• What K. Subrahmanyam advocates — that India should join the call given by Henry Kissinger, George Schulz et al and ‘regain its earlier reputation as a champion of a nuclear weapon-free world’ at the forthcoming Norway conference on non-proliferation — is not only unrealistic; it smacks of deep hypocrisy. (‘When hawks turn moral’, IE January 21). It is a fact — and there’s nothing to be apologetic about it — that India began its quest for N-weapons soon after China went nuclear in 1964.

So let us shed the notion that India ever sat on high moral ground on the issue of a world free of nuclear weapons. It is also a fact that Pakistan and China went nuclear before India; and so long as India has these countries as neighbours, we will need our nuclear deterrent.

Certainly the world would be a wonderful place without N-weapons; but it is condemned to live for at least 100,000 years with the thousands of tonnes of weapons-grade uranium and plutonium created during the Cold War — ironically, the era when Kissinger and Schulz were the most ardent advocates of the US nuclear weapons programme!

There is no morality in defence strategy, nuclear or non-nuclear. There is only supreme national interest, something Subrahmanyam himself has advocated with admirable persistence through the decades.

— R.P. Subramanian

Delhi

Our rural toil

• With reference to your series ‘Shadow over showpiece’, regarding CAG’s draft report on the performance of the rural employment scheme (NREG) and the Union Rural Development Minister Raghuvansh Prasad Singh’s warning to state government officials (IE, January 18), one is tempted to pose the riddle: Are we poor because we are corrupt or are we corrupt because we are poor? It is time we realised that we suffer from illusions about bringing about changes in rural India, given that our feudal bureaucracy is unlikely to loosen its grip on its vested interests.

... contd.