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Today is the tenth anniversary of India becoming a nuclear weapons power. Remember the din after May 11, 1998? The world condemned us. At home many Indians attacked the Bharatiya Janata Party government for the tests and our famous writer, Arundhati Roy, renounced her Indian citizenship in protest. But went ahead shortly after to accept the Booker prize from another nuclear country. Pakistan was at its most aggressive in the immediate aftermath of Pokharan II. Then it went ahead and brought its own bombs out of the basement. If all that our tests achieved was to bring Pakistan’s sneaky, subterranean nuclear programme into the open it would have been enough.

I am among those who believes that Atal Bihari Vajpayee did the right thing by ordering those underground tests. It is my view that if Pokharan II had not happened, Pakistan’s nuclear exports to Islamist nutcases like Osama bin Laden would never have come out in the open. It is too awful to think what 9/11 would have been if Dr A.Q. Khan had succeeded in supplying Al Qaeda with the bomb. Anyone who doubts that Pakistan’s nuclear hero was in the midst of negotiating with Osama must read a book called Deception by Adrian Levy and Catherine Scott-Clark. These two American journalists have exposed not just Pakistani nuclear subterfuge but America’s complicity in allowing Pakistan to build its bomb.

What has happened has happened. The world is what it is. And, this is not a piece about nuclear duplicity. The reason why I draw attention to the anniversary of Pokharan II is to point out that if India is rich enough to build nuclear bombs, we should be rich enough to feed our children and provide them with their most basic needs like healthcare and education. According to an international survey published days before our proud nuclear anniversary, 53 per cent of Indian children have no access to basic healthcare, which means they are three times more likely to die before the age of five than children in developed countries. The report called ‘State of the World’s Mothers’ brought out by Save the Children also tells us that the Indian girl child is much more likely to die than the boy child.

The report says, “India has the world’s largest gender survival gap. While India has cut its overall child mortality rate by 34 per cent since 1990, the survival gap between girls and boys has widened.”

It would not be this way if we could shame our political class into acknowledging that a country that can afford nuclear bombs has to be a country that looks after its children. No government has shown much concern but few have shown as much lack of basic compassion as the UPA (United Progressive Alliance) government of Dr Manmohan Singh. He gives us a health minister who is more concerned about banning smoking and drinking in the movies than about the real life health of our children. He gives us a minister in charge of social welfare who was nearly persuaded by the biscuit lobby to replace the midday meal schoolchildren get with biscuits. In addition we have a minister with the awesome responsibility of rectifying our hopeless education system who has spent his tenure in office fighting for mythical caste quotas.

The prime minister and Sonia Gandhi constantly speak of the aam aadmi as if he were their personal responsibility. It’s time they explained why they did so little. There have been grand gestures and grandiose plans. Farmers loans worth Rs 64 crore were waived in the last budget and the National Rural Employment Guarantee Scheme has been extended to cover every district in the country. Why? When the government’s own reports indicate that the scheme leaks like a sieve and its benefits are dodgy at best. Imagine if the thousands of crores we are spending on such schemes were spent on ensuring that no Indian child went without basic healthcare and nutrition and no Indian child lacked access to basic education.

This should not be an impossible goal for a country that can afford nuclear weapons. If you talk to those who know, you learn that it is not about money. We have more than enough money to build the schools and hospitals we need. Anyone will tell you this. The problem is that we have a political class that is only interested in the access of their own children to healthcare and education and a bureaucratic class that seems totally without compassion. Things will change when the aam aadmi gets a stronger voice, but that is a long way away. So despite our vaunted economic boom, we have Bharat Mata illiterate, diseased and in rags but with a nuclear bomb in her arms. Is this something to celebrate?

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