June 22, 1998

By-elections make it clear the ordinary voter is left cold by Pokhran II.

Mani Shankar Aiyar

There is an innate wisdom to the Indian voter which transports him above and beyond the pedantry of those who massage our media. While editorials have been telling us that India after Pokhran II is a colossus bestriding the world, the Indian voter has just informed the Government that he is not impressed.

The common or garden voter -- repository of our sovereignty -- views the post-Pokhran BJP as no more than a Tees Maar Khan, an empty boaster who kills 30 flies and struts around claiming he is the "Slayer of Thirty". Hence the drubbing the BJP received in the by-elections spread across the country just three weeks after the fireworks in the Rajasthan desert.

The voter knows, even if fellow-columnists and seminarists do not, that in the month since Pokhran II, India has been made more insecure and isolated than in decades. We don't have a bomb, we have bombast.

One, the voter knows that while Pakistan certainly has to reckon with us as a nuclear weapons power, just a month after Pokhran II huge swathes of our country are within range of Pakistani nuclear-tipped missiles. The voter wants to know who put us in this pretty pickle. Two, the voter asks, did you not know when you exploded your five patakas that the Pakis would explode five of their own and, indeed, go on to six? If you did, why did you not warn us? And if you did not know, why not?

Three, queries the voter, you told us the Pakis did not have the brains to make a bomb. You said everything they have -- including Nawaz Sharif's shaving blades -- are imported. They have so little uranium, you said, if they tested they would not have the material to follow up with a bomb. Now, they've tested six and say they'll nuke. Did you think of this before celebrating Diwali on Buddha Poornima?

Four, the voter demands, if you did not know Pakistan would be in possession of nuclear weapons before the next full moon rose on ours, why did one of your more big-mouthed ministers say we would thrash the Pakis in the fourth round, they only had to name the time and place? Oh, you denied that, did you? Then tell us, are we or are we not itching for a fourth war? What! You do not want war, you want peace? And you think the best way to get peace is to get ourselves a bomb? And you think the second best way to peace is for the Pakis to also get theirs? Are you nuts? Or are we?

Five, the bewildered voter asks, why did you say we need the bomb when the defence minister says it is not to be used? Especially when the home minister believes that with the bomb we will be able to stop the Pakis from infiltrating mercenaries into Kashmir and, if they did, chase them in hot pursuit all the way into POK? Why then when Farooq Abdullah threatens to nuke the Pakistanis does Atal Bihari Vajpayee rush in to say we have no such silly thought in our saffron heads? Or that we have no such saffron thought in our silly heads?

Six, asks the by now confused voter, why does the prime minister ask the Pakistanis to forget the past? Since the first general elections of 1952, Vajpayee has been asking for our vote to avenge the invasion of Muhammad Bin Qasim in 712. Does he want us to forget that past now? Or does he mean Pakistan should remember only the glorious past of our one and only brahmastra -- all of 17 lovely days from May 11 to Chagai?

Seven, says the voter now in deep depression, if we needed to overawe the Pakistanis with our N-weapons to make them talk sense, how is it they dare dismiss our humble plea to talk? And how does that wretched Gohar Ayub Khan have the gall to say he won't talk to us unless the UN or the Japanese or the Hottentots sit in on the conversation? After all, the Pakis were talking to us one-on-one before we had the bomb. Why not now? Oh, because we have become weaker -- since we have become stronger?

The voter also asks another set of questions. If after the bomb we have become a power respected the world over, why is the US abusing us like it has never abused us before, no, not even in the heyday of V.K. Krishna Menon? How is it that the Chinese who have all these years been so discreet on Kashmir are chairing with such satisfaction a P-5 meeting that for the first time ever rakes up Kashmir? Or that Russia which once vetoed any Security Council resolution on Kashmir now goes along with the strongest reproof ever given to a member-state hitherto in good standing?

Can you be sure that these P-5, G-8, Security Council sessions are not the prelude to imposing a UN mandate on Kashmir? And please tell us, how is it we did not get into this mess before the bomb? How only thereafter?

The questions go on. If now that we really are such a great world power, how come we are abjectly begging to accede to the CTBT when, without nuclear weapons, we told the world where it could stuff its fissile materials? Why have we suddenly imposed a unilateral moratorium when all these 24 non-nuclear years since Pokhran I we refused to accept any moratorium, unilateral or multilateral? Moreover, when Pakistan conducts its tests after we declare our moratorium, denying ourselves the option of going one up on the Paki tests?

Answers there have been none. Hence the voters' message: if this is strength, please God, give us weakness.

The author is secretary, All-India Congress Committee.

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