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State, Identity, andRepresentations of Danger:Competing World Views onIndian NuclearisationRuna Das aa Department of Political Science , University ofMinnesota Duluth , MN, USAPublished online: 01 Feb 2008.

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State, Identity, andRepresentations of Danger:Competing World Viewson Indian Nuclearisation

RUNA DAS

Department of Political Science, University of Minnesota Duluth, MN, USA

ABSTRACT What explains India’s nuclear detonation in May 1998? Some offer arealist, others a nuclear-apartheid, and some an identity-logic explanation for thisdetonation. My contention in this article is that the nuclear policy choice made byIndia in 1998, under the BJP government, is a culturally situated one and the logicof (in)securities that the state has used to justify this decision draws upon theideological lenses of its then policy makers. To this extent, I compare howideological perceptions of the post-colonial Indian state’s leaders (evidenced underthe Congress Party and the BJP) have articulated divergent notions of nationalisms,nationalist identities, and (in)securities perceived by the Indian state – therebysuggesting a link between political leaders’ ideologies, articulation of statistidentities, (in)securities, and nuclearisation policies.

On 11 May 1998 the Indian state, under a new coalition government led by the

Hindu right-wing Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), exploded three nuclear

devices, followed by two more explosions on 13 May. This event marked

the emergence of India as a declared nuclear weapons state from its earlier

position as a nuclear-capable state. The logic of proliferation in International

Security Studies is based on the structural desire of states to acquire nuclear

weapons. This argument flows from the precepts of realism where the

search for national security privileges nuclear weapons as the ultimate

Commonwealth & Comparative Politics

Vol. 46, No. 1, 2–28, February 2008

Correspondence Address: Runa Das, Department of Political Science, University of Minnesota

Duluth, 303 Cina Hall, 1123 University Drive, Duluth, MN 55812, USA. Email: rdas@d.umn.edu

1466-2043 Print/1743-9094 Online/08/010002–27 # 2008 Taylor & FrancisDOI: 10.1080/14662040701837953

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source in strengthening the military might of the state. In this mode, national

security represents a ‘totalizing condition of civilian militarization’ that rests

on a panoply of legal instruments adopted by states’ security institutions for

identifying threats to established order within and outside the state

(Abraham, 1999: 13).

While national security is a global phenomenon, it is also a time- and place-

dependent ideology. The modular form of national security imported into the

Third World countries is a part of their post-colonial state-building projects –

which gives national security in these contexts a distinct form. In such con-

texts, the post-colonial state-building project and national security converge

around these states’ or their leaders’ pre-eminent ideologies of what constitu-

tes nationalist identity. The two, i.e., nationalist identity and national security,

are institutionalised in complementary ways such that this complementarity

also constitutes a drive on the part of the post-colonial states to consolidate

their nationalist identities as parts of their state-building projects. State

power in this sense ‘is directed towards ensuring the fixity and permanence

of boundaries; establishing irrevocable differences between the inside and

the outside; and its total sovereignty of what is within’ (Walker, 1993: 14).

Moreover, this process is endless: states’ boundaries are always in flux; deter-

mined by the historical memories and geographical structure of states; recre-

ated constantly through representations, and also influenced by the vagaries of

modernisation, economic development, and real strategic concerns. Given this

complex task of defining a state’s identity, the concept of national security

often becomes handy for leaders in securing for their states an impelling iden-

tity (Campbell, 1992). Atomic energy is in this sense no different from many

of the projects of a modern state to shape its nationalist identity. How can one

situate the Indian state’s 1998 detonation in this context?

Nuclear Proliferation: India

Committed to realism, the mainstream school of security studies argues that

states will go nuclear if their vital security interests are threatened. As per

this logic, the world comprises dangers that are given and it is the task of

states to identify and preserve their realm from such dangers. In terms of

this argument, the case of a nuclear India is primarily to counter the nuclear

threats posed to India by China and Pakistan (Thomas and Gupta, 2000).

These realist explanations, although valid to a certain extent, are inconsistent.

This is because the realist school fails to explain why India, which was suppo-

sedly responding to a Chinese nuclear threat (that was already acquired by

1964), waited until 1998 to demonstrate its nuclear capability. More impor-

tantly, I argue that the conventional arguments, guided by their materialist

ontologies and rationalist epistemologies, have conceptualised India’s

Competing World Views on Indian Nuclearisation 3

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insecurity through objective lenses – where danger is given. They have paid

scant attention to the subjective ways in which insecurity may be rewritten and

how policy makers’ ideologies may discursively articulate India’s nationalist

identity vis-a-vis certain forms of insecurities and thus explain India’s nuclear

policies.

Although relatively less recognised than the realist explanation, the Indian

government has also made use of a nuclear-apartheid argument to justify

India’s nuclear detonation. This argument points to the inequalities in the dis-

tribution of global nuclear resources that were institutionalised through arms

control treaties such as the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT) and the

Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty (CTBT) – creating an elite club of

‘nuclear haves’ with exclusive rights to maintain nuclear arsenals that were

denied to the majority of the ‘nuclear have-nots’ (Singh, 1998a). The

nuclear-apartheid argument overcomes the objective biases of the realists

and provides more normative explanations of India’s nuclearisation. Yet

missing from this line of analysis is how nationalist identities and insecurities

discursively reconstituted may also explain India’s nuclear policies.

Scholars have also highlighted an identity logic in explaining India’s 1998

detonation. This analysis needs to be made at two levels: first, by paying atten-

tion to India’s identity as a modern post-colonial state; and, second, how the

relation between modernity and the nation-state, evidenced through India’s

‘monumental’ state-building project, has resulted in the ‘fetishisation’ of

nuclear science by the country’s policy makers (Abraham, 1999; Prakash,

1999). The identity logic argument has acquired considerable currency in

the immediate aftermath of India’s 1998 nuclear tests, claiming that the

tests were emblematic of the jingoistic BJP’s quest for a more virile and mus-

cular Indian state. The latter position is not entirely bereft of merit because the

BJP government did have a more militaristic outlook than the previous non-

BJP governments. Nevertheless, the argument is ahistorical to the extent

that it ignores how subjective factors such as history, culture, and religion

may be intertwined with realpolitik to rearticulate India’s nationalist identity

and insecurities.

Finally, the bureaucratic-institutional argument claims that a bureaucratic-

scientific momentum culminated in the nuclear tests of 1998. It suggests that

key members of India’s Atomic Energy Commission pursued a somewhat sur-

reptitious path to the acquisition of nuclear weapons as a quest for technologi-

cal mastery. There is some merit to this argument. Yet it amounts to an

incomplete explanation for India’s nuclearisation. This is because even

though members of the scientific community can proffer technological

choices to the political leadership, the ultimate decision still rests in the

hands of political authority. Going nuclear ‘demands an act of political

will’ (Ganguly, 2000: 11). Consequently, attributing India’s nuclear choices

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to technological imperative overlooks the primacy of other subjective/ideological factors that may guide a country’s nuclear policies.

Given the relative silence of the preceding explanations in proffering a more

subjective/interpretive analysis of Indian nuclearisation, this article addressesIndia’s nuclear problematique from an interpretive angle, i.e. how the perfor-

mative nature of statist identities, which Campbell (1992: 11) argues are

‘never finished entities’, may rearticulate insecurities to support securitisation

policies. Following this line of analysis, an exposition of India’s nuclearisation

begins with the ‘real’ strategic threats faced by India traditionally and on the

eve of May 1998; opinions of the senior members of the Indian scientific and

nuclear policy community in support of India’s detonation; India’s technologi-

cal development; and the drive to gain its identity as a modern post-colonial

nation. However, it does not stop there. India’s decision to pursue a nuclear

programme and detonate under the BJP points to a complex relationship

between the Indian state’s identity and its representations of insecurities

which cannot be comprehended outside of a discursive reality. This requires

moving away from realpolitik and focusing on other subjective factors –

such as the strategic culture of the Indian state, ideology of its political

leaders, their interpretation of histories, and nationalist/communalist identi-

ties – as an interaction of which the sources of insecurities and the very

object that they threaten (i.e. the Indian state) are themselves historically

reconstituted and rewritten to shape India’s nuclear trajectory. How two com-

peting world views representing post-colonial India’s nationalist identity, its

strategic culture, and sources of insecurities – under both Congress and BJP

governments1 – have influenced the discourse of India’s national security

and nuclearisation policies are the object of my study.

