Strange Gravefellows

I came from a city renowned for its processions, but I had seen nothing like it. On the morning of June 18, 1982, on a sweltering summer day, I saw New York City come to a complete standstill. In the days preceding the 18th, various figures had been bandied about, huge, fantastical, for a rally in the US—100,000, 150,000, a man even went so far as to predict that up to 250,000 people would turn up and everyone told him this was America and to get off the hallucinogenic drugs.

But by 10 am on the day, the 2.5 lakh walla was looking conservative. People had begun trickling in over the previous week. Many had come the previous night, parking their cars in New Jersey and taking the bus or the train. Few had come en masse like they did for the rallies I had seen in Calcutta, and thus no one, not even the organising umbrella group, had any real idea of how many people were actually going to be there.

The plan was to march down Fifth Avenue to Central Park, which was the final destination. The police had agreed to keep Fifth Avenue free and kept Broadway as a standby, ready to be cleared if needed. By mid-morning all the major avenues leading from south Manhattan to Central Park were unavailable for traffic. The numbered streets which run at right angles between the avenues were also jampacked. The speeches and concert were supposed to begin at three.

By half past twelve Central Park—a huge stretch of green bigger than Delhi's Boat Club, Calcutta's Maidan and all of South Bombay's open grounds put together—was completely full. Organisers were telling people to stop where they were because there was no more space to proceed. They were trying to set up loudspeakers as far away as 42nd Street so that people could hear what would be said on the stage more than a mile away.

By the time the rally broke up, around 6 pm, radio stations were quoting police sources as having conceded that 750,000 people had attended the rally. Next morning the newspapers came up with a slightly more realistic figure: the general consensus was that between a million and 1.2 million people had participated in the anti-nuclear march.

I got out of the rally and met up with a friend from out of town at a pre-arranged point. We'd both seen many posters, slogans, banners that day, many witty, many beautifully painted, many hard-hitting. But as we walked away we saw one that would remain with us. The man was middle-aged, a trucker from all we could tell by his clothes, perhaps a Vietnam veteran. The placard he carried was inelegant. It said: "The only good nuke is a dead nuke." And under it, the second sentence: "The only good nuke-lover is a dead one."

 The last few weeks since the Pokhran explosions have been bizarre. For me, the feeling is one of a deja vu of a time that I know I have not lived through, something akin to the '50s in America and, simultaneously, of a time that is coming, a time that one has seen already, yet one that must be lived through again, with a possibly very different and horrible conclusion. When I left the States in the early '80s, the nuclear lobby was on the retreat. The general consensus was that the huge stockpiles in the US and the USSR needed to be reduced before being done away with completely. A month short of 16 years after the New York march, I woke up in New Delhi to find that the nuke-lovers have come crawling out of their coffins.

On the Saturday after the blasts, the memory of Manhattan kicking in my head, I found myself walking from another potential ground zero—one amongst a trickle of people protesting against Pokhran. Passengers in buses going in the opposite direction stared at us as if watching some new, weird species in a zoo. There seemed to be no understanding of what was going on and there certainly was no visible anger or resentment. No one yelled "deshdrohi" or "gaddar" and neither did anyone jump out of the bus and join the march.

In a piece that would be delicious, hilarious, were it not more puke-making than nuke-making, Swapan Dasgupta chortles that foreign camera crews looked for protests for 72 hours after the blasts and returned disappointed. Damn right, they may have. If there had been foreign camera crews in America for 72 hours after Hiroshima or Nagasaki, and had they been looking for antinuclear protests, they too would've returned disappointed. There were no marches in the States after Fat Man and Little Boy. There were none when they exploded the hydrogen bomb a few years later, with more or less the equivalent of the technology that some of us are so proud that "Indian" scientists have "achieved" today.

The marches came a few years later, as did the analysis, debate and awareness. Then they built up. Slowly reached critical mass, if you like. The New York rally, the biggest ever to take place in America till that time—right in the face of the country's honeymoon with one megalomaniac make-up addict called Ronald Reagan—came a full 37 years after a B-29 bomber named after its pilot's mother, Enola Gay, proudly announced the arrival of the ultimate instrument of global harakiri.

The June '82 rally, and the huge wave of informed public opinion it represented, obliged the Reaganite hawks to rethink their military expansion plans. The route to that million-strong rally was not easy. The first peace marchers in the US, Britain and Germany got called all sorts of names, starting with "traitors", "pinko kooks", "cowards" and moving on to much worse.

Around the time the anti-Vietnam and anti-nuclear movements first began to gain momentum, some time in 1968, a new film quickly reached cult status in the US. Cheaply but superbly made, it was called The Night of the Living Dead. In it, horrifying humanoid monsters rose out of graveyards and began to kill "ordinary" human beings. The killing didn't mean death, it meant that the victims became transformed into the Living Dead themselves and then carried out the farz of the Living Dead parivar—which was to grab and mutate those untouched by Living Death.

The living dead of the US military-industrial complex may have had to shrink back into their philosophical graveyard across the years, but they ain't giving up without a fight. If they can't have a full party at home, they are going to make damn sure they, or those they have infected, carry on the orgy abroad. Every time I heard or read the argument that "India ne America ko dikha diya",laughter wells up inside me, laughter that is quelled only by a far more powerful nausea.

