Nuclear Apartheid

"Nuclear Apartheid" as Political Position: Race as a Postcolonial Resource?
Author(s): Shampa Biswas

Source: Alternatives: Global, Local, Political , Oct.-Dec. 2001, Vol. 26, No. 4, Race in
International Relations (Oct.-Dec. 2001), pp. 485-522
Published by: Sage Publications, Inc.
Stable URL: https://www.jstor.org/stable/40645031
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Alternatives 26 (2001), 485-522
"Nuclear Apartheid"
as Political Position:
Race as a Postcolonial Resource?
Shampa Biswas*
Reflecting on the colonial traces that remain in the current conduct

and study of global politics, Roxanne Doty expresses her frustrations
with "the very definition of the field of international relations, whose
central problems and categories have been framed in such a way as to
preclude investigation into categories such as 'race.'"1 While scholars
of international political economy have brought considerable atten-
tion to questions of global material inequalities and culturalist/
constructivist approaches have highlighted issues of discursive and
representational power, the category of race still continues to be con-
spicuous by its absence from the field. However, this absence is less
curious in the subfield of security studies, which remains perhaps one
of the most enduring bastions of neorealism. When questions of
"order" (couched as peace) continue to be privileged over questions
of justice, as is the case in much of mainstream security studies, there
is little epistemic space to raise the question of race. But even the new
critical turn in security studies, which has done much to unsettle the
epistemological and ontological presuppositions in dominant security
thinking, has failed to raise the question of race as an explicit cate-
gory of analysis.
India's decision to nuclearize in May 1998 propelled it into the
international limelight, and along with the reprimands, resolutions,
and statements that were rapidly issued by international bodies like
the U.N. General Assembly and the Conference on Disarmament, re-
gional bodies like the Non-Aligned Movement and the European
Union, governments from both the North and the South, and many
nongovernmental groups and organizations, all kinds of issues began
to be raised with respect to India's motivations, the intelligibility of
such a decision, the consequences of this act for regional and global
*Whitman College, Walla Walla, WA
485

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486 "Nuclear Apartheid" as Political Position
security, and so on. Little attention, however, journalistic or scholarly,

was paid to the use by the Indian government of a significant racial
signifier - "nuclear apartheid" - to justify and defend its actions. Sim-
ply put, the nuclear-apartheid position quite starkly and compellingly
points to the material inequities in the distribution of global nuclear
resources - inequities that are written into, institutionalized, and le-
gitimized through some of the major arms-control treaties, creating
an elite club of nuclear "haves" with exclusive rights to maintain nu-
clear arsenals that are to be denied to the vast majority of nuclear
"have-nots." What insights might we gain, as scholars of international
relations, from interrogating the invocation of race through the de-
ployment of the nuclear-apartheid position?
My attempt in this article is to draw out the dynamics of two
processes of racialization through a critical scrutiny of the nuclear-
apartheid position - both processes participating simultaneously in
co-constructing racialized domestic and international hierarchic or-
ders. In other words, I will argue that the nuclear-apartheid position,
articulated in the voice of the Indian government, simultaneously
performs a dual role: At the same time that it points to a series of
racial exclusions in the contemporary global order, it also masks, and
hence constitutes an "Indian nation" through another series of racial-
ized exclusions. I argue that both these dynamics need to be under-
stood simultaneously in order to grasp the force and the effect of de-
ploying this position. I will briefly explain.
It is clear that the concept of apartheid draws its enunciative force
from the category of race, and I will argue that the deployment of the
nuclear-apartheid position by the Indian government points to a
racially institutionalized global hierarchy. In other words, scrutinizing
the nuclear-apartheid position means at the very least taking seriously
the manner in which the deployment of such a racial signifier by the
Indian government is able to unsettle a certain taken-for-granted ter-
rain in the conduct of international relations and in the writing of the
discipline. What happens if we take seriously the opposition of the In-
dian government to some of the most prominent international arms-
control treaties, such as the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT)
and the Comprehensive Test-Ban Treaty (CTBT), as well as its decision
in 1998 to declare itself as a nuclear-weapons state (NWS) despite the
emerging global norms against nuclearization and the threat of eco-
nomic sanctions, in the name of nuclear apartheid - using perhaps
one of the most potent racial signifiers of our contemporary times to
register its frustrations with, and resistance to, the unequal distribution
of global warfare resources? Rather than simply dismissing this position
because of the level of abhorrence that has come to be attached to
weapons of mass destruction, I argue that there is an epistemic g

158.109.94.83 on Wed, 24 Apr 2024 16:07:57 +00:00
Shampa Biswas 487
from seeing the Indian decision to test as a statement against a racial-

ized inequitable global order.
However, despite the critical leverage that the category of apar-
theid as used by the Indian government carries, the category itself is
analytically problematic, and its deployment is politically disturbing in
other ways. On the one hand, as the article will show, there are a
whole host of ways in which the concept of apartheid that lays implicit
claim to certain inalienable democratic entitlements is simply unten-
able, given the fundamentally undemocratic character of nuclear
weapons. At the same time, the political implications of India's nu-
clearization under the aggressive, exclusivist regime of the Hindu na-
tionalist party (the BJP), does not bode well either for regional security
or for the global disarmament agenda. But much more importantly,
this article argues that the use of race through the nuclear-apartheid
position can also simultaneously mask a series of exclusions - domes-
tically and internationally - and indeed in its use by the BJP govern-
ment comes to play a "racialized, boundary-producing" role that
maintains that division at the expense of marginalized sections of the
Indian population. In addition to exploring the usefulness of "race"
as a category of analysis in examining the BJP's imagination of the
Hindu/Indian nation, I also look at how the BJP draws on a racist
global discourse on Islam and Muslims. Recently, critical-security
scholars within IR have raised and problematized quite compellingly
the questions of "whose security?" and "what kind of security?" does
nuclear/military security provide.2 Taking seriously the global racial-
ized exclusions that the nuclear-apartheid position points to, I want to
problematize the implicit referent (i.e., the Hindu/Indian nation) in
whose name this position is being deployed by the BJP and raise ques-
tions about the political interests that are served by this deployment.
The ultimate purpose of this article, then, is to interrogate, criti-
cally, the category of nuclear apartheid as deployed by the Indian gov-
ernment in order to think through how the silence on race within the
field of international relations enables and constrains its deployment
as a postcolonial resource, and what implications that offers for peace
and justice. The article begins with discussing the security environ-
ment and the domestic political context within which the decision to
test was made. This first section of the article looks at the rise of Hindu
nationalism in contemporary Indian politics, finding the immediate

trigger to the tests in this domestic political environment, and scruti-
nizes the realist "external threats" argument from within this context.
The next section of the article presents and analyzes the nuclear-
apartheid position as articulated with respect to the two prominent
arms-control treaties - the Comprehensive Test-Ban Treaty and the
Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty - and points to the global structural

158.109.94.83 on Wed, 24 Apr 2024 16:07:57 +00:00
and racial hierarchies that make possible the effective deployment of

such a position by the Indian government. Finally, the article turns to
a deconstruction of the nuclear-apartheid position to demonstrate
both its analytical paucities as well as the political function it serves in
the contemporary Indian context in effecting "new kinds of racializa-
tions." I conclude with some reflections on conceptualizing race
within global politics and the implications of taking race seriously for
issues of peace and justice.
The "Hindu Bomb''?