The article is arranged in five sections. Following Campbell’s Writing

Security, it discusses the linkages between statist identity, representations of

insecurity, and securitisation policies and situates this linkage to what critical

constructivists call the ‘cultural’ construction of (in)securities (Weldes et al.,

1999). These frameworks will be utilised subsequently to explore the discur-

sive links between post-colonial India’s nationalist identity, representation of

dangers, and its nuclearisation policies. Part two includes an overview of

India’s national security as influenced by the nation’s ‘strategic’ culture.

Part three explores the discursive links between India’s nuclearisation policies

vis-a-vis the articulations of its nationalist identity and representations of

insecurities under the Congress Party (which were mainly economic/develop-mental and political/military). Part four addresses the rearticulation of India’s

nationalist/communalist identity as a Hindu nation by the BJP, and then raises

the inter-subjective question whether the ideology of Hindutva (subscribed to

by the BJP) has rearticulated India’s nationalist identity, representations of

(in)securities, and justifications for a nuclear policy (along communal/cultural

Competing World Views on Indian Nuclearisation 5

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lines)? The article concludes by asserting the significance of an interpretive

approach to proliferation studies – an aspect undermined by the mainstream

of security studies.

State, Identity, and Representations of Danger

InWriting Security (1992) Campbell undertakes an analysis of how the bound-

aries of the United States’ identity is made secure by manifestly linking it to a

‘danger’ (be it the Amerindians, the Communists, or immigrants to the US). In

this representation of danger, threat does not merely exist. Rather, it emerges

from certain ‘context-bound’ judgements by policy makers where a ‘historical

mode of representation’, which self-consciously adopts an imagination of the

Self and the Other, is used to define danger. In this dynamic of projecting the

Self/Other, identity becomes an inescapable dimension of being. It is not fixed

by nature but constituted in relation to difference. As Campbell argues,

‘Whether we are talking of “the body” or “the state” . . . the identity of each

is performatively constituted’ (Campbell, 1992: 8). The constitution of a

state’s identity is achieved through the construction of boundaries which

serve to demarcate an ‘insider’ from an ‘outsider’, the ‘self’ from the

‘other’, and the ‘domestic’ from the ‘alien’. In this sense, a state, as a sover-

eign entity in world politics, has no ontological status; but is constituted by a

discourse that is ‘tenuously constituted in time . . . through a stylized repetitionof acts . . . that occurs through a regulated process of repetition’ (Campbell,

1992: 9). Thus, ‘states are never finished entities; the tension between the

demands of identity and practices that constitute [it] can never be fully

resolved, because the performative nature of identity can never be fully

revealed’ (Campbell, 1992: 11).

In this context, one may raise the following question: if there are no primary

or stable identities then how can international relations speak about concepts

like state, war, security, danger, sovereignty, etc? After all, is not security

determined by the presence of a sovereign state and war conducted in its

name before an identifiable danger or anarchy? Problematising this conven-

tional assumption that international relations is in a state of anarchy, critical

constructivists view (in)security as what Campbell (1992) calls ‘represen-

tations of danger’. For critical constructivists, ‘(in)securities [are] cultural in

the sense that they are produced in and out of the contexts within which

people give meanings to their actions, experiences, and make sense of their

lives’ (Weldes et al., 1999: 1–2). Operating within frameworks of meanings,

assumptions, and distinctive social identities – the representation of the Other

and what constitutes (in)securities are left open to the dynamics of interpret-

ation, whereby relations of identity/Otherness may be produced, enforced,

and reified in a conflictual manner. Thus, an Other is considered threatening

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not only by the actions that it takes but also by its very constitution through

certain ‘discourses or codes of intelligibility’ – thereby making (in)securities

a ‘cultural’ production of danger. Moreover, constructing identities of an

Other in inter-state relations may not simply be confined to rigid inter-state

dynamics; but may be mediated by a complex realignment of political struc-

tures, ideological perceptions, and cultural/religious traditions involving stateelites – where the latter themselves may play crucial roles in reproducing

statist identities and (in)securities (Weldes et al., 1999: 1–2). This observation

is important for this paper as I will show how such a realignment of the Indian

state, under the BJP, has affected India’s securitisation policies.

The importance of the above perspectives is that they allow us to understand

states as paradoxical entities which do not possess pre-existing stable identi-

ties. As a consequence, all states are marked by an inherent tension as to

how to adjust to the ‘many axis of [its] nationalist identity’ to represent an

‘imagined’ community (Campbell, 1992: 11). Central to this process of con-

stituting a state’s identity is the state’s foreign policy and its construction of

danger – which only serve to further consolidate the state’s identity. This is

because if a state faces no dangers then it would imply an absence of move-

ment via stasis and would wither away. Rather, should dangers continue to

exist as a challenge to the state and be successfully articulated then the state

would continue to exist. Accordingly, a state’s foreign policy by inscribing

certain ‘codes of dangers’ helps in containing and reproducing the state’s

boundaries, and, ironically, guarantees for the state an impelling identity.

The constant articulation of danger facing the state projected through its

foreign policy is thus not an obstacle to a state’s identity or existence;

rather, it is a condition of possibility. In this sense, ‘the drive to fix a state’s

identity from constant re-production of danger(s) cannot absolutely

succeed’ (Campbell, 1992: 11). How the drive to fix the Indian state’s identity

by articulating dangers through the state’s national security policies, is discur-

sively played out in the two competing ideological world views of the

Congress Party and the BJP – is undertaken in the rest of my analysis.

National Security and Strategic Culture: India

Generally speaking, India’s national security is conceptualised as representing

the country’s foreign policy, defence policy, strategic doctrine, and military

force posture – an analysis of which requires understanding its conceptual

integration at the formulating level and its implementation at the national

level (Louw, 1978). Viewed from this perspective, India’s national security

should not be seen as one emerging in a vacuum. Rather, it should be seen

as one emerging out of an interplay of a number of factors: domestic, inter-

national, state, non-state, strategic and non-strategic. Geography, external

Competing World Views on Indian Nuclearisation 7

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environment, the nature of political structure, and the role of non-governmental

agencies constitute the external determinants; whereas history, culture and

policy makers’ ideological perceptions (which are also elements of India’s stra-

tegic culture) constitute the internal determinants (Budania, 2001). Nations tend

to be more concerned about states that are geographically proximate to their

vital resources and lines of communication (reflective of the realist logic).

Changes of government, coups, internal instability, border disputes, nuclear

explosions, and the like in nearby states will therefore be of concern to India.

Although there is no unanimity as to the relative effect these will have on

India’s national security formulations, the significance of these external

factors on the latter can hardly be underestimated.

An important ‘internal’ determinant of India’s national security is its stra-

tegic culture. Strategic culture may be defined as ‘the socially constructed

and transmitted assumptions, habits of mind, traditions, and preferred

methods of operation – that is, behavior – that are more or less specific to

a particular geographically-based security community’ (Gray, 1999: 28).

