"Nuclear apartheid" as political position: Race as a postcolonial resource?

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Volumn 26, Issue 4, 2001, Pages 485-522

  Biswas, Shampa ^a  

^a WHITMAN COLLEGE   (United States)

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EID: 23044531422     PISSN: 03043754     EISSN: None     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1177/030437540102600406     Document Type: Article

References (135)

1. Roxanne Lynn Doty, Imperial Encounters: The Politics of Representation in North South Relations (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1996), p. 167.
2. See Keith Krause and Michael C. Williams, eds., Critical Security Studies: Concepts and Cases (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1997) for an excellent collection of articles that (1) critically examine the newly emerging literature that adds new threats (economic, environmental, ethnic, and so on) to a preexisting security problematic, and (2) problematize the way in which mainstream security studies simply presumes that the state is the only thing to be secured.
3. See in particular, Critical Security Studies: Concepts and Cases ( ibid., Krause and Williams, "From Strategy to Security: Foundations of Critical Security Studies,"
4. and R. B. J. Walker, "The Subject of Security."
5. See also Richard Wyn Jones, Security, Strategy, and Critical Theory (Boulder, Colo.: Lynne Rienner, 1999), esp. chap. 4;
6. and David Mutimer, "Beyond Strategy: Critical Thinking and the New Security Studies," in Craig A. Snyder, Contemporary Security and Strategy (New York: Routledge, 1999).
7. It is noteworthy here that India exploded a nuclear device in 1974, but its characterization by the Indian government as a "peaceful nuclear explosion" (PNE) prevented it from earning the status of a nuclear-weapons state. It is not clear at all that there is anything technologically distinctive about a nuclear explosion that makes it peaceful, the significance of the characterization depending, then, on the declaratory intent of the actor to not weaponize after demonstrating the capability to be able to do so. This indicates at least two issues that are relevant to the arguments in this article: First, it is clear here that declarations of intent do matter in IR, and their importance lies in the normative force they bring to bear on a particular issue. Realist IR, with an ontology of power that relies on physical capability, is unable to account for this realm of global politics. Second, given the amount of speculation on the possession of nuclear weapons (in secret) by nuclear-capable states (this includes states that are considered to be nuclear-capable but that have not exploded a nuclear device, such as Israel, Iran, North Korea, and Libya), it is clear that the line between the two categories is tenuous, even though the categories as distinct and different have been institutionalized in the nuclear nonproliferation regime through international treaties like the NPT and the CTBT. It is commonly recognized, for instance, that Israel possesses nuclear weapons, and lists published by security-related organizations or peace-activist groups provide estimates on the number of such weapons. Once again, it would seem that the constitution of the two categories lies less in the physical attributes that they are supposed to embody and much more in the normative parameters that make the distinction between the two sensible and significant.
8. Scott Sagan is one scholar who debunks the security imperatives of nuclear proliferation and urges more attention to domestic politics. See Scott Sagan, "Why Do States Build Nuclear Weapons?" International Security 21, no. 3 (winter 1996-1997): 54-86.
9. Similar arguments are made in the Indian case by, for example, Braful Bidwai and Achin Vanaik, South Asia on a Short Fuse: Nuclear Politics and the Future of Global Disarmament (New Delhi: Oxford UP, 1999);
10. and Achin Vanaik, "The Indian Nuclear Tests: Causes, Consequences, and Portents," Comparative Studies of South Asia, Africa, and the Middle East 18, no. 1 (1998).
11. The thrust of Ghosh's polemical essay is also on a similar kind of argument: Amitav Ghosh, Countdown (New Delhi: Ravi Dayal, 1999). Another part of a "domestic politics" argument (a part I do not examine here) would be take account of what one might call the nuclear epistemic community in India, consisting at the minimum of a fairly well-entrenched nuclear bureaucracy (Dept. of Atomic Energy, Defence Research and Development Organization), one hawkish set of nuclear scientists with political clout, and a group of think tanks consisting of security experts and policy analysts. In addition, some military leaders have been nuclear advocates for some time.
12. Other important organizations associated with the Parivar are the Bharatiya Mazdoor Sangh (BMS - Indian Workers' Organization), a large trade-union federation that, with a membership of forty-five lakhs, now claims a larger membership than the Congress(I)-affiliated Indian National Trade Union Congress (INTUC); the Akhil Bharatiya Vidyarthi Parishad (ABVP - All-India Students' Council), a large, nationwide students' organization whose importance lies in the fact that the younger population is the highest rising age cohort of support for the BJP; the Swadeshi Jagran Manch (SJM - Economic Nationalism Consciousness-Raising Forum), organized to campaign for economic nationalist themes; the Dharma Sansad, an organization of sadhus (holy men) claiming a strength of about thirty thousand; and tribal organizations, women's organizations, and so on. The RSS has more than eighty front organizations that deal with a variety of issues.
13. Most BJP leaders (as well as leaders from most of the other associated organizations) come from RSS backgrounds. In fact, there is an unwritten rule that only RSS pracharaks (leaders) can hold posts as BJP general secretaries. When dissensions within the BJP have threatened party discipline, the party has set up RSS-style and RSS-aided training camps (Prashikshan Sansthans) for all levels of party workers, including members of parliament, to undergo training in ideology. See "Season for Change," in India Today, October 20, 1997, pp. 18-19,
14. and "Training for Power," India Today ibid., September 15, 1997, pp. 26-27, both articles by Saba Naqvi Bhaumik. Despite the differences that often surface between the BJP and the RSS, the influence of the RSS in serving as the "ideological conscience" of the party remains strong.