Domestic Politics and Security Threats
On May 11, 1998, the Indian government exploded three nuclear de-
vices, and followed this with two more explosions a couple of da
later. Shortly thereafter, the Pakistani government responded
exploding six nuclear devices, on May 28 and 30. These two even
marked the emergence of India and Pakistan as declared nuclea
weapons states from their earlier, more ambivalent, position a
nuclear-capable states.3 The dominance of neorealism in IR generally
and more specifically within security studies, has meant the privile
ing of external security threats as the dominant explanatory variab
for foreign/security policy decision making. However, it seems best
see the immediate trigger to the Indian decision to declare itself un
abashedly as a nuclear power as a product of a certain kind of
domestic politics - that is, the politics of Hindu nationalism.4 In th
section, I will elaborate on the domestic context within which the de-
cision to nuclearize was made, paying close attention to the politics
Hindu nationalism in contemporary Indian politics, and analyze t
external-security-threats argument from within this context.
The Rise of Hindu Nationalism
The Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) is the mainstream, most public, a

relatively moderate face of the political formation one may call Hind
nationalism. From a very marginal electoral presence, the party has
been fairly steadily improving its electoral performance since t
early 1980s, and has been the party in power since 1998. But the su
cess of the BJP and of Hindu nationalism in general extends beyond
its electoral performance. To focus exclusively on the electoral r
and fall of the BJP draws attention away from the widespread com
munalization of everyday life reflected in a variety of ways, a proce
begun under Indira Gandhi's and Rajiv Gandhi's "secular" Congre
governments, but vastly exacerbated under BJP rule. At one level, th

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Sham-pa Biswas 489
increasing visibility of several Hindu nationalist organizations, many

quite militant, and most associated with the BJP, in Indian politics and
society (along with the significant rise in communal violence in the
1980s and 1990s), is an indication of the changing general climate of
opinion in the country. This includes the Rashtriya Swayamsevak
Sangh (RSS), the Vishwa Hindu Parishad (VHP), the Shiv Sena, and
the Bajrang Dal, among others - often collectively called the Sangh
Parivar (family of organizations) .5 Even though there are some dif-
ferences between the various organizations, and sometimes tensions
between them and the BJP, it is important to recognize the very
strong connections among them that give them a measure of organic
unity. These connections make it possible for the BJP to project a
more politically benign face, while organizations like the RSS and the
VHP carry on aggressive mass campaigns on more controversial and
overtly communal issues.6 Also important here is the communaliza-
tion of several state institutions, such as the judiciary, the civil service,
the police, the paramilitary forces, and sections of the armed forces,
as well civil-society institutions such as educational institutions and
large parts of both print and broadcast media. At another level, the
BJP and these other organizations have remarkably changed the po-
litical idiom and discourse of Indian politics, reflected not only in the
kinds of issues and forms of political debate but also in popular cul-
ture and everyday language. The attempt by the Sangh Parivar to cre-
ate a new "common sense" on what it means to be Indian is a hege-
monic project that has made religious minorities in India particularly
vulnerable to physical and other kinds of violence. Later in the arti-
cle, I will scrutinize much more closely the cultural construction of
the Hindu/Indian nation implicit in the BJP agenda.
BJP Foreign Policy
The position of the BJP (and its predecessor the Jan Sangh) has been
somewhat complex with respect to foreign policy. This has been
clearly the case in the realm of political economy and the orientation
of the party to foreign capital. While a section of the Sangh Parivar,
sometimes quite vocal and public, has clearly expressed its opposition
to what it sees as foreign economic imperialism, the general policy
orientation of the party has been clearly in favor of attracting and re-
taining foreign capital.7 Indeed, the conjunction of Hindu national-
ism and the liberalization of the Indian economy are not altogether
an accident. In that sense, the argument that ruling coalitions pursu-
ing economic liberalization are more likely to embrace nuclear
regimes seems clearly contradicted by the BJP's decision to test in the
high noon of globalization in India.8 Sumit Sarkar in fact argues that

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India's decision to nuclearize only helps foreign capital, as the "BJP

regime is now desperate to offer all manner of concessions to foreign
business interests, provided it can keep its new and dangerous toy."9
But despite the differences on the issue of foreign capital, there
has been little dissension within the ranks of Hindu nationalists on
the issue of nuclear policy. Party manifestoes since the inception o

the Bharatiya Jana Sangh (the Hindu nationalist predecessor of
BJP) in 1951 have unapologetically advocated the nuclearization
India. Whatever might have been the position of the party with re
spect to federalism within India, the foreign-policy orientation of t
party has been in favor of a "strong state," or what might be calle
national-security state. It might even be argued that this strong m
tarized state also helps to compensate for certain kinds of postcolo
nial anxieties of mimicry, as India bends to IMF pressures and mak
itself vulnerable to MacDonaldization. As the article will later argue
"race" becomes a particularly valuable postcolonial resource in e
fecting such compensations, even as it partakes in the production o
new kinds of domestic racializations.
India Goes Nuclear: Competing Explanations
Now it is important to keep in mind here that India's nuclear pro

gram had developed and thrived for a long period under previous
"secular" governments that had nevertheless made a conscious deci
sion to not declare India as a nuclear power.10 Hence, rather than ask
why India went nuclear, the more interesting question to pose would
be: What configuration of social and political forces within India, and
what pressures from the external environment, made it conducive for
the India government to acknowledge its nuclear capability? It is clea
that the immediate trigger to the decision to conduct the tests on May
11, 1998, might be found in the foreign-policy orientation of a mili-
taristic, chauvinistic, aggressive party, that at the time was also a new
party in power struggling within an unstable coalition government.11
Reports that the very short-lived (thirteen days) minority BJP govern
ment in 1996 had also ordered such a test would confirm this posi
tion. The immediate, enthusiastic response generated among a cer
tain section of the Indian population, captured in particular in
national and international media coverage of widespread street cele-
brations, certainly bolstered the image of the party somewhat.12
The deteriorating security environment or the Sino-Pakistani
"politics of encirclement" that the BJP government named as the rea-
son for its decision does not hold up to scrutiny, invalidating a con-
ventional realist explanation for the tests.13 Let us first consider the