Applied in the context of any country’s national security, the concept of stra-

tegic culture becomes critical because national security of a state when seen

through the strategic predispositions, or behaviours, of its leaders may influ-

ence the leaders to define their country’s security discourse in terms of what

they see as their country’s strategic culture (Johnston, 1995). In this sense,

strategic culture may influence the national security parameters of a country

as an interaction of several subjective/ideational factors such as its histories,

cultures, norms, ideas, values, etc. Thus, strategic culture as a ‘symbolic strat-

egy’ serves a dual purpose in defining a country’s national security agenda.

First, by reinforcing a sense of legitimacy in securitisation as upheld by

decision makers (e.g. the ‘myth’ that the erstwhile Soviet Union’s nuclear

arsenal had represented a greater threat to the US than Britain’s – which legit-

imised US security policies such as Star Wars); and, second, to create and per-

petuate a sense of ‘in-group’ solidarity of a particular group’s strategic

security discourse directed at ‘supposed’ adversaries. To this effect, Johnston

(1995: 57) observes, ‘the net effect of . . . symbolic discourse has been the cre-

ation of an ideology which justifies the hegemony of security intellectuals,

military policy makers, . . . and all those who accept a direct association

between threats, weaponization, and security’.

Following Gray’s (1999) definition of strategic culture, one may say that

India’s strategic culture is an amalgamation of its history and civilisation

which has witnessed people representing various customs, languages, and reli-

gions (such as Hindus, Jains, Buddhists, Christians, Muslims, and others)

settling down in the sub-continent. While analysts such as Rosen (1996)

have, in contrast, identified India’s strategic culture as representing a Hindu

‘mind-set’ (which becomes important as we analyse the shift of India’s

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strategic culture under the BJP), this observation is incorrect. On the contrary,

the very amorphous nature of India’s strategic culture has been the determi-

nant of India’s security – which has included its territory, culture, history,

religions, and civilisational values – based on the Gandhian concept of

non-violence. While an unintended consequence of these influences has

been an ‘emasculation’ of the concept of India’s state power (Rajain, 2005:

201), one must also not forget that the many external invasions faced by

India – from the Mughals and the British – have also contributed to the

culture of India in a realist/militarist sense. India’s foreign policies pursued

by ancient rulers like Samudragupta, Ashoka (who later surrendered the use

of force), and Kautilya is a testimony of this trend. It is against this backdrop

that the remainder of the paper provides an interpretive analysis of how a rear-

ticulation of India’s nationalist identity and insecurity – at the nexus of its

strategic culture and realpolitik under the Congress and the BJP – has

shaped India’s nuclearisation policies.

Post-Colonial India: Nationalist Identity, Strategic Culture, andNarratives of Insecurity

As elaborated earlier in the article, the discourse of realism is both modern and

Western. Its relationship with a Western epistemological rationality is no

secret – especially in articulating a world of sovereign, self-contained entities

that interact with each other, through a utilitarian calculus, in an overall milieu

of anarchy (Krishna, 1994). However, in the context of the periphery of the

modern world, the relationship of the discourse of realism with the emerging

post-colonial nationalisms is ambivalent. On the one hand, national move-

ments in the peripheries were reacting to the economic exploitation and the

cultural/political subjugation inherent in colonisation. Thus, nationalism

emerged in peripheries (such as in India) as an oppositional force with a pol-

itically ‘counter-hegemonic’ project. On the other hand, the reigning models

of nation building in post-colonial India were derivative of the Western

experiences of science, rationality, and the concept of the nation-state. This

ambivalence, indeed this contradiction, can also be finessed in the formation

of post-colonial India’s national security agenda.

Post-Colonial India, Nuclear Energy, and Insecurity: The Nehru Years

The India that emerged after 1947 was a nation born out of 200 years of British

exploitation and the experience of partition – which to a great extent defined

India’s national/foreign policy choices. Realising the need to establish the

newly born Indian nation as a strong, unified, and sovereign democratic

state (which was perceived as an instrument to establish India’s sovereign

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presence in the world), India under its first Prime Minister (PM) Nehru based

its foreign/national security policies on the principles of idealist nationalism.

A follower of Mahatma Gandhi and a believer that India’s strategic culture

was rooted in non-violence, Nehru’s initial commitment to idealist national-

ism is understandable. India’s unflinching faith in international organisations,

particularly the United Nations, policies of non-alignment, Panchsheel

(peaceful coexistence), and decolonisation are all reflections of such ideals

(Nehru, 1954). Concomitant with his view of national security through

peace was Nehru’s benevolent perception towards non-Hindus, especially

Muslims, in India and his reiteration that ‘it was for the Hindus to make the

Muslims in India feel at home and not see themselves as second-class citizens’

(Parthasarathy, 1989: 8). This aspect of his perception symbolised the secular

ideology of sarvadharma samabhava (equal respect for all religions), which

for Nehru (unlike the Hindu nationalist BJP) was not a value system in

itself. Rather, for Nehru, secular tolerance constituted an attribute of the

modern Indian state.

While India was forging towards a modern state in terms of its political

sovereignty and territorial integrity, it also debated the uses of atomic

energy for India. As explained by Abraham (1999), this pursuit of India

should be seen in the context of India’s emerging identity as a post-colonial

nation. In this context, India’s identity did not represent a chronological con-

dition, i.e. the Indian state’s identity was not simply constituted by its leaders

as a state that was ‘a prior colony’. Rather, the Indian state’s identity as post-

colonial became a ‘specific moment of a global condition of modernity’

(Abraham, 1999: 19). If the project of modernity was at its best secular and

committed to the application of science for the betterment of human condition

and the ordering of political affairs, then these became the goals of the post-

colonial Indian state. These goals were laid down through the rules of democ-

racy, political nationalism, secularism, and parliamentarism that established

the post-colonial Indian state. India’s quest for atomic energy became a

‘new’ state ideology to epitomise India’s identity as a modern state.

Before going into that analysis, I deflect briefly to recall the geostrategic

significance of China and Pakistan vis-a-vis India’s quest for the atomic

project. This is for two reasons: first, to assess if China and Pakistan consti-

tuted a threat to the Indian state; and, second, how the representation of a

Pakistani danger was articulated in the national security discourse of the

Indian state (the representation of which, as I will argue, becomes cultural/religious under the BJP). One finds that although India did have some political

disputes with both China and Pakistan, neither of these assumed dimensions

warrant a nuclear project as defence against these states. Rather, one notices

that Nehru took recourse to the principles of Panchsheel to settle differences

with these states. The Sino-Indian border disputes of 1950, which Nehru

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saw as reflecting the ‘expansionist tendencies of the Chinese nation’ over

Tibet, was dealt with by Nehru by recognising Chinese control over Tibet

(Mankekar, 1968: 110).

The disputes faced by India from Pakistan during the Nehru years were

more crucial when placed in the historical context of Indo-Pakistan partition

and how such historical circumstances shaped the ideological perceptions of

Nehru (and the post-Nehru leaders) with regard to Pakistan. The major dis-

putes that marked Indo-Pakistan relations during Nehru’s leadership were:

the Indus Canal Water problem; the issue of disposing of evacuee property

after partition; Pakistan’s measures to join US sponsored alliances (1954

and 1959); and the Kashmir problem. Despite such political confrontations

between India and Pakistan, the main thrust of India’s foreign policy response

to Pakistan was diplomatic in nature. Reflecting Rosenau et al.’s (1976)

comment that policy maker’s perceptions define a country’s foreign policy,

we find that under Nehru, India’s policy towards Pakistan was based on the

following ideological perceptions: first, in the aftermath of partition it was

time for India and Pakistan to deal with each other on the basis of respecting

territorial status quo; and, second, the common sub-continental history and

culture should draw India and Pakistan closer. Accordingly, peace and good

neighbourly relations with Pakistan, economic cooperation, and enhancing

India’s regional influence to promote national security constituted the pillars

of India’s Pakistan policy under Nehru (Parthasarathy, 1989). Nehru’s remon-

stration to the Pakistani PM Mohammad Ali Bogra that Panchsheel assures

better security and friendlier relations also led India to offer a No-War Agree-

ment to Pakistan in December 1949 (which was subsequently rejected by

Pakistan’s PM Liaquat Ali Khan by linking it to the Kashmir problem).

