ABSTRACT

In 1996 the Indian government submitted a Memorial to the International Court of Justice on the legality of the threat or use of nuclear weapons. In this carefully argued Memorial, India concluded that the use of nuclear weapons in a first attack or even as retaliation would be illegal under international law (India 1998a: 72). Further, the Memorial stated that India considered the theory of nuclear deterrence ‘abhorrent’ since it implied that the ‘keeping of peace or prevention of war is to be made dependent on the threat of horrific indiscriminate destruction’ and because it justified the stockpiling of weapons of mass destruction ‘at an enormous expense’ (India 1998a: 73). Finally, it argued that if it is the case that the use of nuclear weapons is against international law, then, as with biological and chemical weapons, the manufacture of nuclear weapons itself must be considered illegal (India 1998a: 74). Yet, just two years later India conducted nuclear tests and declared itself a nuclear weapons state. In March 2006 India reached an agreement on civil nuclear energy cooperation with the United States which, in the words of Prime Minister Manmohan Singh (2006b), ‘offered the possibility of decades-old restrictions being set aside to create space for India’s emergence as a full member of a new nuclear world order’. On the same day that Singh was heralding the global acceptance of India’s nuclear weapons, Jayant Prasad, India’s Permanent Representative at the Conference on Disarmament in Geneva reiterated India’s belief that the ‘very existence of nuclear weapons, and of their possible use or threat of their use, poses a threat to humanity’ and that India ‘remained committed to the goal of a nuclear-weapon free world, to be achieved through global, verifiable and non-discriminatory nuclear disarmament’ (Prasad 2006). As these two examples illustrate, India has an ambivalent, contradictory relationship with nuclear technology. It would be easy to dismiss India’s advocacy of disarmament as a superficial mask for its realpolitik pursuit of nuclear weapons. In his discussion of India’s refusal to sign the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT) on the grounds that it did not require the declared nuclear powers to commit to time-bound nuclear disarmament, Sumit Ganguly (1999: 158) argues that ‘[a]lthough India’s argument was couched in moral terms, a more pragmatic consideration – namely keeping its nuclear weapons option open – guided its decision not to sign the treaty’. Disarmament, however, is a long-standing and consistent feature of India’s foreign

policy discourse that governments of all hues have upheld and dismissing it as superficial rhetoric does not explain why this has been the case. Even in 2006, as we saw above, when India believed it was on the cusp of being recognized as a nuclear weapons state it still felt obliged to engage in a discourse of disarmament that reiterates a self-image of morality and ethical conduct. Alternatively, an English school or conventional constructivist explanation would focus on the impact of international norms and structures against the proliferation of nuclear weapons in compelling India to validate its nuclear transgressions by raising the issue of disarmament. Yet, the international discourse of non-proliferation is one that has enjoyed little legitimacy in India and has long been identified with a discriminatory world order and labelled ‘nuclear apartheid’. In this chapter I argue that tracing the origins of India’s contradictory nuclear policies produces important insights into India’s postcolonial identity and a more complete understanding of the motivations behind its foreign policy. Specifically, I argue that taking India’s discourse on disarmament seriously reveals the ambivalent nature of India’s postcolonial identity. This ambivalence is the product of a critique of Western modernity, which emerged during the anticolonial era, and the widespread acceptance of the idea among nationalists that India’s failure to become modern was the reason for it succumbing to colonial rule. In particular, a widely-held conviction in nationalist discourse was that Indian civilization’s inability to develop a scientific outlook and modern technology contributed to civilizational backwardness which, in turn, led to colonial subjugation. Given this perception of civilizational backwardness, nuclear technology in postcolonial India took on a special significance as an explicit example of both the promise and the violence of Western modernity. The production of nuclear technology would instil in India what Nehru referred to as a ‘scientific temper’ to provide a cheap source of power for India’s economic development and foster scientific cooperation which, in turn, would facilitate an internationalist ethic that was vital for the construction of an ethical modernity. Yet, nationalist discourse also produced significant critiques of the destructive nature of Western modernity and this meant that the outright adoption of a technology with the capacity to unleash an unprecedented level of violence was untenable. The discourse of disarmament is an attempt to resolve this dilemma by recourse to India’s moral strength, which is seen as an innate attribute of Indian civilization. To begin this examination of the significance of nuclear technology and nuclear disarmament in postcolonial India, I take as my point of departure a comment from Bal Thackeray, the leader of the militant Hindu nationalist Shiv Sena party, who declared his support for the 1998 nuclear tests on the grounds that ‘we have to prove that we are not eunuchs’ (1998b). Several authors have commented on the gendered nature of discourses on nuclear weapons (See for example, Cohn 1987). In the Indian context, Runa Das (2002, 2006) has analysed the representations of masculinity and femininity that underpin Hindu nationalist ideology and which, she argues, are used to justify its pro-nuclear policies. One purpose of this chapter is to introduce the colonial origins of the

gendered discourses that contemporary Hindu nationalists like Thackeray perpetuate. I further explore Hindu nationalist discourse on nuclear weapons in Chapter 7. In this chapter my aim is to show that the Hindu nationalist linkage of masculinity and nuclear weapons was only one particular negotiation of the complex, competing and gendered narratives regarding modernity and progress that emerged as a reaction to a perception of India’s civilizational backwardness among the Indian elite during the colonial encounter. Other nationalist leaders, like Nehru, negotiated these narratives differently and this negotiation, I argue in this chapter, led to the prioritization of nuclear disarmament instead of the production of nuclear weapons. The first section of this chapter examines the gendered narratives of India’s scientific backwardness and moral superiority that emerged during the colonial era. I pay particular attention to Nehru’s negotiations of these narratives and his construction of a (gendered) civilizational identity for India. The second part of the chapter focuses on how Nehru’s understanding of Indian civilization’s flaws and attributes made possible post-independence policies that prioritized the development of nuclear energy alongside a championing of nuclear disarmament.