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Shampa Biswas 491
case of China. Even if one might make something of the strained re-
lationship between the two countries since 1962, it is not clear why
India would decide to go nuclear in 1998 (rather than at any previous
time when it was also capable of doing the same) when Indo-Sino re-
lations had been steadily improving since the resumption of diplo-
matic relations between the two after the end of the Cold War. Not
surprisingly, the Indian government found itself embarrassed by th

rash pronouncement of the Chinese threat and had subsequently
make hasty diplomatic efforts to repair the damage caused in the re
lationship as a consequence of this decision. While some territorial dis
putes still exist between the two countries, there has been no clear ev
idence of Chinese hostile or expansionary ambitions in the South
Asian region.14 The existence of various unresolved issues betwee
India and China, such as over the question of Tibet, still does no
point to any easy calculus of an immediate Chinese security threat ne
cessitating Indian nuclearization at that particular time.
The Pakistani threat is more complicated. In many ways, Pakistan
military policy has been reactive to India's. This has been clear with
respect to Pakistan's position on international nonproliferation
treaties such as the NPT and the CTBT - Pakistan refusing to sig
such treaties unless India does the same - and was also demonstrated
with Pakistan's decision to conduct six nuclear explosions of its own
following India's tests.15 Pakistan's nuclear capability has also always
been known to have been smaller than India's; furthermore, the clear
conventional weapons advantage that India had over Pakistan is now
rendered moot with the equilibrating complications that nuclear
weapons bring to the security dynamic.16 However, it could be argued
that despite the absence of any clear, identifiable "objective" source of
danger, the "Pakistani threat" is rendered more intelligible through
the ideological constructions of an anti-Muslim party.17 Since the very
emergence of postcolonial India occurred through its separation
from Pakistan, there is a sense in which the very terms of indepen-
dence generated the structural conditions of permanent Indian "in-
security" vis-à-vis Pakistan, an insecurity only amplified by nucleariza-
tion. But, furthermore, nuclear foreign policy aimed at "Islamic
Pakistan" helps produce, in a country otherwise ridden by contradic-
tions,18 "Hindu India" - a coherent, intelligible entity; simultaneously,
the BJP becomes lodged quite securely as the voice of this body. It is
interesting in that light, as Mohammed Ayoob points out, that several
other "domestic" issues that had occupied a more prominent place in
the BJP political agenda were relegated to the margins, while the nu-
clearization issue became significant.19 If the representation of dan-
ger is integral to the process through which foreign policy secures a
state's identity, one might see the salience of the "external threats"

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argument in the ability of nuclear policy to performatively constitute

the Indian nation-state in a way that such "domestic" issues are unable
to do.20 Below, I will have more to say on the racialized construction
of Pakistan as the "external enemy" in BJP rhetoric.
Enunciating the "Nuclear Apartheid" Position
Understanding the "nuclear apartheid" argument and the manner in

which it has been articulated requires a close analysis of two of the
several international treaties existing in the realm of nuclear-weapons
politics. Both these treaties generated considerable controversy, in
particular with respect to the position taken by India on them. The
first of these is the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT) and the
second is the Comprehensive Test-Ban Treaty (CTBT).
The Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty
The NPT was first signed in 1968, came into force in 1970, and was in-
definitely and unconditionally extended when it came up for review
in 1995. The explicit purpose of the NPT is quite simple - to prevent
the horizontal proliferation of nuclear weapons. Recognizing the
peaceful uses of nuclear energy, the treaty enables non-nuclear-
weapons signatories to partake in such benefits by requiring nuclear-
weapons states to share technology and materials that could be put
to such use (article 4 and 5). In return, non-NWSs bind themselves to
the agreement to not obtain or build a nuclear weapons capability
(article 2) as well as accept International Atomic Energy Agency
(IAEA) jurisdiction to inspect its peaceful nuclear facilities (article 3),
and NWSs are prohibited from transferring any nuclear weapons
technology or any fissionable, weapons-grade material to NNWSs (ar-
ticle 1). There is a sense in which the NPT may be regarded as truly
an international treaty in its scope: every country in the world, except
Cuba, India, Israel, and Pakistan, is party to it.21
As laudable as its aims are in preventing the proliferation of
weapons as deadly and as baneful as nuclear weapons, the NPT in one
sense quite clearly reflects certain aspects of the hierarchy that char-
acterizes the contemporary global order and the presuppositions that
go with that. First, 1967 becomes the cutoff point for the division be-
tween NWSs and NNWSs in the Nuclear Proliferation Treaty, so that
all countries that demonstrated nuclear-weapons capability before
that year are automatically entitled to the "privilege" of acquiring and
retaining such weapons, and all other signatories are barred from
such acquisition.22 Five nuclear states - the United States, Russia,23

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Shampa Biswas 493
Britain, France, and China24 - -are thus recognized as NWSs by the

terms of the treaties, and all other countries automatically occupy the
NNWS status. Hence the accusation by many (including Indian gov-
ernment spokespersons) of the creation of what has been called the
"nuclear club," demarcating and legitimizing a set of "nuclear haves"
against a set of "nuclear have-nots" through the recognition imparted
by the terms of the treaty.25
Second, there is no provision in the treaty to prevent vertical pro-
liferation.26 Despite the efforts by many disarmament advocates, as
well as by disaffected states such as India, to push for the inclusion of
a time-bound commitment on the part of NWSs to move toward com-
plete disarmament, the treaty includes a fairly weak statement of pur-
pose in the form of article 6 that encourages NWSs "to pursue nego-
tiations in good faith" toward complete disarmament. Finally, the
indefinite extension of the NPT in 1995, without any substantive
amendments to the treaty, has meant what commentators have called
the indefinite "freezing of the nuclear status-quo,"27 taking away at
least one avenue of pressure on nuclear states to disarm - to hold the
"good faith negotiations" up for periodic judgment and exercising
the right to not extend the treaty on the basis of that judgment.28
The Comprehensive Test-Ban Treaty
The CTBT has brought up a host of similar issues. Following a series

of cumulating efforts to ban the testing of nuclear weapons,29 the
purpose of the CTBT is to ban all kinds of nuclear testing - in the
atmosphere, underground, on water, underwater, and in space. The
involvement and position of India in the negotiations for the CTBT
in 1996 brought forth considerable acrimony. India's refusal to con-
sent to the terms of the treaty in the Conference on Disarmament
within the United Nations destroyed the possibility for the consensus
required for CD proposals, so that the treaty had to be introduced to
the General Assembly under questionable procedures by Belgium and
Australia; there it was finally adopted by majority vote.30 It is worth
spending a little time clarifying the Indian government's negotiating
posture and the issues it raised with respect to the treaty.
First, much as with the NPT, India objected to the absence of any
time-bound commitment on the part of NWSs toward complete dis-
armament and pushed for the inclusion of such a clause (that would
lead to a phased but time-bound universal elimination of all nuclear
weapons) in the text of the treaty. As is obvious, the argument was
that while the CTBT disallowed all NNWSs from conducting any kinds
of tests that might aid in the development of any reliable nuclear-
weapons capability, the fact that NWSs had already conducted such