Thus, to a certain extent Indo-Pakistan’s historical legacy did constitute

Pakistan as an ‘Other’ to India. Yet such anxieties or insecurities were of a pol-

itical/military nature (centring around reconfiguring India’s territorial space –

which was also its post-colonial sovereign self) and did not evoke, for Nehru, a

communal rewriting of Indo-Pakistan’s history to formulate India’s Pakistan

policy. Evidently, a ‘clash of civilisation’ thesis did not guide Nehru’s

foreign policy vis-a-vis Pakistan. In Nehru’s words:

India suffered from one major drawback . . . due to partition which gaverise to bitterness of feeling between India and Pakistan. This was unfor-

tunate, because it affected our policies in many ways. What was worse,

it affected the feelings of our people as it affected the feelings of the

people of Pakistan. But this bitterness has no ancient roots . . . Therefore,there was no reason whatsoever why India should . . . champion . . .the animosities and past history . . . which had bred quarrels. (Nehru,

1961: 83)

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As evidenced from this quote, Nehru viewed India’s Pakistan policy as a

policy ‘inherent in the past thinking of India’ (meaning the ancient Hindu phil-

osophy of tolerance) (Nehru, 1961: 80).

If the political disputes between India, Pakistan, and China were largely

settled on the basis of idealist nationalism, then how can one situate the

Indian state’s identity, insecurity, and pursuit of atomic power at this conjec-

tural moment of immediate post-independence Indian politics? I argue that,

the ‘shroud of post-colonial modernity [that] defined the ambitions and

fears of [its] . . . political class trying to come to terms with a global condition

[of modernity]’, constituted the insecurity dilemmas, and thus the quest for the

atom bomb, for the early Indian state (Abraham, 1999: 19). Like any post-

colonial moment, ‘the post-colonial modern [India] was marked by a particu-

lar experience of time’, i.e. a post-colonial time ‘always . . . in-waiting for

catching-up with the desired modernity, yet always behind them in terms of

one’s own development’ (Abraham, 1999: 19). Before such a dilemma, the

articulation of India’s national security was structured around the acquisition

and consolidation of the Indian state’s power, identity, and national interest

and the pursuit of the atom bomb located in that context.

Nehru was not pro-nuclear – a stance which stemmed from the Gandhian

legacy of non-violence and his apprehension that nuclear weapons may

cause the militarisation of Indian society (Constituent Assembly of India,

1948). Yet, a developmentalist at heart, Nehru had a vision for India as a

self-reliant and modern nation. To that extent, he did not foreclose the

option of pursuing an atomic programme for India’s national development.

In his Presidential address to the Indian Science Congress Nehru (1947),

spoke of the relationship of science to development as larger objectives of

the post-colonial project. In relation to development, science was valued

since its power could be harnessed for national development (for generating

power for public consumption) and atomic energy used for peaceful pro-

duction (Nehru, 1947). Shortly after India’s independence, Nehru, upon the

recommendation of Homi Bhahba (Chair of the Board of Atomic Energy

Research), sponsored the Atomic Energy Bill in the Constituent Assembly.

In 1948 an Atomic Energy Commission (AEC) was also established that con-

trolled all activities relating to atomic energy. Nehru’s rationale for sponsoring

the Atomic Energy Bill was not militaristic; rather it relied on a developmental

trajectory where the atom represented a new era of human civilisation. This

developmental rationale is evidenced in Nehru’s claim (on the eve of introdu-

cing the Atomic Energy Bill):

. . . we are on the verge . . . of a tremendous development in some direc-

tion of the human race. Consider the past few hundred years of human

history: the world developed a new source of power, the steam engine,

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. . . India with all her virtues did not develop that power. It became a

backward country because of that . . . Now we are facing the atomic

age; we are on the verge of it. And this is something infinitely . . .powerful. (Constituent Assembly of India, 1948: 3334)

Although the atomic policies made during these initial years of India’s inde-

pendence carried the reflections of the prime minister’s persona, there was

support from other prominent legislators for the atomic project (Abraham,

1999). In their understandings of science and nation, the essence of progress

through science was not only seen in a historical context (i.e. as something

rooted in ancient India) but also one that seeks to map India on a world

scale, the progressive transformation of which depended on the development

and access to these sources of energy. In this sense, supporters of science

become ‘patriots’ of the Indian nation, as opposed to ‘dissenters’ of science

(who included V.K. Krishna Menon, Nehru’s closest advisor and confidant,

who was anti-atomic bomb). Despite some public opposition to nuclear

weapons, Nehru granted Bhabha a free hand in the development of India’s

nuclear infrastructure and laying the necessary foundations should a political

decision to acquire nuclear weapons be made in the future. All through the

representation of this event, the atomic programme symbolised an indigenous

affair built with local expertise. ‘It represented national pride’ (Abraham,

1999: 85).

It is through this exegesis between the Indian state (represented through the

personality of Nehru) and the AEC that one understands the insecurity

dilemma that underscored India’s atomic project. The insecurities of

‘catching-up’ as a modern nation constituted the dominant representation of

the Indian state and coming to grips with it legitimised the atomic quest. It

was an insecurity that was derived not so much from the identities of China

or Pakistan but an (in)security of the self, that was ‘located in direct confronta-

tion with history . . . a colonial history and the urgency of [creating] a

post-colonial modern state’ (Abraham, 1999: 105). In this context, the

nuclear programme was symbolic of a project that could resolve this post-

colonial anxiety which only ‘super patriots’ like Nehru could undertake by

using their political authority to develop a sense of Indian nationhood and

identity. In this projection of post-colonial identity/anxiety, real geostrategicthreats as faced regionally were nominal, which, however, was amplified in

the post-1962 years.

India’s (In)Security and Nuclear Options/Policies: Post-Nehru Years

If in the pre-1962 years anxiety or insecurity in establishing a modern post-

colonial nationalist identity had guided India’s atomic energy project, the

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post-1962 years provided Indian leaders with the space to rearticulate India’s

nationalist identity and insecurity from a Hobbesian context, in which the

focus of analysis came to rest on the preservation of national security from

‘real’ geostrategic threats. To the Indian leaders the 1962 war with China,

in which the under-equipped and unprepared Indian troops were defeated by

Chinese forces, provided such a moment. The norms of peaceful coexistence

underlying India’s foreign policy became unrealistic in responding to the

anxieties facing the Indian state. Following Campbell’s (1992: 11) assertion

that ‘a state’s foreign policy . . . by inscribing codes of danger helps containing. . . the boundaries of the state’, one may also locate a discursive shift in the

articulation of India’s nationalist identity, insecurity, and its quest for nuclear

power from a peaceful to a military option. The government in 1962 passed

the Atomic Energy Bill in the Indian Parliament. This bill delineated that the

Indian state develop a nuclear military option (its peaceful uses relegated to a

secondary context) and, furthermore, contextualised the Indian atomic energy

project in the realm of India’s national security (Government of India, 1962).

However, the shift of elite opinion to develop atomic weapons against

‘enemies’ came in October 1964, when China conducted its first nuclear test.

