up its mind, an overwhelming 80 percent was convinced that it did.But how informed is this debate? There seems little awareness of the horror of a nuclear war, or of the fact that it can have no winners, or indeed of the fact that there is a colossal difference between conventional and nuclear warfare. This ignorance is compounded by an unthinking fatalism and a tendency to render human life devoid of value. During the height of the Kargil operations, a colleague happened to ask a taxi-driver in Mumbai about whether the prospect of being nuked frightened him. The reply came in the form of a shrug. The taxi driver explained that since he had nothing to look forward to in the future, no real prospect of ``high life'', as he put it, it didn't make much difference to him whether he was nuked or not.Others in India drew cold comfort from the fact that since this country was so much bigger than Pakistan, ``at least three-fourths of us will still survive a nuclear attack''. This half-jocular statement reveals a terrifying and uninformedcomplacency and cynicism. A holocaust is okay, or so the argument goes, if it means that ultimately we get to win. It is a similar response to the one that greeted Tim Sebastian's interview with External Affairs Minister Jaswant Singh in Hard Talk last week. It did not matter whether what Singh said was logical or whether it made India's case more credible to the world community. What mattered was that we ``won'' because Singh had so effectively stonewalled his interlocutor.Author Amitav Ghosh, in a recent piece entitled, Countdown - Insurgency of an Elite, asked the well-known Pakistani human rights activist Asma Jehangir whether a nuclear war is possible between the two countries. Her reply is significant: ``Anything is possible because our policies are irrational. Our decision making is ad hoc. We are surrounded by disinformation. We have a historical enmity and the emotionalism of jihad against each other. And we are fatalistic nations who believe that whatever happens - a famine, adrought, an accident - it is the will of God.''Ghosh concludes by observing that the fact that ``these two countries should be willing to risk economic breakdown, nuclear accidents and nuclear war in order to indulge these confused ambitions is itself a sign that some essential element in the social compact has broken down: the desires of the rulers and the well-being of the ruled could not be further apart''.This, indeed, is the tragedy of the subcontinent. Unless clear and unequivocal voices are raised against this process of legitimising nuclear weapons, it is the doomsday voice of the Mumbai taxi-driver that will speak for all of us.