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tests (the results of which NNWSs were not privy to by virtue of the
NPT) made it possible for NWSs to continue building, and possibly
upgrading, their own stockpiles without there being any prohibitions
placed on that.
Second, and related to that, India also pushed for the inclusion of
an additional kind of testing not covered under the treaty - labora-
tory-based computer simulations - on the grounds that NWSs such as
the United States that already had amassed large amounts of data
from previous explosive testing also now possessed the sophisticated
computer technology to use that data to conduct simulations that
could be used to upgrade existing weapons systems.31 In that sense,
the language of the CTBT is somewhat deceptive since it could be ar-
gued that it is not "comprehensive" in its scope, and indeed a closer
reading of the treaty reveals that what it comprehensively bans is "ex-
plosive testing," not all testing.32
Third was India's objection to the "entry into force" clause, which
like all international treaties stipulated that a certain number of
countries (forty-four in this case) needed to sign the treaty for it to
come into force, and unlike other international treaties and in viola-
tion of the Vienna Convention on Law of Treaties, named India,
against its will (and forty-three other countries with ongoing nuclear
programs) as one of the countries that needed to sign the treaty for it
to come into force.33 This clause, inserted on China's insistence, ef-
fectively put India, without its signature, in the position of "holding
the treaty hostage"34 a role that it objected to and resented. In the af-
termath of the May 1998 tests, Indian leaders would claim that this
pressure to sign was "closing the window" very quickly for India to test
and declare itself a nuclear-weapons state, since signing the CTBT, in
conjunction with the simultaneously increasing pressures to sign the
NPT would effectively take away India's ability to remain ambiguously
nuclear-capable. Finally, while not a major part of the negotiations,
the issue of the intrusive nature of surveillance technology and on-
site inspections, and the power of control that that confers on P-5
countries, has also been raised.35
Nuclear Apartheid: Race in the Global Order
The nuclear-apartheid argument has been invoked fairly regularly in

the public speeches of Indian political leaders and policymakers. As is
pointed out by external-affairs minister Jaswant Singh, the division be-
tween nuclear haves and nuclear have-nots within a discriminatory
and flawed nonproliferation regime that sets "differentiated standards
of national security" creates a "a sort of international nuclear apar-
theid."36 To use the word apartheid is clearly to use a racial signifier,

158.109.94.83 on Wed, 24 Apr 2024 16:07:57 +00:00
Shampa Biswas 495
and one that carries with it a certain contemporary political reso-

nance, given the very recent shameful history of the complicity of
many First World states with the racist regime in South Africa. Under
very different circumstances no doubt, the nuclear-apartheid argu-
ment is in one sense an attempt then to point to the continuing ex-
clusions and marginalizations faced by people of color in Third World
countries in a global order dominated and controlled by privileged
whites in First World countries. Now it is clear that this black/white
distinction is problematic. Not only can China, as one of the nuclear
five, clearly not be categorized in the latter category, but it is also
problematic, for reasons that will become clearer later, to conflate
state boundaries with racial boundaries, despite the racial implica-
tions of all boundary-making exercises. However, the articulation of
"whiteness" with power is deep and compelling for many and draws
on a particular postcolonial logic. Let us, for instance, hear the words
of a scholar on Indian security writing just before the Indian tests:
There continues to exist three "White" nuclear weapons states as

part of the Western alliance to which in all likelihood a fourth one,
Russia, may be added when its "Partnership for Peace" merges into
NATO. It may be recalled that following the Indian atomic test of
1974, President Zulfikar Ali Bhutto of Pakistan had reportedly said
that there was a Christian bomb (US, Britain and France), a Marx-
ist bomb (Soviet Union and China), a Jewish bomb (Israel's bombs-
in-the-basement) and now a Hindu bomb (India), but no Muslim
bomb. Likewise, India could possibly complain now that there were
four White bombs, one Yellow or Beige bomb, but no Brown or
Black bombs, an unfair and unacceptable situation. While China
may continue to show some defiance against the policies of the
West on occasion, the nuclear distribution indicated the continuing
domination of the traditional White imperialists in an overwhelm-
ingly non-White world.37
Similarly, J. Mohan Malik, in reference to the nuclear-apartheid posi-

tion says that "an unstated reason behind India's nuclear ambivalence
had been the belief that the possession of nuclear weapons by 'white'
nations implied their racial and technological superiority that could
not go unchallenged."38 It is this sense of racial discrimination in a
postcolonial world that is invoked by a BJP spokesman when he says,
"We don't want to be blackmailed and treated as oriental blackies."39
Let us examine more closely what discrimination the nuclear

apartheid position precisely points to. "Nuclear apartheid," as de
ployed by Indian leaders, quite simply points to not just the existen
of an unequal global distribution of nuclear resources, but the legit-
imization and institutionalization of that inequality through the term

158.109.94.83 on Wed, 24 Apr 2024 16:07:57 +00:00
of contemporary international treaties such as the NPT and the CTBT.

Let us hear Jaswant Singh on this issue:
If the permanent five's possession of nuclear weapons increases se-

curity, why would India's possession of nuclear weapons be danger-
ous? If the permanent five continue to employ nuclear weapons as
an international currency of force and power, why should India vol-
untarily devalue its own state power and national security? Why ad-
monish India after the fact for not falling in line behind a new in-
ternational agenda of discriminatory nonproliferation pursued
largely due to the internal agendas or political debates of the nu-
clear club? If deterrence works in the West - as it so obviously ap-
pears to, since Western nations insist on continuing to possess nu-
clear weapons - by what reasoning will it not work in India?40
On the face of it, such an argument is hard to dispute. Clearly, both

treaties recognize a clear distinction between those able to possess nu-
clear weapons and those that are not. Further, the unequal burdens
placed on those two groups to contribute to a "nuclear-free world"
makes one wonder about the criteria that makes any particular group
of countries more "worthy" of or more "capable" of or more "respon-
sible" in possessing weapons that seem dangerous when they prolifer-
ate to others. Within a national-security problematic, the pressures
that impinge on France to acquire nuclear weapons to ward off the
dangers of an anarchic world are surely not in any demonstrably clear
fashion any greater than those that impinge on India.41 In the words
of the Indian minister for external affairs, "It cannot be argued that
the security of a few countries depends on their having nuclear
weapons, and that of the rest depends on their not."42 If security is in-
deed "high politics," then the question of the affordability of nuclear
weapons by an "underdeveloped" country like India should also be
moot. If being "secure" is always the foremost priority, then a poor
India's expensive nuclear program should make sense - unless the life
of poor people is cheap. Moreover, if deterrence is the product of
"state rationality," then the horrific calculus of "mutual destruction"
should operate as smoothly to prevent nuclear war in the Indian sub-
continent (where contiguous territory only magnifies the horror) as
it does in the European theater.43 The creeping suspicion that the ac-
centuated fear of nuclear disaster in South Asia, expressed in differ-
ent versions of "the South Asian Tinderbox" argument, are reflections
of more deep-seated prejudices about the "irrationality" of barbaric
peoples in the Third World is hard to avoid. Hence, Pratap Bhanu
Mehta attributes the popularity of the tests for Indians to the "politics
of cultural representation" - a general perception of the unstated as-
sumption in global nuclear discourse that "the subcontinent is full of