Although China contended that it’s nuclear and defence modernisations were

guided by its perceptions of threat from the Soviet Union, and that India need

not worry about the security implications of these weapons, it did not convince

India. Mr Baday, a Congress Party Member of Parliament from Khargaon,

stated in his constituency:

Apna raksha karne ke vaste yadi hum [‘atomic energy’] se apne

[‘defence’] aur [‘military weapons’] tiyar karen, to useman kaun sa

gunah hai. Kaise veh shanty ke khilaf hai. . . . [If we develop atomic

energy for our defence and military weapons in order to keep us

secure, what’s wrong with that, how can it be antithetical to

peace. . .]. (Government of India, 1962: 2914)

India’s new PM, Lal Bahadur Shastri, who had succeeded Nehru in the post-

China war period, had two options to provide nuclear weapons for India’s

defence: first, to obtain nuclear protection from another state, and, second,

to build an Indian bomb. Shastri, far less positive about the atomic energy pro-

gramme, opted to pursue the first option from the US.2 When this option

failed, Shastri agreed to allow the AEC to begin studies on the feasibility of

underground nuclear explosions. In September 1965, nearly a fifth of Indian

parliamentary members from all parties urged Shastri to begin an open

nuclear weapons programme (Singh, 1971). Besides, Bhabha also at that

time offered reassurance regarding India’s technological capability to make

the bomb (Abraham, 1999). But the political leadership showed restraint.

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Careful diplomatic statements were crafted so that while India could, if it so

chose, become a nuclear power, the country’s current policy was not to take

that step. Such diplomatic statements also reflected India’s strategic culture

rooted in global peace and non-violence. Stated by the then Indian Foreign

Minister, Swaran Singh in the Indian Parliament: ‘The government still

feels that the interests of world peace and our own security are better achieved

by giving all support to the efforts for world nuclear disarmament than by

building our own nuclear weapons’ (Jain, 1974: 178). No Indian bomb

followed. In January 1966 Shastri died, followed shortly after by Bhabha.

In the post-1966 period, the path of India’s atomic energy complex changed

under PM Indira Gandhi – who had a different ideological perception vis-a-vis

India’s nationalist identity, insecurity, and the bomb. In this ideological pre-

disposition, the quest for the atom was aligned alongside India’s nationalist

discourses of threat and fear. This thinking was reinforced by Vikram Sarabhai,

Homi Sethna, and Raja Ramanna – Bhabha’s successors at the AEC – who

asserted that the atomic energy project inevitably spilled over to India’s nation-

alist security frame.3 Accordingly, dangers perceived from regional and global

levels were tailored to shape India’s national security discourse and atomic

energy firmly rooted in this Hobbesian context. The Indian leaders were at

that point struggling on the global front to ascertain India’s policy of nuclear

restraint by seeking a free and fair disarmament framework. However, on

grounds of Article IX of the NPT the Indian leadership refused to sign the

treaty. Supporting this rejection was also an articulation of India’s nuclear

sovereignty reflective of the nuclear-apartheid argument.

Nor were China and Pakistan standing still. What bothered the Indian

decision makers was that China was acquiring air-to-air, surface-to-surface,

and air-to-surface missiles; developing inter-continental ballistic missiles;

and manufacturing an anti-nuclear radar network that could be effectively

used against India (Chari, 1979). Additionally, China conducted its second

and third nuclear explosions which also raised concerns about China either

resorting to nuclear blackmail or crushing India’s conventional military

might – to promote an armed confrontation between India and China. This

perception was propounded following the visit of Dr Henry Kissinger to

Peking in July 1971 and the announcement of US President Nixon’s visit to

China in 1972. Additionally, India’s threat dimensions perceived vis-a-vis

Pakistan also assumed a nuclear dimension in the post-1972 years as Pakistan

began to pursue a rearmament programme under PM Z.A. Bhutto. That

Bhutto’s decision to embark on a nuclear programme was to counter India’s

nuclear weapons programme is evidenced in his revelation:

India is acquiring nuclear weapons at very great cost . . . and . . . to inti-

midate and blackmail Pakistan . . . That has been the purpose . . . to

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brandish the nuclear sword at Pakistan . . . Pakistan cannot rule out the

possibility that India will use the nuclear device . . . if the war was there.(Government of Pakistan, 1974: 301)

Around this time, the discussion over a peaceful nuclear explosion (PNE)

expanded amongst India’s policy makers. Yet, in contrast to the Indo-

centric rationale forwarded by Pakistan, India’s proposal for a PNE was not

Pakistan-centric. It was based on an economic rationale. As stated by Indira

Gandhi in the Indian Parliament in 1972: ‘The Atomic Energy Commission

is studying conditions under which peaceful nuclear explosions carried out

underground could be of economic benefit to India’ (Jain, 1974: 327). India

duly conducted an underground PNE on 18 May 1974.

By 1981, India’s insecurity concerns vis-a-vis China, Pakistan, and the US

amplified. This occurred with the US military cooperation with Pakistan in

the 1980s, when the Afghan crisis made Pakistan a frontline state for the

US. In 1981, an aid package to Pakistan of $3.2 billion was approved by

the US administration. Simultaneously, to assuage Pakistani fears of Indo-

Soviet collusion (since India and the Soviet Union had signed a Friendship

Treaty in 1971), the US agreed to sell Pakistan several squadrons of F-16

fighter planes. India vehemently lobbied against this sale but with little

success. Indian security analysts argued that India’s insecurity stemmed

from the fact that the US, having knowledge of Pakistan’s nuclear ambitions,

was nevertheless supplying Pakistan with sophisticated weaponry and nuclear

capable aircrafts. Growing suspicions regarding Chinese involvement in

assisting Pakistan to acquire nuclear weapons also fuelled India’s concerns.4

Under these circumstances, the clamour for acquiring more nuclear

weapons grew in India. This orientation became manifest through reports sur-

facing in the Indian media that the country by 1983 had the ability to process

plutonium to weapons grade (Ganguly, 2000). Yet it should be noted that the

insecurities that India perceived from Pakistan in justifying its nuclearisation

were political/military (and not religious/cultural) in nature. According to theCongress Party’s Election Manifesto (Indian National Congress, 1984: 22),

India’s national security/nuclear policies were to ‘protect India’s vital secur-

ity interests in the context of the threat posed by the induction of large scale

sophisticated weaponry in Pakistan’.

India’s next PM, Rajiv Gandhi (despite proposing the Rajiv Gandhi Action

Plan for the gradual elimination of nuclear weapons in South Asia), gave a

further boost to India’s scientific-military establishment. As reported by

India’s defence experts such as K. Suhrahmanyan, it was under Rajiv

Gandhi that India decided to form an effective nuclear deterrent. Such

decisions in turn may be situated vis-a-vis an increasing nuclear threat percep-

tion faced by India from Pakistan – evidenced in an interview given by Abdul

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Kader Khan (widely known as the father of Pakistan’s nuclear programme) to

the Indian journalist Kuldip Nayar, in January 1987, that Pakistan had suc-

ceeded in producing weapons grade uranium (Hussain, 1989). Subsequently,

in 1989 (and again in 1993), General Mirza Beg – the then Pakistani Chief

of Army Staff – confirmed that Pakistan had acquired the ability to manufac-

ture a bomb (Hussain, 1989). These developments were carefully noted by

India, as also was the 25-year review and extension of the NPT (1995) and

the introduction of the CTBT (1996). On grounds of nuclear sovereignty

and apartheid, India found the indefinite extension of the NPT and Clause

XIV of the CTBT problematic.5 The above developments, when seen

against the fall of the Soviet Union (that had provided India with military

and technological assistance and thus a counterweight against China and

Pakistan) and China’s testing of another nuclear device in 1993, explain

why India under the next Congress PM, Narasimha Rao, in December 1995,

attempted to conduct a nuclear explosion.6 Once again, it should be noted

that Pakistani insecurities based on political/realist factors, and not

religious/cultural, were cited by the Congress Party for India’s nuclearisation

process. As stated in the Congress’ 1996 Election Manifesto:

We are deeply concerned that Pakistan is developing nuclear weapons

unabated. They have already inflicted four wars upon India. In case

Pakistan persists in the development and deployment of nuclear

weapons India will be constrained to review her policy to meet the

threat. (Indian National Congress, 1996: 32)

By 1996, while threats from China had receded considerably (following the

Sino-Indian Border Peace and Tranquillity Agreement), concerns involving

China, namely the Chinese supply of M-11 missiles and nuclear technology

to Pakistan, remained. The testing of the Ghauri missile by Pakistan in

April 1998 amplified India’s nuclear insecurity concerns, and, if reports are

to be believed, a decision to overtly test a nuclear weapon in India was

taken a few days later. Speaking on the eve of India’s 1998 detonation,

a Congress Party official stated:

The end of the Cold War has not resulted in the end of nuclear weapons

or of nuclear threats to nations. Regionally, the problem of proliferation

has got further aggravated. With Pakistan’s nuclear programmes,

especially the testing of Ghauri, and the reality of a nuclear China –

India must address the question of its national security. (Ram Kumar,

Secretary, All India Congress Committee, New Delhi, Personal

Interview, 8 December 1998)

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This quote is important especially for its reference to Pakistan’s testing of

Ghauri – which is interpreted as posing a geostrategic/political nuclearsecurity threat to India. It will be interesting to analyse in the next section

how the same event, i.e. the testing of Ghauri, is interpreted by the BJP

and how the party rewrites the narratives of India’s Pakistan-based

insecurities.

Indeed, from the post-1962 years India faced ‘real’ political/military and

nuclear threats from China and Pakistan, which represented ‘cartographic

anxieties’ for the Indian nation, i.e. ‘anxieties centering around questions

concerning one’s nationalist identity and survival’ (Krishna, 1996: 192).

Such insecurities are justified because the central attribute of nation for-

mation and nationalist identity in international politics require the pro-

duction of a particular configuration of territorial space – that is,

‘territorially secure, mutually exclusive, and yet functionally similar like

other sovereign states’ (Ruggie, 1993: 144). Accordingly, the Indian

state’s leaders, as heroic defenders of this realm, have tried to configure

their territorial boundaries by determining ‘relations with the foreign and

inter alia the domestic’, i.e. the ‘endless reproduction of an antinomy: an

anarchy without/community within’ (Krishna, 1996: 193). In such an

attempt to secure the territorial boundaries of something called India, the

post-colonial Indian state’s leaders under the Congress Party have also rear-

ticulated divergent notions of insecurities, which have evolved from

economic/developmental insecurities (faced by the newly born Indian

state) to military/nuclear insecurities (faced by the post-1962 Indian

state). In the context of the latter, one also comprehends why India con-

ducted the PNE in 1974 (although the PNE was of a much lower yield

than the subsequent 1998 detonation) and why India under PM Rao contem-

plated a nuclear test in 1995. Thus, from a realist perspective, India’s evol-

ving nuclear modernisation did reveal a transformation in the strategic

thinking of India that departed from the Gandhian brand of moralistic poli-

tics to one of a defence-oriented/militarised India. In this context, some may

even argue that the BJP’s decision to detonate in 1998 was a culmination of

similar nuclear policies pursued (though not tested) by the previous

Congress leaders. I will not enter into the debate as to why India under the

BJP detonated the bomb. Rather, following Campbell’s (1992: 11) assertion

that ‘the drive to fix the state’s identity and contain challenges to the state’s

representation should not finally or absolutely succeed’, I proceed in the rest

of the paper to show how a different rearticulation of India’s nationalist iden-

tity and (in)security under the BJP, guided by Hindutva, has reinscribed

different representations of danger for India to secure the party’s national/nuclear security project. In doing so, I also draw from Weldes et al.’s

(1999) concept of ‘cultural’ construction of danger.

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The BJP and Nationalism/Communalism in India

Although communalism erupted as a major force in post-independence India

from the 1980s, it has reappeared under the BJP government in the 1990s as a

struggle to lead the political reconstruction of a Hindu nationalist India. The

party’s call for reinventing a pan-Indian identity, which it identifies with a

Hindu rashtra (nation), is the logical outcome of this recent revival of

Hindu nationalism in India. The BJP claims that India’s nationalist identity

as a rashtra is based on ‘one nation, one people, and one culture’ (BJP,

1998a: 6). Hindutva is seen as the unifying factor in the creation of the

Hindu rashtra. Following the boundaries of Hindutva, as defined by the twen-

tieth century Hindu nationalist Savarkar, the BJP too defines it in a rather com-

munal manner and further circumscribes its usage in defining the parameters

of a modern India. Pitrabhoomi (fatherland), jati (bloodline), and sanskriti

(culture) are identified by the BJP as the three principles of Hindutva. Accord-

ing to the BJP, the first principle, pitrabhoomi, implies that to be a Hindu one

should be born within the territorial boundaries of India; the second, jati,

claims that to be a Hindu one should establish lineage from natural as

opposed to converted Hindu parents; and the third, sanskriti, implies that

only those whose sacred land (sacred to their religion) lay within their father-

land (India) actually have the moral basis for claiming citizenship of India

(thereby privileging a cultural/religious rather than a territorial concept of

citizenship in India) (Chowdhry, 2000). Under it, ‘Muslims, Christians,

Jews, and whose ancestral land lay outside the territorial boundaries of

punyabhoomi (the holy land of India) were by implication excluded from

both Hindutva and from their citizenship of India’ (Chowdhry, 2000: 101).

As claimed by a famous BJP ideologue, Sadhvi Rithambara: ‘Hindus, who

can never be communal, are today being branded as communal. They

[Muslims] murder with impunity and people are silent. But we [Hindus] are

defamed when we cry out in pain’ (Banerjee, 1998: 179). This quote illustrates

that for the BJP Hindustan acts as an exclusionary force, where Indian

Muslims become ‘aliens’ to the Hindu land. I show below how this exclusion-

ary basis of Hindutva and the Hindu rashtra also rearticulates India’s (or the

Hindu nation’s) national security culture.

The BJP and India’s National Security as a Strategic (Hindu) Culture

A cursory look at the BJP’s nationalist security agenda shows that the party,

like the Congress, is ‘pledged to defend the unity and integrity of India . . .under all circumstances’ (BJP, n.d.: 10–12). Yet, seen in the context of the

ideological orientations of the BJP, one finds that the party’s concept of

national integration is underpinned by a religious/cultural tone. While

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affirming its ideal of national integrity, the party mentions that its prime focus

of national security calls for a return to the traditions of Hindustan (land of the

Hindus) (BJP, 1996: 15, 69). The party’s dream of unity is cultural, in contrast

to that of the Congress, which was territorial and political. Their leaders never

forget to mention that: ‘Hindutva is a unifying principle which alone can pre-

serve the unity and integrity of our nation’ (BJP, 1996: 15).

Another pamphlet (BJP, n.d.: 11–12) states that:

The Bharatmata (Mother India) for which we say Vande Mataram rep-

resents one organic unity . . . The BJP stands committed to subordination

of all petty loyalties, considerations of creed, caste, and religion in favor

of the overriding ideal of India’s unity and social cohesion of its people.

Referring to Islam, in this context, Jaswant Singh (Minister of Foreign and

External Affairs for India under the BJP) reiterates that ‘Professor Samuel

Huntington is not wholly wrong in talking about the clash of civilizations.

It has always been there in history’ (Singh, 1998b: xiv). It is in this effort to

achieve a Hindu rashtra that the BJP designs its national security agenda in

the context of the country’s strategic culture.

