Tell the people what’s going on

Congress leaders know this but not how to deal with it. At every available opportunity inside and outside Parliament Natwar Singh, Salman Khurshid and others demand to be told what is going on. They would do well to make a bigger issue of the secrecy and lack of information. For a start, they should ask whether American revelations on the Jaswant Singh-Strobe Talbott negotiations match the facts. At the very minimum, Parliament should hear the Indian side of the story in a full government statement.

On the one hand, the Indian public is left to look at evolving positions on the CTBT, fissile materials freeze and technology controls through an American prism. On the other, the Prime Minister and his defence minister play for the applause. Their mantras today are what they were in May: India is a nuclear weapons state, no price is too high to pay for national security and so on.

Althoughthe US, France and the EU have begun to act (albeit cautiously and so as to bind us to our words) on the assumption that the Vajpayee government is moving towards adherence to the CTBT, the government itself does precious little to persuade the Indian people of the advantages of the treaty. Instead, shortly after returning from New York, Vajpayee went ambivalent again in speeches across the country. The seventh round of the India-US dialogue has ended with a few more cryptic sentences. To cultivate public ignorance and jingoism while policy rises out of that morass is the worst kind of populism and the antithesis of democratic functioning.

For 24 years, successive governments and the nuclear and strategic establishment led the public to believe Pokharan-I was a peaceful device and that India had the nuclear capability to ward off potential threats to security. People are now being told the threats to security are upon us, that a tous azimutf nuclear capability is the answer and has been achieved with fivetests. All three propositions are false.

Any government acting responsibly and conducting a policy of nuclear restraint must, first of all, alter the public discourse. It must reassert the old norms not only against the threat of use and use of nuclear weapons but also possession of nuclear weapons. “Nuclear apartheid” cannot be condemned in one breath and be subscribed to in the next under the rubric of “equal security for all”. Why can’t the BJP use the language at home of the resolution India introduced at the UN on “reducing nuclear danger”?

Why not talk to people here of the horrors of nuclear weapons, the threat to mankind, the terrible risks of accidental nuclear war? Here the bomb is presented as a legitimate war-fighting weapon and a passport to greatness.

Out there it becomes a threat to all peace-loving people. Here the dangerous illusion is spread that nuclear warheads bring absolute security. Out there those warheads endanger human civilization.

Never mind that it has been workingbackwards all these months from the tests to a nuclear policy, the government has taken a number of sensible steps. It has declared a unilateral moratorium on testing and a no-first-use doctrine, said it is ready to sign the CTBT and to talk about an FMCT. It introduced an important and self-deterring resolution in the UN General Assembly on de-alerting nuclear arsenals. Having agreed in principle to nuclear and missile technology export controls (even though it hopes exports to India will be treated somehow as an exception), it is engaged in discussion with the US and the EU on technical means of tightening controls.

A broad dialogue with Pakistan has begun. Finally, a National Security Council is being put together and may eventually carry out a review of security policy including nuclear policy.

Taken together these measures could lead to a more viable policy stance than the one suggested by the chest-thumping of May and June. But it will take more than a little courage to put Pokharan-II intoperspective and declare it, let us say, a technology demonstrator. With proven capability, there is no compelling need to weaponise and deploy. Given the way nuclear affairs have been conducted so far, many experts inside the country have come to the conclusion that that is, in any case, the only logical position this government can take.

With a policy of restraint taking shape under the BJP, it becomes possible to attend to the country’s real and compelling needs. The list is long and includes deploying our resources for education and health especially, restoring our international standing, securing out capital account better by obtaining loans from multilateral institutions, freeing scientific and research establishments from constraints and rebuilding non-nuclear arms of the security apparatus.

What is possible is not necessarily what is going to come about. As long as the bomb and national security are domestic political playthings, as they have been for the last eight months, it cannot be said withcertainty that restraint will hold. Someone is going to have to tell the people what is going on. The BJP won’t; the Congress and the CPI(M) should. Otherwise they will find themselves crippled and the BJP running with the bomb again.