Coming Out From Gandhi’s Shadow

With a series of five nuclear tests, India finally has removed the specter of Mohandas K. Gandhi, which has been haunting India’s modernizing elites. The political party over which Prime Minister Atal Behari Vajpayee presides draws some of its membership from political associations that were implicated in Gandhi’s assassination 50 years ago and which have been the ardent champions of Hindu ascendancy. The Indian nation-state no longer will live in consummate fear of Gandhi’s critiques of modernity, big science, instrumental rationality, development, war and masculinity.

While economists, foreign policy experts and defense specialists will continue to debate the reasons that led India to assume nuclear testing at this particular juncture, the cost to India of economic sanctions, the possible escalation of an arms race, the palpable failures of U.S. foreign policy and intelligence gathering and the geopolitical consequences of South Asia’s nuclearization, there are other, more interesting and poignant, considerations to which we should be attentive.

During the height of the Cold War, Jawaharlal Nehru attempted to place India in a “third camp” and place it at the helm of the leadership of the nonaligned movement. This was even, in some measure, a continuation of Gandhi’s policy of repudiating realpolitik. The nonaligned movement, however, would become increasingly irrelevant, until the fall of the Soviet Union rendered it obsolete, and some commentators have consequently interpreted the nuclear tests as India’s cry for attention. President Clinton appeared to have echoed this view when he noted that India, perhaps lacking in self-esteem, thought itself “underappreciated” as a world power.

The history of India’s nuclear tests extends back, in a manner of speaking, to the early days of India under colonial rule. The British were apt to describe Indians as an “effeminate” people, leading lives of indolence and womanly softness; following the rebellion of 1857-58, the entire country was divided between “martial” and “nonmartial” races. One response was to embrace a certain kind of hyper-masculinity, which would enable Indians to be construed as a people just as “manly” as the British. Indians have never been able to live down the taunt of “effeminacy,” and those who know of the cultural nuances of South Asian history are aware that some Indians imagine Pakistani Muslims as a meat-eating, virile, robust and militaristic people. It is a telling fact that upon hearing of the tests, Bal Thackeray, the chauvinist leader of the militantly Hindu Shiv Sena Party who is an open admirer of Hitler, said, “We have to prove that we are not eunuchs.”

By signaling its departure from the body of world opinion, India has sought to arrive on the world stage. It is the one resounding cruelty of our times that no nation-state that refuses to partake in realpolitik and the brutal zero-sum politics of our times can receive much of a hearing. The recent nuclear tests may represent the shallow triumph of India as a nation-state, but they signify the saddening defeat of India as a civilization. This is an irony made all the more bitter by the posturing in which Vajpayee’s Bharatiya Janata Party engages as the vanguard of “Hindu civilization.”

True bravery and courage consist, not in an empty renunciation of what is not possible, but in forsaking the military force that one has at one’s command. Thus might what Gandhi called “nonviolence of the weak,” which is no nonviolence at all, be transformed into “nonviolence of the strong,” and from India’s descent into nuclear madness might some good emerge.