There was a time when the Indian government was part of that charming but self-righteous club of small states like Sweden, New Zealand and Ireland campaigning for many a lost cause. We would go before the International Court of Justice and insist that nuclear weapons must be declared “illegal”. Whatever that meant.

We prided ourselves on saying no to port calls from the naval vessels of the great powers. Although our activism had no impact on the real world, our diplomats were happy to win the disarmament beauty contests in Geneva. Our security establishment and our anti-nuclear activists seemed to be on the same page; both felt good about saying the honourable thing about disarmament.

One would have thought our atomic innocence ended when New Delhi defied the world and declared itself a nuclear weapon power in May 1998. While the Indian government is learning to forget some of the old propaganda, the word has not filtered down to the CPM, the Telugu Desam, the AIADMK and many other political parties.

Put simply, the outrage of these parties at the visit of the USS Nimitz can partly be attributed to an enduring national trait — nuclear hypocrisy. If the protesters are seriously opposed to nuclear weapons they should be asking the Indian government to undertake unilateral disarmament. (At least that is what the British movement for disarmament does. Try and practise what you preach to others.) If our anti-nuclear activists are concerned about nuclear powered warships, they should be pressuring New Delhi to scrap the plans to develop an atomic powered submarine.

Recall the national fury when the then external affairs minister, Jaswant Singh, welcomed US President George W. Bush’s controversial plans to develop the missile defence in May 2001. Six years later when our own Defence Research and Development Organisation announced its first missile test in November 2006, there was not a whimper of protest from any political party or a peace group.

Truth be told, New Delhi’s attitudes towards a range of nuclear issues have evolved since May 1998. And rightly too. The problem has been the lack of an orderly transition within the government. In oral cultures like ours, once the mantra is memorised, it is rather hard to replace it with another.

India is not just a nuclear weapon power, but it is also a naval power of some consequence. The Nimitz hypocrisy looks a lot worse when you see it in the context of India’s new naval activism in the Indian Ocean. In the summer of 2005, India sent its aircraft carrier on one of its rare visits to foreign shores. It visited Malaysia, Indonesia and Singapore.

Earlier this summer, a large Indian naval contingent was operating far from our shores and exercising with many Southeast Asian countries, the US, Japan, China and Russia. Last summer when the Indian navy was ordered to evacuate

Indian citizens from war-torn Lebanon, India got the badly needed assistance from the US warships in the Mediterranean. India in turn extended the favour to Nepal and Sri Lanka by picking up their citizens stranded in Lebanon.

The maritime universe does not lend itself to the simple verities of the Left protesters against the Nimitz. In the post-Cold War world, navies around the world highly value and actively seek greater cooperation with one another. As one of the world’s leading maritime nations, there is no reason for India to deny itself the benefits of international naval cooperation.

There was a time, though, from the mid-1960s until the mid-1980s when Indian governments in their wisdom shut our military establishment from all contact with their professional counterparts around the world. Indian armed forces would not even exercise with the military of our best friend, the Soviet Union.

In that era of military isolationism, New Delhi often demanded that all great power navies should withdraw from the Indian Ocean. While we felt pious about the Zone of Peace, our neighbours saw it as a devious design to establish our own hegemony over the Indian Ocean. Some of them turned the slogan against us. Kathmandu, for example, used to ask New Delhi to support Nepal as a “zone of peace”. For Nepal, it was a way of playing the China card against India.

It was also the time when India argued that any country which offered bases to great powers was not eligible for membership of the Non-Aligned Movement. In a fascinating reversal, the speculation is now all about China and India trying to acquire facilities of various kinds in the Indian Ocean, especially in the small island states.

By itself, hypocrisy is harmless. And the greater the power, the more brazen the simultaneous emphasis on morality and the naked pursuit of self-interest. Hypocrisy, however, is a problem when it becomes ingrained in a nation’s strategic culture and stops it from adapting to changed circumstances.

For many a generation, the Indian establishment desperately sought to prevent outsiders from intruding on our sovereign space. As a nuclear weapon power with a trillion dollar economy, India now begins to impinge on the rest of the world. In the past India was a mere victim of an international order over which it had no control. What India now needs is a national security mindset that corresponds with its emergence as a system-shaping power.

The writer is a professor at the Rajaratnam School of International Studies, Nanyang Technological University, Singapore