158.109.94.83 on Wed, 24 Apr 2024 16:07:57 +00:00
Shampa Biswas 497
unstable people with deep historical resentments, incapable of acting

rationally or managing a technologically sophisticated arsenal."44
However, this is not to discount the significance of issues such as
the historical relations between India and Pakistan or the under-
development of a command, control, communications, and in

gence system in either country - which add new and importa
mensions to the possibility of a South Asian nuclear conflict - bu
problematize the manner in which they "function" within a partic
discourse to create certain kinds of possibilities and foreclose oth
For instance, I believe that the historical relationship between
and Pakistan is certainly pivotal to understanding the nuclea
namic between these two states, but it is also important to point
that the dominant historical narrative of the US role in World War II
has imparted a certain "aura of responsibility" to the US decision to

use an atomic bomb, so that the United States' unique position as the
only country ever to have used a nuclear weapon is rendered beyond
ethical reproach, while India's mere possession of it becomes ques-
tionable. Why, after all, does the possession of around one hundred
or so nuclear weapons by India and Pakistan cause the kind of stir
that the more than ten thousand nuclear warheads, many on active
alert, in the United States hardly ever invoke? If such a "sense of
(un) safety" is not simply a product of the proliferation of nuclear
weapons but also has to do with "whom" these weapons proliferate to
(hence, the much greater focus on horizontal, rather than vertical,
proliferation in these treaties), then what prejudiced criteria make
the P-5 unthreatening to, and indeed in some renditions the guaran-
tors of, safety in a way not deemed possible for other countries?45
Why, if it is not about a certain kind of racism, do treaties like the
NPT and CTBT that do legitimize both structural inequities and the
presuppositions that make those possible, not appear preposterous to
scholars, commentators, and activists who find "progress" in the insti-
tutionalization of international norms? Is it not possible to argue that
the strategic objectives of treaties like the NPT and CTBT have less
to do with peace and more with maintaining a monopoly of nuclear
violence, a monopoly that is not just fundamental to the undemo-
cratic nature of the world order but can be used to sustain and main-
tain the hegemony of a few states?46

In this sense, then, the nuclear-apartheid argument does need to
be taken seriously. Not only does it point to the hypocrisy inherent in
the disarmament position taken by powerful countries but it also
points to orientalist assumptions that underlie both such positions
and the responses generated by the proliferation of nuclear weapons
to Third World countries. The argument also indicates the existence
of an international hierarchy that, even when it is recognized, is

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accepted somewhat unproblematically by those within NWSs quick to

condemn India and Pakistan without simultaneously condemning the
P-5.47 Even if one accepts that there is a middle ground between what
is seen as the "impossibility" of complete global disarmament and the
"horror" of unrestricted proliferation, and that this middle ground of
some kind of "realistic" arms-control arrangement is certainly more
attractive than its absence, the nuclear-apartheid argument does call
on us to interrogate how indeed what becomes "realistic" within this
terrain of the "middle ground" is produced through the workings
of power in the international realm. This is one sense in which the
nuclear-apartheid argument does make it possible to unsettle some of
the taken-for-granted in accounts of international relations. While its
political-strategic use by Indian leaders is largely directed at a domes-
tic constituency that can find a compelling postcolonial logic in this
symbol of discrimination and racial condescension,48 it behooves IR
scholars to take seriously and pay close attention to the claims made
in and through this symbol. Is it precisely the silence on "race" within
IR that both enables its use as a postcolonial resource by Indian po-
litical leaders and constrains scholars from interrogating critically
(without dismissing it or accepting it at its face value) the claims of
that position?
Interrogating the "Nuclear Apartheid" Position
While there may be a certain persuasive force to the nuclear apar-

theid argument, both the concept itself and its political deployment
need more interrogation. In the first part of this section, I raise ques-
tions about the underlying premise and promise of "nuclear democ-
racy" that the nuclear-apartheid position invokes. The next two parts
of this section scrutinize the political function performed by the de-
ployment of this position in effecting "other kinds of racializations" -
by looking at the domestic racialized exclusions implicit in the BJP
vision of the Indian nation and the construction of a Hindu India
by the BJP by drawing on a racialized global discourse on the th

of Islam.
Nuclear Apartheid or Nuclear Democracy?
At one level, as Partha Chatterjee has pointed out, the concept of

apartheid relates to a discourse about "democracy."49 To use apar-
theid to designate the unequal distribution of nuclear resources then
is also simultaneously to draw attention to the undemocratic charac-
ter of international relations - or, more literally, the exclusion of a

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Shampa Biswas 499
group of people from some kind of legitimate and just entitlement.

More specifically, to talk in terms of nuclear haves and have-nots is to
talk in terms of a concept of democratic justice based on the "posses-
sion" (or lack thereof) of something. "Apartheid," as Sumit Sarkar
points out, "implies as its valorised Other a notion of equal rights."50
But that this something is "nuclear weapons" complicates the issue a
great deal. If the vision of democracy that is implicit in the concept of
nuclear apartheid implies a world of "equal possession" of nuclear
weapons, a position implied in the Indian decision to test, that is a
frightening thought indeed. Yet surely even India does not subscribe
to that vision of democracy. "Would India," asks Sarkar, "welcome a
nuclearised Nepal or Bangladesh?"51 If Jaswant Singh is serious that
"the country"s national security in a world of nuclear proliferation
lies either in global disarmament or in exercise of the principle of
equal and legitimate security for all,"52 then it should indeed support
the "equal and legitimate" nuclearization of its neighbors, which is ex-
tremely unlikely given its own demonstrated hegemonic aspirations in
the South Asian region.53 Further, if India does indeed now sign the
NPT and the CTBT, and sign them in the garb of a nuclear power as
it wants to do, what does that say about its commitment to nuclear
democracy? Even if India and Pakistan were to be included in the
treaties as NWSs, all that would do is expand the size of the cate-
gories, not delegitimize the unequal privileges and burdens written
into the categories themselves.
Indian military scientists claim that India has now accumulated
enough data for reliable future weaponization without explosive test-
ing, and Indian leaders have, since the tests, indicated more willing-
ness to sign the CTBT. India has already voluntarily accepted re-
straints on the exports of nuclear-related materials, as required by the
NPT. According to an Indian strategic analyst with respect to negoti-
ation of the Fissile Material Cut-Off Treaty, the next major arms-
control treaty to be discussed in the Conference on Disarmament,
"The key question in relation to the FMCT is not if it is global and
nondiscriminatory. It is whether India has sufficient nuclear material
at hand to maintain a credible nuclear deterrent."54 If all India ever
wanted was to move from the side of the discriminated to the side of
the discriminators, so much for speaking for democratic ideals

through the symbol of nuclear apartheid.55
There are several troublesome issues here with respect to the con-
cept of "nuclear democracy." On the one hand, it seems clear that th
widespread proliferation of nuclear weapons sits ill at ease with any no
tion of democratic entitlement. It seems that rather than equalizing th
possession of nuclear weapons, it would be equalizing the dispossession
of nuclear weapons that entails a more compelling democratic logic.56