15. See N. K. Singh, "Hindu Divided Family," in India Today, December 15, 1996, pp. 28-32. While the BJP leaders now restrain themselves from speaking publicly on some of the more politically controversial issues (and often even publicly disagree with statements made and positions taken by other organizations), restricting themselves to relatively banal public pronouncements like "anticorruption" and "good governance," the RSS and the VHP continue to stir up passions on religious and "cultural" issues.
16. See N. K. Singh, "Return of the Hindu Card," in India Today, October 15, 1995, pp. 42-47. After forming the government, the BJP had been strategizing to use the grassroots links of the various affiliated organizations to extend its regional and social networking and building and consolidating its base.
17. See Saba Naqvi Bhaumik, "The Soul is the Sangh," in India Today, April 13, 1998. My point is that while there are sometimes genuine differences of opinions and positions among these different organizations, as we will see on the issue of Swadeshi (economic nationalism), sometimes the differences also serve as a form of political strategy as the BJP relegates the Hindutva fervor to the VHP and RSS and tries to project itself as more moderate. But more importantly, my argument is that there is a certain level of organic unity that, despite the ambivalences, gives the political formation that I call Hindu nationalism a certain coherence and logic.
18. Hence even if the electoral success of the BJP can be attributed to a number of different voter/constituent interests and motivations (a June 1996 India Today-MARG postelection survey revealed that only 33 percent of the people agreed with the statement that the BJP is a communal party; 56 percent felt it was not: see India Today, June 30, 1996), there are both larger structural causes and, in particular, consequences of its rise to power. This is also the reason that simply focusing on the "liberal" face of BJP Prime Minister Vajpayee as evidence of the political mainstreaming of Hindu nationalism is inadequate:
19. See, for instance, Jonathan Karp, "Sheep among Wolves," in Far Eastern Economic Review, May 30, 1996.
20. For instances of how Vajpayee's liberalism has had to be reigned in due to party and other pressures, see N. K. Singh, "Operating Oh So Smoothly," in India Today, May 15, 1996.
21. While there are sometimes genuine differences of opinions and positions among the different organizations in the Sangh Parivar, particularly on the issue of swadeshi (economic nationalism), it may be argued that this ambivalent position of the party, while reflecting different internal interests, serves also a particular purpose (and is sometimes deployed strategically to that purpose): This is to speak to certain middle-class cultural anxieties generated with the spread of consumer capitalism without dismantling the benefits and advantages that liberalization has also brought to this section of the population.
22. This argument is made by Etel Solingen, "The Political Economy of Nuclear Restraint," International Security 19, no. 2 (1994): 126-169.
23. Solingen also misreads the BJP's economic orientation by taking some of its economic nationalist rhetoric at its face value: International Security ibid.: 148.
24. Sumit Sarkar, "The BJP Bomb and Aspects of Nationalism," Economic and Political Weekly, July 14, 1998, p. 1725.
25. There is a sense in which Congress secularism has always been suspect, and jingoism or militarism in foreign-policy orientation is certainly not the sole province of BJP-style nationalist/religious bigotry. But more importantly, it must be emphasized in interrogating the Hindu-bomb argument that while the decision to conduct the May 11 tests was made by the BJP government, this decision was made possible by a series of decisions made under prior political regimes to develop India's nuclear program to the nuclear-weapons capability level. Itty Abraham has shown how as atomic energy becomes the "epitome of a modern scientific project" and national security becomes the "prime rationale for state behavior," the very emergence of the Indian postcolonial state becomes inextricably (although contingently) intertwined with the Indian atomic-energy establishment built under the auspices of Nehru: Itty Abraham, "Science and Power in the Postcolonial State," Alternatives 21 (1996): 321-339, at 330. The BJP inherited a very well-developed nuclear program-ready to go, if you will - a program that had received the patronage of several political leaders much before the Hindu nationalist politics of the BJP had burst onto the Indian political mainstream. It must be remembered here that India's first nuclear test occurred under Prime Minister Indira Gandhi's (Congress Party) leadership, and in December 1995 Prime Minister Narasimha Rao (also of the Congress Party) had come very close to conducting a nuclear test and backed away only under heavy pressure from the U.S. government. The history of India's nuclear program does point out that it is clearly inadequate to understand either the emergence of Hindu nationalism or the decision of the BJP government to conduct the nuclear tests in a vacuum-that is, without understanding the terrain of possibilities (both physical and ideological) that enabled the BJP to conduct those tests.
26. See Sarkar, note 9, for an account that attributes the BJP decision to the masculinist militaristic authoritarianism of the Hindutva project. See Madhu Kishwar, "BJP's Wargasm," Manushi, no. 106 (1998), for more on the gendered motivations and responses to nuclearization in India and Pakistan.
27. Ziauddin Sardar, "Two Asian Film Thugs Square Up," New Statesman, June 5, 1998, points to postcolonial-gendered anxieties that motivated the BJP decision. Hindu hypermasculinity became a response to the (ef)feminization of Hindus by the British in contrast to the masculinized violence attributed to Muslims.