Pokhran signifies nothing like a clarion call of a "free nation" coming into its own. Nothing's swadeshi about it, except, perhaps, the sight of Atal Behari doing shashtang pranaam to the ultimate Americanism.

BecausePokhran is the gross and final capitulation of anything we can imagine called "our culture" to the insane and obscene philosophy of a small powerful clique that used to sit in fortified castles and laboratories in Germany, castles with innocuous names like Berchtesgaden, laboratories with innocent names like Peenemunde. From Berchtesgaden and Peenemunde, the Living Dead moved to well-protected houses in Washington, Virginia and Maryland, from where they multiplied to spread into well-protected dachas outside Moscow, Kiev and Sebastopol, from where they managed to transmute themselves, to come alive in the gracious bungalows surrounded by well-kept lawns behind the circles of barbed wire in Lutyens' Delhi.

The special thing about the Living Dead in the movie was that they grabbed who they could, caste and creed no bar. One moment you thought you were talking to your brother and when he turned around, oh no, he was an LD and you were done for.

POKHRAN-II has made for strange gravefellows. In what has passed for a "debate" around India's belated loss of nuclear virginity, the lines have more or less been childishly clear. On one side there were likes of Mr Dasgupta and Chandan Mitra (he of the every-Indian-walks-taller-today fame, never mind that every Indian now walks more naked to the radiation of poverty, the moral ground scorched from under his feet by this series of obsolete fireballs) and on the other you have the pushers of the "bomb is vital but the blasts were badly timed/bad because it was the BJP that did the timing" line. A precious few people seem willing to actually question the notions behind words and phrases such as deterrent, retaliatory capability, weaponisation, stability through strength, no first strike policy, etc.

But why be hard on the armchair Rottweilers of the right—they are just doing their job after all—when you get nuggets like "to drive India towards either hysteria or isolation...would be a disservice to the nation and an insult to the very talent that has given India the comfort of security" (italics mine) from the likes of M.J. Akbar. What comfort, Mr Akbar? What security? What talent? Don't you know by now no nuclear war is "winnable"? Don't you know that the presence of nuclear weapons creates its own insecurity, its own obscenely costly paranoia? Some people have just copied successfully an instrument which, even if a single Agni or Ghauri is never launched, will rape the future of your children and mine. Would you call rape a talent?

Another collector's item is Rajdeep Sardesai's column in Sunday. "Clearly in the field of atomic energy we are second to none. (Oh no? Ever heard of delivery systems, Rajdeep? Know what it costs to sustain an effective 'deterrent' on top of your conventional army?) Dr A.P.J. Abdul Kalam is the Sachin Tendulkar of the defence research establishment (this one is more painful than a clumsy slash outside off-stump—nothing Tendulkar about it, except that the thinking does belong to a 24-year-old of substantially less intelligence than Sachin) his white mane bequeathing him with a halo of wisdom...."

Wisdom. Another American movie has preyed on my mind since June 11. Released in 1963, it was made by Stanley Kubrick and it was called Dr Strangelove or How I Learnt to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb. The plot is simple: a commander of a US nuclear airforce base goes mad and orders a pre-emptive nuclear strike against the USSR. As the B-52 bombers begin their final pre-launch manoeuvres, the commander's madness is discovered by the US military command and the President (played by Peter Sellers) is rushed to the nuclear command centre. With him is Dr Strangelove (a wonderful caricature of Edward Teller, the "father" of the H-bomb, also played by Peter Sellers in the second of his three roles in the film) who sits in a wheelchair and watches his systems go into their unstoppable madness with barely disguised glee. Strangelove's right hand has a volition of its own—every time he wants to say yes to a question, the hand goes up in a Nazi salute and he has to slap it down with his other hand.

Sellers also plays another famous role in a film called The Party—that of the wannabe American "Hindoo" Dr Vrundi V. Bakshi. The caricature, with its ersatz south Indian accent was, to say the least, offensive at the time, but now I miss old Peter Sellers. How wonderfully he would have fusio-ned Dr Bakshi with Dr Strangelove, the wannabe Yank with the ex-Nazi scientist.

Figures from Galileo to Einstein to Oppenheimer have always insisted that the scientist is morally responsible for the uses he allows his work to be put to. Our Indian Strangeloves are surely not above this. Their consciences paralysed, it is irrelevant whether the moral wheelchairs they sit in are designed by the BJP, the Congress or the Left coalitions. As long as those right hands keep whipping up to political commands,they are culpable. They will ultimately share responsibility not only with the people who happen to be in power at the time, but also with their equally "wise", "talented" and hard-working Pakistani counterparts.

Kubrick's Strangelove ends with a haunting sequence. All attempts at stopping the last B-52 have failed. The American bomber manages to reach its target deep in the Soviet Union. The bomb hits. The Russians have warned the Americans that they have an equally crazy, equally unstoppable system, one which is designed to retaliate automatically and massively if a single American nuclear bomb explodes on their soil and they are not lying. As one mushroom cloud goes up after another, the only sound you hear is a woman's voice singing We'll meet again someday. It is one of the most frightening moments in cinema. Transfer the song to the subcontinent and what song could you put on the soundtrack? My candidate would be an old classic—Tere mere sapne ab ek rang hai. Ho jahan miley chahey, ham sang hai...." Perhaps nuke-lovers everywhere should start their singing practice.