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On the other hand, there is also the question of the fundamentally

undemocratic nature of nuclear weapons themselves. At one level, the
sheer scope of such weapons to kill and destroy indiscriminately (a
democratic logic here?) renders any laws of "just war" moot. As Braful
Bidwai and Achin Vanaik point out, the very use of nuclear weapons
would be to break the principle of proportionate use of force, and
such weapons clearly cannot be made to distinguish between combat-
ants and noncombatants as required in the just conduct of war.57
In this context, it might be worth pointing to the 1996 ruling by
the International Court of Justice at the Hague that stipulated that
the "the threat or use of nuclear weapons would generally be contrary
to the rules of international law applicable in armed conflict and, in
particular, the principles and rules of humanitarian law."58 If the reg-
ulation of war can be considered a democratic exercise, then nuclear
weapons by their very nature make that exercise futile. At another
level is the secrecy that has historically and perhaps necessarily ac-
companied the development of nuclear-weapons programs, relegated
to an aspect of the national-security state that is immunized from
democratic scrutiny. Chatterjee argues that nuclear weapons involve a
technology that is intrinsically undemocratic - both domestically and
internationally - since the enormous destructive potential that they
embody requires a great deal of secrecy and inaccessibility.59 Itty Abra-
ham's excellent analysis shows how the intertwined emergence of the
independent Indian state and the atomic-energy establishment legally
foreclosed the democratic and institutional oversight of the entire
atomic-energy enterprise because of its proximity to national security.
In other words, the state sponsorship and control of nuclear science,
and indeed its constitution in and through nuclear science, makes
both science and the state susceptible to undemocratic governance.60
Apartheid Against Whom? The Interpellation of Indians as Hindus
The enunciation of the nuclear-apartheid argument by Indian politi-

cal leaders in the name of a discriminated India raises another set of
issues. Herein is a question about identity and interests. As argu

earlier with respect to the performative aspects of foreign/securit
policy, to speak in the name of India is also simultaneously to produc
India as a coherent and bounded entity. But scripting India in th
fashion means erasing the hierarchies, the exclusions, the differen
that mark the space called India. Indeed, to imagine this entity call
India as a "community" requires not just an act of collective will, b
also and always a "will to power." In other words, the question
"whose imagined community?" is rendered coherent and bounded, a
what interests are served by that will-to-power cannot be neglected.

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Shampa Biswas 501
When Indian leaders use the nuclear-apartheid argument and make

the claims to certain democratic entitlements in using that argument,
they will into being an India that is in itself neither coherent nor
bounded, and hence render invisible the incoherences and contra-
dictions that threaten that body politic.
It is here that the question of Hindu nationalism becomes partic-
ularly salient because implicit in this production of India is the estab-
lishment of a certain hegemonic vision of India (Hindu, male, upper-
caste/upper-class) that serves various specific interests. In other
words, the success of Hindu nationalism depends on the ability to in-
terpellate Indians as "Hindus," a boundary-making exercise with its
own racialized, exclusionary implications. That a significant amount
of political labor is expended by the BJP in claiming Hindus as the
"natural inhabitants" of India and on drawing the boundaries around
the "Hindu self reveals how unstable and problematic this boundary-
making exercise is. I will investigate this process a little more closely.
There is an implicit claim in the Hindu nationalist discourse about
who "belongs" to India and who is an "outsider." First, this requires es-
tablishing Hindus as the "natural" or "original" inhabitants of India
through erasing the history of Aryan conquest and settlement in
India. There has been a proliferation of literature that attempts to
rewrite this history by demonstrating the indigenous roots of Hin-
duism. Hindu militant organizations, like the RSS, have been working
among the tribal and hills people in India and attempting to bring
them into the fold of Hinduism. The labeling of such groups as van-
vasis (forest dwellers) rather than adivasis (original dwellers) suggests
a conscious attempt to erase the association of Hinduism with "alien"
Aryan roots.62 This is always accompanied by the attempt to project
Muslims as "foreigners" {Babar ki aulad, or progeny of Babar),63 as in-
vaders and conquerors, much like the British (only worse).64
The second assumption about who belongs to the Hindu com-
munity is even more problematic and has had a much longer history
of contestation. There have been at least two sources of resistance to
the Hindu nationalist definition of the Hindu community. Romi
Thapar's work has done much to problematize the very conceptu
ization of a Hindu religion or a Hindu community. She claims that i
was orientalist scholarship that attempted to reconstruct the variou
parallel systems, practices, and religious beliefs that existed in India
(better called Hindu religions, in the plural) into a coherent and ra-
tional faith called Hinduism, and this was done from the familiar per
spective of Semitic religions.65 Even more importantly, the construct
the "Hindu community" that Hindu nationalists draw on is a particu
laristic Brahmanical Hinduism that has been maintained through cas
hierarchy. Groups now designated as "untouchables" have sometimes

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been considered as "outcastes" by upper-caste Hindus, and hence not

really Hindus. Many such groups have themselves often resisted being
included within a generalized, monolithic Hindu political commu-
nity.66 Much of the current BJP support comes from upper-caste,
middle-class, urban, northern India, even though the party has at-
tempted with some limited success to broaden considerably its sup-
port structure.67 This upper-caste orientation of the party was to some
extent revealed in the reaction to the Mandai Commission's recom-
mendation, when it was charged that this would result in "aparthe

Indian style," dividing the Hindus as a community.68 Similarly, th
politics of the political parties representing lower-caste interests is
tributed a "sinister design" in "undermining the very fabric of Ind
society."69 Hence, the grassroots work conducted by the BJP, RSS,
other affiliated organizations who feel it necessary repeatedly to a
sert that Dalit groups are "part and parcel of Hindu society."70
There are also other religious groups who, although they ar
claimed by Hindu nationalists to be part of the Hindu ambit, have
jected and continue to reject such an incorporation. This includ
Buddhists, Jains, Sikhs, and various Bhakti sects such as Kabirpant
and Vallabhacharya, all of whom the BJP considers as offshoot
Hinduism but who have always resisted such inclusion. For instanc
the construction and consolidation of a singular, well-defined S
identity had itself come from the earlier resistance of the Singh Sa
movement to the assimilationist attempts of the Hindu revivalist A
Samaj at "purification" and "reconversion" in the late nineteenth a
the early twentieth centuries.71 The Sikh demands that led to the P
jab crisis are seen by the BJP as a creation of a pseudosecularist po
tics in which groups claim a minority status to use the state for its
interests. This attempt to appropriate Sikh identity erases the legi
macy of many of the genuine political demands of Sikhs that contin
to be ignored.
The point is that since the days of Hindu ideologue Savarka
Hindutva: Who Is a Hindu ? there has been an explicit attempt to f
the meaning of Hinduism by appropriating and assimilating within
fold various groups, many of whose self-identities have been staked
opposition to Hinduism.72 In Savarkar's work there is also an expli
attempt to construct this Hindu nation as a "race." It is quite comm
to see the category of "race" invoked in the writings of many of
early Hindu nationalists. Many such writers borrowed from Weste
racial theory to conceptualize religious communities as distin
"races."73 It is interesting to see that even though important id
logues like Savarkar and Golwalkar attempt to define race at least p
tially in biological terms,74 the thrust of the argument is on cult
variables. Hence a Hindu in Savarkar's discourse is one "who has