28. See Carol Cohn, "Sex and Death in the Rational World of Defense Intellectuals," Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society 12, no. 4 (1987): 687-718, for an excellent, more general account of the gendered nature of nuclear-strategic thinking.
29. For instance, an opinion poll conducted by India Today-MARG in twelve major Indian cities found that 87 percent of the population approved of the tests and 44 percent of the population said that their intention to vote for the BJP in the aftermath of the nuclear tests increased, while only 8 percent said that they were now less likely to vote for the BJP: India Today, May 20, 1998.
30. This realist explanation for India's decision is for instance the main thrust of the argument made by J. Mohan Malik, "India Goes Nuclear: Rationale, Benefits, Cost, and Implications," Contemporary South Asia 20, no. 2 (1998). Convinced about China's expansionist interests in the region, Malik (p. 199) finds India's nuclear policy "aimed at restoring a stable balance-of-power in order to prevent China from assuming a policing role in South and Southeast Asia." He sees this as the forerunner to a new global US-China bipolar balance of power, with an alliance between the United States and India.
31. Similarly, Mohammed Ayoob's position on the significance of the Chinese threat also seems to be taking such a realist perspective, although in a more sophisticated way; see Mohammed Ayoob, "Nuclear India and Indian-American Relations," Orbis 43, no. 1 (1999): 59-74.
32. For a good overview of India's developing nuclear program, which also takes a realist position in privileging the security imperatives that have driven India's nuclear program as well as the 1999 tests, see Sumit Ganguly, "Pokhran II: The Prospects and Sources of New Delhi's Nuclear Weapons Program," International Security 23, no. 4 (1999). It is of course common for political leaders and policy-makers to subscribe to, and invoke, a realist paradigm in justifying military postures. Hence, even Jaswant Singh, senior adviser on defense and foreign affairs to Prime Minister Vajpayee, who articulated the nuclear-apartheid argument most clearly to justify India's decision, made the case for India's nuclear policy on the basis of its immediate security environment.
33. Highlighting the Pakistani and Chinese threats in Foreign Affairs article, Singh points out that "India's motives remain security" since "India lives in a rough neighborhood"; throughout the article, he goes to considerable length to highlight the difference between a "moralistic approach" and a "realistic approach": sec Jaswant Singh, "Against Nuclear Apartheid," Foreign Affairs 77, no. 5 (1998): 49, 52.
34. This is in contrast with, for instance, China's belligerent posture with respect to claims in the South China Sea, or with regard to Taiwan and Vietnam. Wade Huntley points out that "although China-India relations have been rhetorically contentious for decades, specific Chinese actions in South Asia have been more limited than many in India perceive": Wade L. Huntley, "Alternative Futures after the South Asian Nuclear Tests: Pokhran as Prologue," Asian Survey (May/June 1999).
35. It has been remarked that these six tests were an attempt to even the balance of India's five tests plus the one conducted in 1974. Opinion polls in Pakistan confirm (100 percent) that the Indian threat is the sole justification for the Pakistani nuclear program; the renunciation of the nuclear option depends largely on the settlement of the Kashmir dispute with India and a reduction of India's conventional military advantage; about 91 percent of Pakistani elites agreed that Islamabad should sign the NPT were India to do the same: Samina Ahmed, David Cortright, and Amitabh Mattoo, "Public Opinion and Nuclear Options for South Asia," Asian Survey, 1998.
36. The scale of damage that can be inflicted by nuclear-weapons retaliation could, in one kind of security calculus, prevent the initiation of a conventional attack by an otherwise powerful enemy. In that sense, the acquisition of any nuclear-weapons capability has a fundamentally equilibrating effect, if any damage caused by nuclear weapons is deemed unbearable. That other, cheaper, and less technologically sophisticated weapons such as biological and chemical weapons, can have the same effect has earned such weapons the name of "the poor man's nuclear weapons." However, in another kind of security calculus, the existence of nuclear weapons on both sides of a security equation can make conventional warfare more likely as both (rational) actors understand (and trust each other's understandings of) what becomes the warfare threshold (i.e., escalation to nuclear warfare).
37. L. K. Advani, India's home minister, called on Islamabad "to realize the change in the geostrategic situation in the region and the world" created by the Indian tests, particularly with respect to the Kashmir issue (as quoted in the Hindu by William Walker, "International Nuclear Relations after the Indian and Pakistani Tests," International Affairs 74, no. 3 (1998): 505-528. A public-opinion survey conducted among Indian elites (Ahmed, Cortland, and Matoo, note 15) found that the perceived threat from China, which had been officially named as the justification for nuclearization, ranked well below concerns about the Pakistani threat. While the authors attempt to attribute the official position to the specific knowledge about China available to government and military/intelligence specialists, the question of how perceptions are formed about the Pakistani threat (i.e., where the discursive resources for "Pakistani othering" come from) requires more interrogation here.
38. The interpellation of Indians as Hindus requires considerable political labor, both to demarcate who belongs to this "community" and to temper the hierarchies of caste, class, and gender that rend this community. I return to this issue at much greater length later in the article.
