Beyond the bomb

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.”

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