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Shampa Biswas 503
inherited and claims as his own the culture of that race as expressed
chiefly in their common classical language Sanskrit and represented
by a common history, a common literature, art and architecture, law
and jurisprudence, rites and rituals, ceremonies and sacraments, fairs
and festivals."75 Race, in Golwalkar's writing, is defined as "a heredi-
tary society having common customs, common language, common
memories of glory or disaster; in short, it is a population with a com-
mon origin under one culture,"76 and it is on this basis that the
"Hindu race" is defined. In such an analysis, race and culture are
both constituted through the category of religion.77 It is typical also
of the Hindu communal discourse, as Purushottam Agarwal points
out, that various ethnic groups owing allegiance to Islam are trans-
formed into one single race, the Muslim.78
But unlike the category of "the nation," it is very rare to find the
category of "race" explicitly invoked in the contemporary Hindu na-
tionalist discourse. Yet even though the BJP does not explicitly invoke
the category of race very much (affiliated organizations like the VHP
and the RSS still refer to race occasionally) , these early formulations
inform the BJP construction of Hindu identity and non-Hindu others.
Hence, not only are Muslims homogenized into one monolithic com-
munity, but also associated with a range of essentialized negative char-
acteristics such as "dirt," "excessive libidinal energies" or "animal sex-
uality," "backward cultural norms," and so on. Prominent here is the
phenomenal procreative power attributed to the racialized commu-
nity that is a trademark of racial discourse almost everywhere. VHP
propaganda stresses both the practice of polygamy and the virility of
the Muslim male as contributing to fertility rates that would lead to
the Muslim population eventually outnumbering the Hindus. To
quote a VHP leader, "Muslims follow a more insidious path to con-
version - seduction and then marriage with innocent Hindu girls."79
A VHP pamphlet states that the Muslim family-planning motto is,
"Hum paanch, hamare pacchis" ("We are five"; i.e., one Muslim man and
his four wives, and we have twenty-five children).80 Similarly, Muslim
migrants from Bangladesh are attributed with animal sexuality, dirt,
and undesirable social behavior, which includes in particular the rape
of Hindu women.
In other words, to hail Indians as Hindus is also an attempt to ap

propriate many non-Hindus as Hindus, while simultaneously rejecti
Muslims from the Indian nation. This is what makes the definition of
the Hindu nation within BJP discourse both problematically broa

and dangerously narrow. Hence, if the invocation of "race" through
the nuclear-apartheid position by the BJP produces India as a partic-
ular kind of nation, one must ask who is racially excluded throug
this boundary-making exercise, and with what implications. The clai

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of Hindu nationalists to represent a homogenous Hindu community

with pregiven interests in the construction of a Hindu India is a hege-
monic project that serves particular caste and class interests. Here the
question of India's poverty also becomes more relevant when it is un-
derstood that this particular hegemonic vision of (nuclear) India
makes possible the redistribution of state resources to a nuclear pro-
gram that does not have uniform effects across the Indian spec-
trum.81 If the threat of economic sanctions was unable to deter In-
dian and Pakistani nuclearization, one wonders how much of that was
a result of the unequal distribution of the burdens of sanctions within
a political body and apathy toward the plight of those most adversely
affected by such sanctions (i.e., the marginalized groups in society).
The "Global Threat of Islam" in Hindu Nationalist Discourse
Speculation on the post-Cold War future has often raised the specter
of the "global threat of Islam," exemplified most notoriously in the
scholarly work of Samuel Huntington but also fairly rampant in the
pronouncements of politicians, policymakers, and journalists who
fairly routinely make a series of racialized orientalist assumptions
about "Muslim terrorists," "Islamic fundamentalism," and so on. I am
not so much concerned here with analyzing the extent to which Islam
and the Muslim world (if at all one could draw such clear boundaries)
does indeed constitute a "threat" to the Western world or to the goals
of democracy, secularism, modernity. The critiques of a monolithic
Islamic threat have been offered vigorously and persuasively, even if
they have failed to penetrate the dominant discourse in any signifi-
cant fashion.82 What is more interesting to me here is to note how
Hindu nationalist rhetoric taps into this discourse to construct its own
homegrown version of the "Islamic threat," whether it be with respect
to Pakistan as the "external enemy" or to Muslims as the "internal
enemy." Even if, as James Piscatori points out, "the global Islamic
threat" yields "an imagined rather than an empirical transnational
Islamic unity and reality,"83 in the unequally structured terrain of the
global political economy, this "imagination" has powerful effects.
I earlier mentioned that since the partition of British India was
also the constituting moment for the birth of postcolonial India (and
Pakistan), the existence of Pakistan has always generated a particular
kind of anxiety in the postcolonial Indian imagination. The existence
of Pakistan as the "evil other" is fundamental as the external threat
that glues together the Indian nation-state. It is common for Ind

politicians, and particularly for the BJP, to point to the source o
dian domestic problems in Pakistan, home of the infamous "forei
hand" that stirs domestic disturbances and provides the train
ground for terrorists in the border areas of the state. Allegiance

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Shampa Biswas 505
Pakistan tests the loyalty of Indian Muslims, Hindu nationalist ide-

alogues often claiming that Pakistan forms the object of the extra-
territorial loyalty of Indian Muslims, thus rendering their patriotism
always suspect. In addition, an existing Indian middle-class conceit
about the liberal-secular "tolerant" credentials of India vis-à-vis an
Islamic Pakistan (and Bangladesh) has also been fundamental to

postcolonial imagination of the Indian nation, so that even the B
finds it necessary to call itself a "secular" party. Secularism in a se
is what enables the distinction between the "civilized" and the "bar-
barian" here. Hence in labeling itself a "secular" party, the BJP dra
on this common sense, simultaneously rejecting what it labels a We
ernized "pseudosecularism" in favor of an "authentic" Hinduis
inspired "positive secularism" and aligning itself with the "modern
secular West." Both moves occur through juxtaposition with a raciali
"Islamic fundamentalism" discourse - one that has increasing glo
resonances. Let us look at this latter process a little more closely.
Atal Behari Vajpayee, presently interim prime minister of India
and leader of the BJP, ends a lecture on Indian secularism by d
scribing the emerging world in the post-Cold War period:
Several dramatic changes have taken place in the world. No one