39. These issues included the abrogation of article 370 of the Indian constitution, which gives special status to (Muslim-majority in) Kashmir, the promise to build a Ram temple at the disputed site in Ayodhya, where a mosque had been destroyed by Hindu mobs in 1992, and the creation of a uniform civil code to replace the personal codes that govern issues of marriage, divorce, and inheritance among minority religious communities - all controversial, domestic issues that the BJP had politicized and on which it had campaigned; see Ayoob, note 13.
40. See David Campbell, "Writing Security": United States Foreign Policy and the Politics of Identity (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1992); Campbell makes this argument in his analysis of US foreign policy in the Cold War and post-Cold War period.
41. I am not arguing here that this wide scope makes the treaty international in any unproblematic sense, given that many states gave their votes in exchange for aid and that most states that did sign on had no real chance of developing a nuclear capability, peaceful or military. As I will argue later, formal sovereign equality in the global order masks a much more substantive structural and racial hierarchy.
42. Article 9.3: "A nuclear weapon State is one which has manufactured and exploded a nuclear weapon or other nuclear explosive device prior to January 1, 1967."
43. The three other nuclear-weapons-possessing states that emerged from the dissolution of the Soviet Union - Ukraine, Belarus, and Kazakhstan - all transferred their nuclear weapons for dismantlement to Russia, thus leaving Russia as the only nuclear-weapons state that emerged out of the former Soviet Union.
44. These are also the P-5, the Permanent Five with veto power in the Security Council of the United Nations. The question that has arisen recently is whether India's possession of nuclear weapons now makes it a better or worse candidate for this august status (which India has been lobbying for).
45. Strobe Talbott says that the "NPT was explicitly not intended to legitimize those arsenals (of the P-5) indefinitely," but rather was a bargain intended to put a "brake on what would otherwise have been a juggernaut of nuclear proliferation," and in that sense has been largely successful. Strobe Talbott, "Dealing with the Bomb in South Asia," Foreign Affairs 78, no. 2 (1999): 112-113;
46. see also George Perkovich, "Think Again: Nuclear Proliferation," Foreign Policy, no. 112 (1998), who agrees with this assessment of the success of the NPT, even in light of the Indian and Pakistani tests, and thinks it unlikely that this will lead to more proliferation.
47. For a realist argument that the NPT cannot prevent nuclear proliferation (although it makes it harder), since the regime does nothing to address the security imperatives of states, which is the primary motivation for nuclearization, see Bradley A. Thayer, "The Causes of Nuclear Proliferation and the Utility of the Non-proliferation Regime," in Raju G. C. Thomas, ed., The Nuclear Non-Proliferation Regime: Prospects for the 21st Century (New York: St. Martin's, 1998).
48. In this respect, note the strong words of the principal Indian negotiator on the CTBT deliberations in Geneva: "The transfer of nuclear technology, weapons, materials or delivery vehicles to another Nuclear Weapon State is proliferation as much as transferring such technology to a non-Nuclear Weapon State. Improving qualitatively or modernizing existing weapons is also, according to India, proliferation." See Arundhati Ghosh, "Negotiating the CTBT: India's Security Concerns and Nuclear Disarmament," Journal of International Affairs 51, no. 1 (1997): 245. That the term nuclear proliferation conjures up the image of the spread of such weapons to irresponsible terrorist states and groups is telling of the way the term is articulated within official and popular discourse.
49. Justifying India's decision to move from a nuclear-capable to a nuclear-weapons state, Jaswant Singh says that "India could have lived with a nuclear option but without overt weaponization in a world where nuclear weapons had not been formally legitimized" through the unconditional and indefinite extension of the NPT; see Singh, note 13. There is a certain oddity that results from Indian and Pakistani nuclearization now since by the terms of the treaty it is not possible to legally recognize India and Pakistan as NWSs, creating what Walker calls three classes of states: the "legal" 5 NWSs (the P-5), the extralegal 3 NWSs (India, Pakistan, and Israel), and 183 NNWSs; see William Walker, "International Nuclear Relations after the Indian and Pakistani Tests," International Affairs 74, no. 3 (1998): 505-528. In other words, India and Pakistan cannot really sign the treaty as it currently stands unless they are willing to dismantle their nuclear weapons program completely. Given that neither country seems willing to pursue that option, the situation now requires some more creative ways to deal with the issue. There has been some discussion of creating a new category within the treaty to reflect this change. But according to Deputy Secretary of State Strobe Talbott, who was President Clinton's envoy on South Asian proliferation and security issues, "The United States must remain committed to the long-range goal of universal adherence to the NPT.
50. It cannot concede, even by implication, that India and Pakistan have by their tests established themselves as nuclear-weapons states with all the rights and privileges enjoyed by parties to the NPT"; see Strobe Talbott, "Dealing with the Bomb in South Asia," Foreign Affairs 78, no. 2 (1999): 119.
51. Periodic reviews are still held - every two years as stipulated in the treaty. The most recent one was held in New York in May 2000. As useful as these reviews might be, the indefinite extension of the treaty has meant the eradication of any deadline that could be held as a means of exerting pressure to make good on the faith bestowed on NWSs by NNWSs.
52. This process started with the Partial Test-Ban Treaty of 1963 (banning atmospheric testing) which India joined in 1963.
