Spread it around

The BJP has decreed a day of celebration and seems to have appointed itself master of ceremonies. Some self-congratulation is certainly in order, given the success that India has achieved. But that, precisely, is the point. Surely the credit for a national achievement cannot go to a single party. Congress president Sonia Gandhi was perfectly justified in making her `social call’ on the Prime Minister. It was the Congress which set the ball rolling with the first tests at Pokharan in 1974. And in the intervening years, several governments have kept India’s position on the nuclear issue alive in international debates. It was, in fact, a United Front government which refused to sign the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty. Had India succumbed to world opinion and signed the CTBT, the BJP would have been in no position to conduct the tests.

The Prime Minister, of course, took a step in the right direction by talking to the opposition parties. If there is a national consensus backing the bomb, it should be reflectedin a consensus among the national parties. But after that, the jubilation seemed to have gone a little out of hand, at least so far as the manner of its expression is concerned. The marchers from Pokharan bearing sand to Jaipur and Delhi are about to, so to speak, put a little sand in the works. They immediately recall the kar sevaks who marched to the shilanyas with Ram bricks on their heads. Not exactly the image that the BJP might want to dredge up from the collective memory, now that it is in power and is preparing to deal multilaterally on the disarmament issue. A nation that is capable of making a thermonuclear bomb ought to display a corresponding level of maturity. Celebrations may be in order, but they should really be an expression of national pride. They should be a projection of the national will into the international sphere. As things stand, the event is in danger of degenerating into a confidence-building and revitalising exercise within the party in power. The bomb was made to deal with aninternational issue. Unfortunately, it is finding its most immediate use in the domestic sphere.

The achievement is of too large a magnitude to serve such a petty purpose. The BJP is welcome to use whatever mileage it can earn out of the event, but not to the extent that the real issue — national security — is deflated and rendered ridiculous. The level of national security that the BJP would like to introduce is predicated on a requisite extent of national will, and that can only be formed by a consensus among the national parties. True, none of them has opposed the bomb, but they have not come out in open praise of it either. Their approval, strictly speaking, has been extended to the scientific achievement that the bomb represents, not to any giant steps that India may have taken in the field of external affairs. As it prepares to take these steps, the government stands in need of national support. To get it, it will have to extend the credit to the nation.