Jaswant Singh describes his vision of India’s national security from what he

perceives to be India’s strategic culture. According to him, to define India’s

strategic culture one has to ‘examine the very nature of India’s nationhood;

the very characteristics of its society; and the evolution of its strategic

thought over the ages’ (Singh, 1998b: 2). For him, this evolution of strategic

culture represents ‘an intermix of many influences: civilization, culture . . . andthe functioning of a civil, etc. It is a by-product of the political culture of a

nation and its people . . . this is where history and racial memories influence

a nation’s strategic thought [and] its culture’ (Singh, 1998b: 2).

Furthermore, representing Rosen’s (1996: 18) concept of ‘mind-set’, as

underlying a country’s strategic culture, Singh claims that it is the Hindu

civilisation/culture that essentially constitutes India’s strategic culture. In

his words: ‘above all else, India is Hindu and Hindus think differently from

non-Hindus . . . [and] it is this “ism” [i.e., Hinduism] that has given birth to

a culture from which we hope to extract the essence of its [meaning

India’s] strategic thought’ (Singh, 1998b: 5). As expressed by the above

quotes, the roots of India’s strategic culture is associated essentially with

the mind-set of the Hindus, their history, and their cultural memories –

which by implication link the logistics of the BJP’s strategic culture to the

ideological underpinnings of Hindutva.

If the BJP’s rearticulation of India’s nationalist identity is situated from the

perspective of a Hindu strategic culture, then can we claim that the

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underpinning of India’s national security agenda under the BJP was communal

or Hindu in character? Or can one assume that the BJP guided by Hindutva

may rewrite India’s nationalist identity and (in)security along communal

lines (as identified with Pakistan) and justify its nuclear policies? The follow-

ing section situates this debate concerning Indian nuclearisation drawing from

the perspectives of realpolitik and a ‘cultural’ production of danger.

Indian Nuclearisation and the BJP: The (Cultural) Rewriting of Danger

The BJP government’s decision to test in 1998 is justified by the party as a

result of international and regional geostrategic factors which reflect many

of the insecurities perceived by the previous non-BJP leaders. First, in terms

of the international scenario, the BJP has argued (and continues to argue)

for a free and fair global disarmament treaty which has not been taken

seriously by the nuclear powers. Furthermore, the CTBT, as flouted by the

nuclear powers, would, if accepted by the BJP, close India’s further nuclear

options (BJP, 2000a). In terms of the regional factors, the BJP has cited

Pakistan and China as growing nuclear threats for India and the official expla-

nation for the 1998 tests were threats from these regional powers (BJP, 1999a).

In fact, some leading BJP politicians, such as L.K. Advani, have recognised

China as the ‘No.1’ threat to India (BJP, 2000b: 6). Even if they have ident-

ified Pakistan as a threat to India (as was done by some of the prominent

spokespersons of the party – Arun Shourie, Mukhtar Naqvi, and Venkaiah

Naidu), they situated their case under the context of geostrategic insecurities

(BJP, 1999a). As stated by the then party president, L.K. Advani, ‘the BJP has

consistently advocated India exercising the nuclear option . . . because we

believe that neighbors and superpowers must never be in a position to intimi-

date us’ (BJP, 2000a: 153). To this extent, the party holds that by conducting

the May 1998 nuclear tests, ‘the BJP government has established India’s parity

with the till now exclusive club of nuclear powers known as P-5’ (BJP, 1999b:

4–7). As announced by the BJP PM, Vajpayee, immediately after the 1998

detonation, ‘92 per cent of the Indians said that they were proud of the test;

64 per cent thought that the Indian explosion was an issue of Indian pride;

and 88 per cent thought that it would make India stronger’ (BJP, 1998b: 1).

Three broad generalisations may be discerned from the BJP’s discourse, as

above, in addressing the issue of India’s nuclear security, the location of

Pakistan in this discourse, and its relation to the justification of India’s

nuclear policy. First, India under its geopolitical realities faces real threats

regionally and globally, and thus adopting a nuclear deterrent posture is essen-

tial for India. Second, India’s national security needs to be maintained for all

Indians and ‘92 per cent of the Indians’ supported the tests (thereby rendering

invisible the contradictions of the party’s nationalist/communalist agenda);

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third, China is as much an external danger to India as Pakistan on grounds of

realist threat concerns. Such apparent realistic claims made by the BJP have

indeed enabled the party to claim certain democratic entitlements for itself

to justify India’s nuclear agenda. However, I argue here that the realist projec-

tion of insecurities that the BJP perceives India to be facing from China and

Pakistan, which to a great extent is true, requires scrutiny in the context of

Hindutva, which may have served as the ideological foundation for the

party to rewrite the Pakistani danger along more communal/cultural lines.This is because in the absence of any clear identifiable danger from Pakistan

(no more than Pakistan had already posed to India prior to the May 1998 deto-

nation), the Pakistani threat was rendered more ‘intelligible’ by the BJP policy

makers through the ideological constructions of anti-Islamic/Pakistani senti-ment in India, which viewed Pakistan as a more serious threat to India than

China. To that extent, a public opinion poll conducted among Indian elites

found that the perceived threats to India from China, which had sometimes

been officially named by the BJP policy makers as the ‘No.1’ justification

for India’s nuclearisation, actually ranked well below their unofficial concerns

about the Pakistani threat (Ahmed & Cortright, 1998). The sentiment among

most of the party members thus goes:

While a nuclear-armed People’s Republic of China may be perceived as

a . . . threat to the Indian security, the BJP believes that it is possible to

reach an accommodation with China because of the past cultural

relations between the two countries. China does not cause apprehension

among the BJP leaders. (Malik & Singh, 1994: 119)

While the BJP policy makers have attempted to attribute their official geostra-

tegic perception about the Pakistani threat to India from the information made

available to them, the question of ‘how’ the BJP simultaneously draws from

history, culture, and nationalist/communalist identities of the Self/Other torewrite a new form of Pakistani danger along communal/cultural lines

requires interrogation.

As evidenced by a number of party documents such as the BJP Today,

Swastika, and BJP election manifestos, most of the BJP members identify

the cultural history of Indo-Pakistan partition as a factor for India’s nuclear

concerns over Pakistan. Most of these members from their communal calcu-

lations, rooted in the cultural biases of the two-nation theory, view the

history of partition as a ‘living nostalgia’ which, according to them, despite

having occurred 60 years ago, still has the potential to affect the contemporary

national security of India. Recalling that India has had a ‘fractured past, which

began with the Muslim invasion and the grinding down of the Hindu-Buddhist

cultures’ in India, these members consider Pakistan as a cultural/religious

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threat to India (BJP, 1999c: 34). An example of how such historical, cultural

and religious factors prominently define these party members’ views vis-a-vis

Pakistan is evidenced from the following comment made by a BJP politician:

Threat perceptions have several dimensions – economic, political, cul-

tural, and religious. Between India and Pakistan, the cultural and reli-

gious aspects of threat dimensions are severe because there are no

cultural similarities between India and Pakistan . . . This was the basis

of hatred between the Hindus and the Muslims and also the emergence

of India and Pakistan. (Tathagatha Roy, Vice-President, West Bengal

BJP State Working Committee, Personal Interview, 12 July, 2002)

Based on such cultural essentials of India as a Hindu rashtra, most of the BJP

members also perceive India as facing a threat from Pakistan which also

relates to contemporary India’s nuclear security concerns. This may be

explained by the fact that the historical-cultural animosities between India

and Pakistan, represented currently in the Kashmir issue as a ‘continuing

legacy of the unfinished agenda of partition’, are perceived by most BJP

members as a factor that may cause Pakistan to resort to ‘nuclear blackmail’

against India to settle this unfinished agenda (a view also expressed by PM

Vajpayee at the 57th Session of the United Nations General Assembly)

(BJP, 1999d: 3, 5). Accordingly, as revealed overwhelmingly in the BJP

newspaper Swastika and the party magazine BJP Today, the Islamisation of

a Pakistani nuclear threat posed to India reached its height following

Pakistan’s test-firing of its medium-range ballistic missile, Ghauri, in 2001

(BJP, 2002a). Interpreting this test-firing, the Swastika held that the Ghauri

represents Pakistan’s desperate bid to acquire a strike capability that will

have a deterrent effect on India (BJP, 1998c: 8). While from a realist perspec-

tive the Ghauri indeed poses a threat to India (as was also acknowledged by a

Congress Party member), what makes this otherwise acceptable assertion pro-

blematic and communal is the party’s interweaving of history, culture, and

religion to interpret the Ghauri. Such interpretations of Pakistan’s nuclear

developments or its test-firing of the Ghauri in the context of an ‘Islamic ven-

geance’ against a Hindu India not only suggests the working of communal sen-

timents within these BJP members but also that they seek to reinterpret issues

of nationalist identities and inter-state securities in the context of Hindutva.