53. Mohammed Ayoob, note 13.
54. It is true for instance that France and China agreed to join the CTBT only after hurriedly conducting a series of nuclear tests very soon after the NPT Review Conference. It is interesting here that the United States's ability to maintain and upgrade its systems in a reliable fashion, despite the ban on explosive testing, was the "selling point" of the treaty within the United States: that was the basis on which the Clinton administration attempted (unsuccessfully) to persuade the Republican members of Congress opposed to the CTBT to ratify it in 1999. Clinton pointed to the existence of the Stockpile Stewardship Program, which not only ensures the safety and reliability of existing stockpiles of nuclear weapons, but also allows the United States to continue to develop and upgrade this stockpile - a program that has been pointed out by others as indicating the insincerity of the United States with regard to arms-control treaties.
55. Indeed, even this adoption of "zero-yield" or "no release of energy" testing may seem progress given the attempt by NWSs to retain some flexibility for low-yield testing in the earlier stages of the negotiations. See Ghosh, note 26.
56. This clause required India to sign the treaty by September 1999 or face the possibility of Iraqi-style U.N.-imposed sanctions; see Malik, note 13: 192. India, Pakistan, and Israel are required to sign and ratify the treaty for it to come into effect. Israel has since signed it. See Ghosh, note 26, for an extended discussion of this issue.
57. Given that forty-one of those countries had already endorsed the draft, Pakistan's signature was conditional on India's endorsement; Israel had indicated its willingness to sign, and North Korea was the remaining "rogue" state that would have to be pressured into signing; see Mohammed Ayoob, note 13.
58. It has also been claimed that the International Monitoring System is able to detect tests of only about 1-kiloton yields; hence, the surveillance technology needed to detect explosive testing at very low yields (between zero yield and one thousand tons) is available to only very few industrially developed states. So while such testing could be detected (and punished) when conducted by NNWSs, it could be expected that any breach of the treaty by, say, the United States might hardly be noticed. See Arundhati Ghosh, "Taming India," Times of India, Feb 26, 1999. Once again, what this points to is the unequally structured terrain of nuclear options within the existing global order.
59. Singh, note 13, p. 48.
60. Raju G. C. Thomas, "Should India Sign the NPT/CTBT?" in Thomas, note 25, p. 285.
61. Malik, note 13: 201.
62. A BJP spokesman in 1993, as quoted in George Perkovich, "Think Again: Nuclear Proliferation," Foreign Policy, no. 112 (fall 1998): 16.
63. Singh, note 13, p. 43.
64. It is important to point out here that there have been realists like Waltz who have been more consistent in their application of the logic of deterrence. See, for instance, Kenneth N. Waltz, "The Spread of Nuclear Weapons: More May be Better," Adelphi Paper No. 171, London: International Institute for Strategic Studies, 1981. Bradley Thayer argues from a realist perspective that the NPT is simply a veil for power politics allowing the great powers to punish violators "in the name of a more felicitous concept, the maintenance of an international norm," while retaining their own legal access to nuclear weapons; see Thayer, note 25, p. 103.
65. As quoted in Ghosh, note 26: 249.
66. I am not arguing that the deterrence argument is compelling in itself, but that the persuasive force of its logic requires a certain commitment to universal human rationality, which when it comes to nuclear proliferation is often found wanting.
67. Pratap Bhanu Mehta, "India: The Politics of Self-Esteem," Current His-tory (December 1998): 405.
68. Referring to the constructions of those undeterrable "people(s) with nothing to lose" in making the case for a national missile defense system in the United States, Marshall Beier points to the image of the savage that such constructions evoke - such "irrationality" making them "not quite human for lacking a fully developed awareness of self." See Marshall Beier, "Postcards from the Outskirts of Security: Defence Professionals, Semiotics, and the NMD Initiative," Canadian Foreign Policy 8, no. 2 (2001): 39-49, at 46.
69. The argument is sometimes made that the possession of nuclear weapons by themselves has little to do with international hierarchy. Japan and Germany are sometimes held up as examples of nonnuclear powers with sig-nificant clout in international relations (and as the most likely candidates in a reconstituted Security Council), and Russia is offered as an example of a nuclear power with dwindling international influence. Partha Chatterjee even argues that nuclear proliferation in South Asia will in fact strengthen, not weaken, international hierarchy, as the United States and other NWSs, rec-ognizing the ineffectiveness of sanctions, feel compelled to intervene directly to coerce India and Pakistan into signing the NPT and the CTBT; see Partha Chatterjee, "How We Loved the Bomb and Later Rued It," Economic and Political Weekly, June 13, 1998, p. 1441. While I agree that the structuring of international hierarchy runs much deeper than the simple possession of nuclear weapons, and also agree that India's and Pakistan's possession of these weapons does little to challenge the structural bases of such hierarchy, I still believe that it is important to draw attention to the fact that the attempt by NWSs to retain control over such weapons, if need be by direct political intervention, comes from more than simply a benign interest in creating the conditions of peace.
70. Sumit Sarkar attributes the ability of the BJP to generate enthusiasm for its decision to the absence, within India, of a peace movement that could have created the appropriate awareness of the horrors of nuclear war. This absence, Sarkar points out, has itself been a product of the antinuclear and prodisarmament position taken by India, even in official discourse and practice: Sarkar, note 9. It is important to point out here that such a peace movement has now emerged within both India and Pakistan, movements that are increasingly making connections with those in the First World.
