"No problems, we have the Bomb"

Submitted by Anon on 30 June, 1998 - 4:06

Trade unions and left-wing parties in both India and Pakistan have condemned the two countries’ nuclear weapon tests. India carried out tests on 11 and 13 May; Pakistan tested weapons on 27 and 31 May, and has declared a state of emergency.

Demonstrators in New Delhi on 29 May held placards declaring, sarcastically: “No food, no electricity, no jobs, no problems, we have the Bomb.” The Pakistan Trade Union Federation has called for “a nuclear-weapons-free subcontinent,” and declared: “We support the All India Democratic Women’s Association and forty-three other mass organisations that demanded a nuclear-weapons-free world during their protest march on 16 May.”

But bourgeois politicians in both countries are war-mongering to bolster their support. While Indian prime minister A B Vajpayee declares, for diplomatic consumption, that there is “no tension” in the Indian subcontinent, one of his ministers, Madan Lal Khurana, says that India is “prepared” for a fourth war with Pakistan (the previous wars were in 1947, 1965 and 1971).

The VHP, a Hindu-chauvinist group which acts as an outrider to the ruling BJP party, has called for a “short war” with Pakistan. And Pakistan’s former prime minister, Benazir Bhutto, told the Los Angeles Times that Pakistan should make a “pre-emptive military strike” against India.

In India, the ex-Stalinist opposition parties, the Communist Party of India and the Communist Party (Marxist), have said that the nuclear tests are a reckless gambit to help a “rickety” coalition government, and they are probably right. The BJP is a Hindu chauvinist party which became a major India-wide political force in the late 1980s. The decay and splintering of the Congress Party which led India’s independence movement and governed the country for its first 30 years — and the decline of the ex-Stalinist parties — has made the BJP a candidate for power in a federal parliament now full of small regional parties.

Yet the BJP still got only 25.4% of the poll in India’s elections this March, marginally behind Congress’s 25.7%. (The CPM got 5.2%, the CPI 1.7%, and two other left parties, the BSP and RSP, 4.7% and 0.6%. In 1991 the CPM got 6.2% and the CPI 2.5%.) The BJP can govern only in uneasily-contrived coalition with smaller parties. In addition, it has to deal with the impact on India of the Asian economic crisis; and, despite its populism, the BJP is mainly a party of better-off, upper-caste Hindus in the cities of northern India. In vast areas of the country it has very little base.

Its economic policy is free-market: although, responding to the Asian crisis, it has increased tariffs, it has also continued the drive by Indian governments of all colours since 1985 to privatise and open the economy to foreign investment. In India, 130m people have no access to basic health facilities, 226m have no safe drinking water, 70 per cent of the country lacks basic sanitation, and nearly half the population is illiterate. More than 50 per cent of India’s under-fives are malnourished, and almost 40 per cent of girls do not attend school. The BJP cannot even make plausible gestures towards addressing these issues.

The sort of anti-Muslim demagogy that the BJP uses to win support can be seen in India’s foremost industrial city, Mumbai, governed by another Hindu-chauvinist group, the Shiv Sena. There, discos must close early. All rock groups must submit the lyrics of their songs to the government for permission before performing them.

Kissing on stage is illegal. Pakistanis must not perform under any circumstances (which is a coded way of saying that Indian Muslims, too, had better keep out of sight). A Muslim painter recently had his house ransacked on the grounds that he had painted a nude twenty years ago.

The BJP, running a coalition government, fortunately has to soft-pedal such chauvinism. It says that its prime campaigning issue for many years — the construction of a Hindu temple at Ayodhya, on the site when an ancient Muslim mosque was ripped down by a mob in December 1992, with BJP leaders standing by to applaud — is now on hold, though opposition parties say that construction plans are going ahead secretly. The nuclear weapon tests meet its need for a cheap-and-dirty political stunt. They are Vajpayee’s “Falklands War”, though he probably still hopes to get through without an actual war.

Vajpayee has tried to justify himself by denouncing the hypocrisy of the nuclear powers — the US, Britain, France, China, etc. True, nuclear weapons in the hands of the USA are no less deadly than in those of the Indian government, and the USA has actually used nuclear weapons — and more than once seriously threatened to use them again — as no other government has. But the proper conclusion is not to excuse Vajpayee, but to realise that the cause of nuclear disarmament is no less urgent for the future of humanity today than it was at the height of the Cold War.

Colin Foster

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