by JAWED NAQWI
Z.A. BHUTTO prescribed grass as the food that his people would merrily eat to mobilise resources for Pakistan’s bomb project, but he was not being original.
Reports from North Korea hinted at widespread starvation in what was then an aspiring nuclear weapons state. With the bomb in hand, the country is said to live on food dole from some of its perceived foes.
In Bhutto’s neighbourhood, when Indira Gandhi first tested the bomb in 1974, thousands of impoverished Indians were already scraping hybrid tree roots for a meal, which would become more precarious with seasonal drought and floods. Credible studies have likened populous Indian states — despite Manmohan Singh’s economic wizardry, or perhaps because of it — to sub-Saharan Africa.
Pakistan’s test of the Shaheen-1A nuclear missile on Wednesday followed a pattern of destitution. The government has not been able to rehabilitate victims of recent floods and earthquakes but it feels no shame boasting of a missile that can hit more parts of India but not do much more for its own people.
India’s successful launch of Agni V a few days earlier means it can target every part of China. As if on cue, the Indian media went out of its way to emphasise that the new missile would not reach America or Western Europe — so much for claims of nuclear sovereignty.
Indians are evidently unconvinced that ceaseless self-congratulation can be a sign of myopia. If TV-watching audiences in Delhi and Mumbai have been led to see Pakistan as a failed state, should they at least not be apprised also of the flip side to the assumption — that a supposedly failed state is still capable of showing off its ‘scientific’ achievements?
Does it do India credit to exult over a technology, which in theory or even in practice a North Korea or an Iran can replicate with equal ease? What Indians can boast of, if that is what they must do, is that the world in its strange wisdom has turned a blind eye to South Asia’s dangerously poised arsenal of bombs and missiles.
In any equitable democracy, with over a billion people to feed, 80 per cent of them living on less than a dollar a day, each Indian paisa spent on the military should be deemed a serious criminal offence. And that is only one part of the picture.
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(Thanks to Mukul Dube)