71. An opinion poll conducted by India Today-MARG in twelve major Indian cities found that while at least 35 percent of the population expected India to become more unpopular internationally as a result of the tests, and 49 percent expected India's relations with the United States to worsen, about 92 percent of the population now felt more proud to be Indian. It is also interesting here that about 64 percent of the population did not see the test as a political move by the BJP; only 30 percent did see it as that: India Today, May 25, 1998. I will argue later that this symbol indeed produces this constituency as a particular kind of postcolonial entity.
72. Chatterjee, note 46.
73. See Sarkar, note 9, p. 1727.
74. Ibid., p. 1727.
75. Singh, note 13, pp. 41-42.
76. As Mohammed Ayoob, note 13, argues, the Indian elite as well as the Indian political public see the Indian state as the legitimate manager of South Asian politics, similar to the US perception of its own role with respect to the Americas - and in that sees the so-called "Indira Doctrine" of 1983 and the more recent "Gujral Doctrine" as analogous to the "Monroe Doctrine." However, in all fairness to Jaswant Singh, when asked "if countries like Iraq, Iran were to conduct tests, would you deny them their right to test?" he said, "No, this is the principle. Do you deny that nations on this earth have the right to equal and legitimate security?" Quoted in Bidwai and Vanaik, note 4, p. 256.
77. As quoted in Ayoob, note 13.
78. See Chatterjee, note 46.
79. In that sense, South Africa, as the only country in the world to have dismantled completely its nuclear-weapons program, may be said to have shown a serious commitment to "nonnuclear democracy." The reports that the motivation for this dismantling was the fear of the control of such weapons in the hands of the majority-black government should surely give us pause. South African president F. W. De Klerk decided in secret to get rid of his country's nuclear weapons stockpile and to sign the NPT before the South African public and parliament had any knowledge of such weapons; see De Klerk, "Think Again: Nuclear Proliferation," Foreign Policy, no. 112 (1998). That nuclear disarmament in this context was motivated by apartheid-induced racial anxieties is surely ridden with ironies here.
80. Bidwai and Vanaik, note 4, esp. chap. 6, "Indefensible Arms: The Ethics of War and Nuclear Weapons." Bidwai and Vanaik make this argument in the context of the morality of nuclear weapons; they make the case that it is not only the use of nuclear weapons but even the threat of their use through the doctrine of deterrence (the credibility for which requires the intention to use as well as the physical capacity to use) is immoral. Hence, the very possession or manufacture of such weapons would also thereby be immoral.
81. Bidwai and Vanaik, note 4, p. 47.
82. Chatterjee, note 46.
83. Abraham, note 10: 321-339. For a discussion of the exclusionary and specialized (and gendered) language and discourse of technostrategic communities that is both seductive in its power and inhibiting of democratic participation, see Cohn, note 11: 687-718.
84. Here I am drawing on Benedict Anderson's conceptualization of the nation as an imagined community: Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism (London: Verso, 1983).
85. I get this point from Gyanendra Pandey, "Which of Us Are Hindus?" in Gyanendra Pandey, ed., Hindus and Others: The Question of Identity in India Today (New Delhi: Viking-Penguin, 1993). I also found this to be the case from my own survey of BJP documents that reveals the use of vanvasis and girijans (another word for forest dwellers) rather than adivasis. One of the primary RSS organizations working among the tribal and hill people is the Adivasi Kalyan (Well-Being) Ashram.
86. Babar was the first Mughal emperor in the Indian subcontinent.
87. As Pandey, note 62, points out, this occurs despite the contradictory claim also made that most Muslims in India are lower-caste, innocent Hindus forcibly converted by Muslims. For example, Rajendra Singh, the head of RSS, said that "ninety-eight per cent of the Muslims in Indian are converts": see the interview in Yubaraj Ghimre, "In the Limelight, Again," in India Today, April 30, 1994, p. 24.
88. See Romila Thapar, "Communalism and the Historical Legacy: Some Facets," in K. N. Panikkar, ed., Communalism in India: History, Politics, and Culture (New Delhi: Manohar, 1991);
89. Thapar, "The Politics of Religious Communities," Seminar, no. 365, January 1990;
90. Thapar, "Imagined Religious Communities? Ancient History and the Modern Search for a Hindu Identity," in Modern Asian Studies 23, no. 2 (1989);
91. and Thapar, "Syndicated Moksha," Seminar, no. 313 (September 1985).
92. For a critique of Thapar's work, see Brian K. Smith, "Re-envisioning Hinduism and Evaluating the Hindutva Movement," in Religion 26 (1996): 119-128. Smith argues that it is this claim of the amorphousness of Hinduism and the difficulties in defining it that have made possible the Hindutva movement's chauvinism and exclusiveness under the guise of the impossibility of such chauvinism and exclusivism in Hinduism.
93. In a sympathetic response to Smith, Ninian Smart argues that regardless of the difficulties of defining Hinduism, and even if one can claim that there was no such thing as Hinduism, one needs to confront the realities of modern constructions of Hinduism that makes Hindutva possible; see Ninian Smart, "Response to Brian K. Smith: Re-envisioning Hinduism," Religion 26 (1996): 137-140.