It may be important to note here that the BJP leaders do not explicitly reveal

this anti-Pakistani sentiment underlying India’s nuclear agenda by saying

‘nuke Pakistan’, or that India’s nuclear policy is a Pakistan-centric agenda

in defence of a Hindu rashtra. In fact, the high-ranking leaders of the BJP

sometimes even refuse to identify Pakistan as an Islamic/cultural danger toIndia. For instance, External Affairs Minister Jaswant Singh stated that ‘our

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foreign [nuclear] policy has not been fixated on Pakistan’ (BJP, 1999e: 4–7).

Yet the party simultaneously reminds the (Hindu) nation and its people of the

impending nuclear danger that the nation faces from Pakistan, which is sug-

gestive of the implicit recognition of Pakistan by the BJP as the ‘cultural’

enemy of India. On the contrary, the party considers China (which in a real

strategic sense is a greater nuclear danger to India than Pakistan) a key inter-

locutor in India’s diplomatic ventures – defined from the perspective of what

it sees as India’s ‘established [Hindu] culture’ (BJP, 2000c: 13). To this extent,

the party considers it meaningless to make conversation with the political

leaders of Pakistan (Times of India, 1999). Rather, an ‘inescapable conclusion’

of the party is that a nuclear bomb is needed by the country – which the

party’s ex-General Secretary Mukhtar Naqvi terms as ‘missiles of democracy’

(BJP, 2002b: 23). Detesting this ‘ideological baggage’ guiding the BJP’s per-

ceptions vis-a-vis Pakistan, a prominent spokesperson of the Congress Party

claims:

The BJP’s conception of cultural differences with Pakistan and vice

versa an accommodation with China is a reflection of confused ideologi-

cal postulations from which the party is suffering since inception. This is

one of the fundamental reasons that stand in the way of making a

forward move in Indo-Pakistan relations. (Mukherjee Santosh,

General Secretary, All India Pradesh Congress Committee, Calcutta,

Personal Interview, 16 August, 2002)

Based on the above analysis, can we claim that there is an implicit connection

between Hindutva, the BJP’s rearticulation of a Hindu rashtra, and the rewrit-

ing of (in)securities (along cultural lines) to justify a nuclear policy for the

rashtra?

Conclusion

Following Campbell’s (1992) premise that representations of danger do not

merely exist but emerge from ‘context-bound’ judgements of its policy

makers, this article has tried to highlight a discursive linkage between political

leaders’ ideology, articulations of statist identities, and representations of inse-

curities in reading India’s nuclearisation policies. I have particularly high-

lighted how the ‘performative’ nature of identity – an act inherent in

establishing, guarding, and securing the Self – has enabled two divergent,

ideologically driven political parties in India to rearticulate the locus of

India’s insecurity (from economic/developmental, to military/political, tocultural/religious) vis-a-vis India’s nuclearisation policies. In studying this

cultural rewriting of (a Pakistani) danger by the BJP this study is cognisant

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that Pakistan was created out of a two-nation theory and since then has

pursued an anti-Indian national security policy. Thus, Pakistan itself has his-

torically constructed India as an Other. However, from the Indian side such a

parallel construction of Pakistan along communal/religious lines had not

occurred under the non-BJP governments (construction of Pakistan as a

danger during the non-BJP government was only political/military). To this

extent, I contend that the BJP’s Hindutva ideology, ‘exclusionary’ in contrast

to the Congress’ sarvadharma swamabhava, has enabled the party to replay

this historical existence of demonisation and rearticulate Pakistan as one of

the many axis of (a communal) danger facing the Hindu nation. This arti-

culation of a Pakistani danger facing the rashtra – projected through the

nuclear policy – furthermore serves in ‘containing and reproducing’ the bound-

aries of the Hindu rashtra, and also grants it an impelling identity. In this sense,

the Indian state under the BJP (like the Congress Party) has not only portrayed

itself as a responsible entity for ensuring India’s security but has gone beyond

the latter to reconstruct a well-defined enemy on the basis of religious identities

to add a strategic rationale and grandeur to the Hindu rashtra.

Although a Congress-led alliance has governed India since 2004, Hindutva

as articulated by the BJP remains an important component of India’s political

culture (which contains possibilities of their resurgence to power as the

national government of India). Accordingly, there are two conclusions (one

theoretical and one practical) with which I would like to end. First, any

reading of security in nationalist discourses must demonstrate effort to con-

sider the relationship between political leaders’ ideology (such as communal

ones like Hindutva), articulation of statist identities, and (in)securities –

barring which such discourses will be susceptible to charges of communalism,

and for good reasons. Second, following Weldes et al.’s (1999) argument that

construction of identities affect (in)securities and vice versa, I argue at a more

practical level that manipulation of communal ideologies to meet the vested

interests of state leaders and their implications for inter-state security relations

are neither peripheral nor disconnected issues. In fact, it is precisely because

of these reasons, i.e. the ways in which the BJP’s communal/ideologicalorientations have guided (the contested formulations of) India’s nationalist

identity and nuclear (in)security perceptions – that a rereading of the role

of ideology as a manipulative narrative in India’s nationalist discourse

becomes all the more imperative and compelling.

Acknowledgement

The author wishes to thank the two anonymous reviewers and Dr James

Chiriyankandath (Editor) for their valuable comments on this article.

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Notes

1. In this paper, I highlight the ideological perspectives of the Congress Party and the BJP

because the Congress Party has predominantly formed the national government of India

(with brief interruptions) and has, at least publicly, subscribed to a secularist ideology. In

contrast, the BJP subscribes to the Hindutva ideology. Owing to the different ideological

perspectives of the two parties, it will be interesting to interrogate how their leaders’

ideologies have discursively articulated India’s nationalist identities with divergent

notions of insecurities.

2. The US agreed to give a formal guarantee to protect India in the event of a nuclear attack

by China – with the stipulation that India would not begin its own nuclear weapons pro-

gramme. This proposal, which implied curbing India’s nuclear sovereignty, was rejected

by the AEC.

3. This reiteration was partly because the promises that the atomic energy establishments

had made in the previous decade to be a panacea to India’s hydro-electricity production

were dimmed by then, and the establishment required a different rationale for its exist-

ence. India’s insecurity scenario was thus tailored towards making a bomb, as a defensive

project, to justify those establishments’ existence.

4. Efforts to this end included the transfer of nuclear and missile technology to Pakistan

(such as M-9 and M-11 ballistic missiles) and aiding Pakistan to acquire missile and

fissile components.

5. This is because Clause XIV of the treaty stipulated that India as a signatory of the treaty

would be restricted from undertaking any further nuclear testing.

6. When the US surveillance satellites picked up the evidence of these preparations and the

US Ambassador to India confronted Rao, he called off the tests.

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