94. See Kancha Ilaih, Why I Am Not a Hindu: A Sudra Critique of Hindutva Philosophy, Culture, and Political Economy (Calcutta: Samya [an imprint of Bhatkal and Sen], 1996) for an excellent critique of Brahminical Hindutva from a Dalit perspective. Ilaih rejects assimilation into the Hindu fold despite an abundance of messages that claim sudras as part of the Hindu order, finding more commonality in his experiences with Muslims and Christians than with upper-caste Brahmins and Baniyas.
95. There is also a regional aspect to this Hindu identity. Some of the early Hindu nationalists (such as Dayanand Saraswati) did not recognize that India south of the Vindhyas could also be drawn into the Arya movement. See Pandey, note 62. Even now, the success of the BJP is most prominent in the North Indian "Hindi heartland," even though the party has begun to make some inroads in South India. Regional political parties from the South, such as the DMK and the TDP, have always been somewhat suspicious of the BJP's stand on the language issue - of imposing Hindi. In West Bengal, the party has made a concerted attempt to incorporate Bengali national leaders like Shyama Prasad Mukherjee and even Subhas Chandra Bose more explicitly into the campaign, albeit with only limited success. This North Indian focus of the party is also evident in the use of Ram (who is worshipped mostly in northern India) as the icon of Hindu nationalism.
96. India Today, September 15, 1990.
97. The decision by the V. P. Singh government to implement the Mandal Commission recommendations greatly enhanced the appeal of Hindutva among upper-caste and middle-class Hindu groups. The government-sponsored Mandal Commission report, submitted in 1980, recommended that 27 percent of central-government jobs and government-supported higher-educational seats be reserved for the 52 percent of Hindus that were classified as Other Backward Classes (OBCs), thus extending reservations from those assigned for Scheduled Castes (15 percent) and Scheduled Tribes (7.5 percent) and bringing the figure close to 50 percent. The decision to implement the recommendations in August 1990 generated significant and quite violent protests (that included some dramatic headline-grabbing self-immolations) in urban North India by upper-caste students from the middle and lower-middle classes: L. K. Advani, "Basis of Our Nationalism Is Our Culture and Heritage," presidential Address delivered at the BJP National Council Session, June 10-12, 1994,
98. Vadodra, Gujarat, as reproduced in BJP Today, June 16-30, 1994, p. 12. The assertion sometimes made in Hindu nationalist camps that caste is an anachronism that is being used instrumentally for political gains by other political parties is clearly contradicted by Kanchi Ilaih's excellent and extensive documentation of how caste hierarchy structures every aspect of Indian society; see Ilaih, note 66.
99. See "Minister Kesari [sic] asks Dalits to renounce Hinduism," in BJP Today, August 16-31, 1995, p. 16;
100. and Sudheendra Kulkarni, "Between Ram and Kanshi Ram, History Turns a New Leaf," in BJP Today, July 1-15, 1995, pp. 12-14.
101. See T. N. Madan, "The Double-Edged Sword: Fundamentalism and the Sikh Religious Tradition," in Martin E. Marty and R. Scott Appleby, Fundamentalisms Observed (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1994).
102. Veer Savarkar was one of the first to articulate the idea of Hindutva that the BJP now uses, and M. S. Golwalkar is regarded as having articulated the ideology of the RSS. Savarkar defined Hindus as a nation despite their linguistic, social, and regional differences, the three main components of the Hindu nation being geographical unity, racial features, and a common inherited culture. See Veer Savarkar, Hindutva: Who Is a Hindu? (Bombay: Veer Savarkar Prakashan, 1969).
103. Golwalkar uses five criteria to define the nation: geographical unity, race, religion, culture, and language; see M. S. Golwalkar, We, Or Our Nationhood Defined (Nagpur: Bharat Prakashan, 1939).
104. For the influence of European ideas of race, including Eugenic ideas of German fascism, on Savarkar and Golwalkar (as well as other early Hindu nationalists), see Christophe Jaffrelot, "The Ideas of the Hindu Race in the Writings of Hindu Nationalist Idealogues in the 1920s and 1930s: A Concept Between Two Cultures," in Peter Robb, ed., The Concept of Race in South Asia (New Delhi: Oxford UP, 1995).
105. Savarkar and Golwalkar were certainly not the first to articulate a notion of the Hindu race; see, for example, Har Bilas Sarda, Hindu Superiority: An Attempt to Determine the Position of the Hindu Race in the Scale of Nations (Ajmer: Rajputana Printing Works, 1906). More recently, Shiv Sena leader Bal Thackeray, a self-professed admirer of Hitler, has compared Muslims in India to Jews in Nazi Germany, and BJP leader Malkani in a television interview stated his belief that many Indians admired Hitler.
106. See Tapan Raychaudhuri, "Shadows of the Swastika: Historical Reflections on the Politics of Hindu Communalism," Contention 4, no. 2 (1995): 141-162.
107. Hindus are not merely the citizens of the Indian state because they are united not only by the bonds of love they bear to a common motherland but also by the bonds of a common blood. . . . All Hindus claim to have in their veins the blood of the mighty race incorporated with and descended from the Vedic fathers. V. D. Savarkar, note 72, pp. 84-85. Yet the idea of genetic racial purity is rejected by Savarkar. His historical account of the formation of the "Hindu people" assumes that Aryans and foreigners intermingled when the former entered India, and he calls on foreigners who aspire to become Hindus to marry Hindus, have Hindu children, assimilate into Hindu culture, and so on. This is also true of the definition in Golwalkar (note 72), where the biological factor is even more underplayed.
108. Savarkar, note 72, pp. 115-116.
109. Golwalkar, note 72, p. 21.
110. This leads Brenda Crossman and Ratna Kapur to conclude that "despite the emphasis on racial differences, it was the difference of religion that remained as a constituting movement of the oppositional identities," so that even though contemporary Hindu nationalist discourse still carries some "traces" of the "racial construction of Hindus," the emphasis clearly is on religion. See Cossman and Kapur, "Secularism: Bench-Marked by Hindu Right," in Economic and Political Weekly, Sept 21, 1996, pp. 2617-2619. However, I believe that this distinction between religion and race can often be somewhat tenuous. The point is that religious (and cultural) differences can be "racialized." Jaffrelot calls it a "special kind of racism" that borrows from the hierarchical principles of "Indian traditional xenology"; see Jaffrelot, note 73, p.
111. Hence, while in this early Hindu nationalist discourse, the category of race is explicitly used in the process of racialization, the contemporary discourse, as I will point out below, continues to racialite, albeit with a much more muted explicit invocation of race. It is interesting to see that at one point, "possessing" race in Savarkar's discourse is considered good, since "Mohammedans are no race nor are the Christians. They are a religious unit, yet neither a racial nor a national one. But we Hindus, if possible, are all the three put together, and live under our ancient and common roof"; see Savarkar, note 72, p. 134. But this is not a consistent position: Muslims (and Christians) are often identified as "races" in much of the early Hindu nationalist discourse.
112. Purshottam Agarwal, "Surat, Savarkar, and Draupadi: Legitimizing Rape as a Political Weapon," in Tanika Sarkar and Urvashi Butalia, eds., Women and Right-Wing Movements: Indian Experiences (New Delhi/London: Kali for Women/Zed, 1995).
113. Quoted in Saba Naqvi Bhaumik, Toothless Wonder," India Today, December 15, 1997; p. 15.
114. This is a takeoff on the well-known Indian family-planning slogan "Hum Do, Hamre Do" ("We are two, and we have two children"), urging Indians to restrict the size of their families.
115. The Indian defense budget for the year 2000 showed the biggest percentage increase since the 1964 Sino-Indian war.
116. In addition to the prominent work of Edward Said, John Esposito and James Piscatori have been two of the most articulate critics of this tendency in the Western academy; see John L. Esposito, The Islamic Threat: Myth or Reality? (New York: Oxford UP, 1992);
117. and James P. Piscatori, Islam in a World of Nation States (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1986).
118. Esposito, note 82, p. 182.
119. Atal Behari Vajpayee, Secularism: The Indian Concept, the Dr. Rajendra Prasad Lecture 1992, organized by All-India Radio, December 2 and 3, 1992, published as Bharatiyajanata Party Publication No. 124 (New Delhi: 1992); p. 28 (the italics are mine).
120. Hence, in the second sentence following my italics in the above Vajpayee quote on "keeping a watchful eye on the developments in neighbouring . . . countries," the implicit reference is primarily to Pakistan and Bangladesh.
121. "Our Foreign Policy Agenda for the Future," Foreign Policy and Resolutions (New Delhi: Bharatiyajanata Party Publication No. E/17/95, 1995), p. 5 (the italics are mine).
122. BJP Today [n.a.], December 16-31, 1994, pp. 25-26.
123. BJP on Kashmir (New Delhi: BJP Publication E/13/95, 1995), p. 36 (the italics are mine).
124. BJP on Kashmir ( Ibid., pp. 37. In particular, a relationship with Israel, "which has had a long experience of fighting fundamentalism and terrorism," is strongly recommended on this score. Might it be well here to have a brief update - given the mixed reception Colin Powell received recently in New Delhi (said to be because of the Kashmir complication)?
125. Simon Dalby, "Contesting and Essential Concept: Reading the Dilemmas in Contemporary Security Discourse," in Krause and Williams, eds., note 2, p. 10.
126. David Mutimer, "Reimagining Security: The Metaphors of Proliferation," in Krause and Williams, eds., note 2, p. 191.
127. Mutimer, Reimagining Security: The Metaphors of Proliferation ibid., pp. 211-212.
128. The term new racisms has been used by Martin Barker in The New Racism (London: Junction Books, 1981).
129. Others who have highlighted the centrality of culturalist forms of racism in the contemporary period include Paul Gilroy, There Ain't No Black in the Union Jack (London: Hutchinson, 1987);
130. and David Goldberg, introduction to David Goldberg, ed., The Anatomy of Racism (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1990),
131. and "The Social Formation of Racist Discourse," ibid.
132. James Blaut, as quoted in Peter Jackson and Jan Penrose, eds., Constructions of Race, Place, and Nation (London: UCL Press, 1993), p. 10.
133. Racialization does not necessarily lead to racism, but it can also be a means for struggle and resistance by subordinated groups, as for instance in anticolonial struggles or the Black Power movement in the United States in the 1960s.
134. Doty, note 1, p. 169.
135. Dalby, note 90.