could have ever even imagined of such changes a few years ago.
Some changes augur well, but there are also changes which spell
uncertainty. The end of the cold war gives rise to the hope that the
world community would move fast towards achieving the goal of dis-
armament and some part of the heavy expenditure on defence
equipment would now be made available to the third world coun-
tries for their economic development. However, the emergence of reli-
gious fundamentalism and its alliance with terrorism in some parts of the
world have caused serious apprehensions. It is a serious situation. While
keeping a watchful eye on the developments in neighbouring and
other countries, we have to remain firm in maintaining our tradi-
tions and culture. We have to give a concrete shape to our resolve
to build an India where there is no discrimination on the basis of
the community or the way of worship.84
That Vajpayee recognizes this emerging threat of religious nat

alisms, yet leaves its source unnamed, signals at least two (strateg
moves. On the one hand, as a leader of a party that is generally
cepted as religious-nationalist, his statement implicitly, but strate
cally, rejects any claim that Hindu nationalism falls within this "fu
mentalist" category (despite attempts in the West to situate it as su
In participating in the process of the "othering" of fundamentalis
he is implicitly situating the BJP in the "self" that is in oppositio
fundamentalism. On the other hand, in leaving the explicit so
of fundamentalism unsaid, Vajpayee shows his (perhaps strate

158.109.94.83 on Wed, 24 Apr 2024 16:07:57 +00:00
506 ''Nuclear Apartheid" as Political Position
acceptance of the unspoken common sense of the world - that that

source must be Islamic.85 In that sense, the "unsaid" here functions as
(and helps constitute) the site for the "taken-for-granted."
In another place within BJP discourse, the threat is more explic-
itly identified:
It is being realized by all democratic countries that today the greatest threat
to world peace emanates from Islamic fundamentalism. The fact that a re-
volt against the autocratic rule of the former Shah of Iran was suc-
cessfully led by a Muslim religious leader has given a kind of divine
injunction to Islamic clergy all over the world to establish an Islam
Utopia on the surface of the globe. To achieve their goal, they have
adopted the weapon of terrorism. This mixture has proved to be
the main destabilizer of society today.86
It is interesting here that the "self (that opposes fundamentalism)

is clearly named - it is "democracy." Democracy here becomes the
marker of a common (modern) civilizational boundary that the BJP
shares with the West in the act of naming the common enemy - (anti-
modern) "Islamic fundamentalism." An article in the BJP-published
newsmagazine BJP Today titled "The Fundamentalists [sic] Threat to
USA," which identifies the growing recognition within the United
States of the emerging Muslim terrorist threat,87 is designed to more
explicitly mark out this Islamic threat that plagues both the West and
India. Further, in "naming" this threat, the words used sometimes are
familiar and evocative: Another article says that "the emerging reality
is that India is being gradually encircled by a hostile Islamic fundamen-
talist arc which besides being a security threat, is a civilizational challenge
as well."88 The ghost of Huntington is unmistakable. The article goes
on to say that mobilizing international opinion on this score is imper-
ative.89 Clearly, international/Western opinion is more easily mobi-
lized by tapping into Western fears and apprehensions, and doing so
in a language that is familiar. These fears and apprehensions come
from a racist discourse, fairly widespread in Western media, policy-
making, and sometimes academic representations of the Islamic
threat, the Muslim terrorist, the oppressed woman in veil, and so on. If
race, as invoked through the nuclear-apartheid position, constitutes
India through juxtaposition against a neocolonial West, race in the
global discourse on Islam serves to constitute Hindu India as aligned
with the West. Both strategies, however, work to effect closure on a
hegemonic vision of the Indian nation that serves particular interests.
* * *
International relations in general, and sec

have tended to privilege the "problem of

158.109.94.83 on Wed, 24 Apr 2024 16:07:57 +00:00
Shampa Biswas 507
justice." Coming from a critical perspective, Simon Dalby points out

that national security is in general premised on the "desirability of
order," and hence has often been "a conservative formulation, equat-
ing the political status quo with desirable order."90 This political sta-
tus quo has been somewhat unsettled by the dissolution of the Soviet
threat; the primary bipolar balance-of-power framework that for so
long dominated security studies has been rendered obsolete in the
post-Cold War period. In the words of another critical security-studies
scholar, David Mutimer: "Proliferation is a problem enunciated to fill
the gap left by the Cold War."91 Examining the use of the dominant
metaphors that structure thinking about global security issues, Muti-
mer has shown how the increasing salience of the "proliferation issue"
in the post-Cold War world builds on underlying anxieties about insta-
bility and disorder, so that the very use of the metaphor of prolifera-
tion entails a conservative normative commitment to the mainte-
nance of stable and balanced orders - a commitment that "naturalizes
a particular set of relations of power and interest, privileging those

who are able to set the metaphorical agenda, and render invisible the
political basis of their claims."92 This article has attempted to demon
strate that taking the "nuclear apartheid" argument seriously is to re-
veal that underlying this fear of proliferation is a series of racialized
constructions of Third World people.
With the discrediting of scientific racism and with the increasing
recognition by scholars of race that "color" is not necessarily the
prime index or the only marker of racialization, it may not be entirel
surprising that the question of race in global politics has been so in-
tractable. Yet many scholars have argued that contemporary racism
exists in a far more invidious form precisely because it often rejects a
biologized concept of race in favor of culturalist forms, or what has
been called the "new racisms."93 The invidiousness of such racism lies
in that it often exists without making any explicit reference to race, so

that it has been said that we now live in a world with "a lot of racism
but very few racists."94 If the process of racialization and racism - a

process of hierarchization, inferiorization, and subordination of
racialized groups95 - can use all kinds of signifiers or markers, a bio-
logical and cultural tracing of its operations in global politics requires
innovative conceptual lenses and new analytical tools. However,
"race," as Roxanne Doty points out, "has most fundamentally been
about being human. Racist discourses historically have constructed
different kinds and degrees of humanness through representational
practices that have claimed to be and have been accepted as 'true'
and accurate representations of 'reality.'"96
This article has argued that if one takes "rationality" as fundamen-
tal to what makes us fully human - the premise of most Enlightenment
inspired narratives - fears of proliferation that rely on presupposition

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of the irrationality of "others" draw on racist discourses that deny a

degree of humanity to "others" in the very constitution of the "self as
human. However, this article is also premised on the claim that rather
than a generalized formulation of a singular, monolithic racism, it is
more useful to talk of historical racisms, examining processes of
racializations in the contexts in which they exist. Hence, in addition
to the construction of a racialized Third World in nuclear prolifera-
tion discourses, I have also examined the racializations of religious
and other minorities in the BJP's discourses of the Hindu/Indian na-
tion as well as the operations of a racist global discourse on Islam and
Muslims that serves this project.
Where does that leave us with the question of "nuclear apartheid"?
As persuasive as the nuclear-apartheid argument may be at pointing
to one set of global exclusions, its complicity in the production of
boundaries that help sustain a whole other set of exclusions also
makes it suspect. It is precisely the resonances of the concept of
apartheid, and the strong visceral response it generates, that gives it
the ability to bound and erase much more effectively. In one bold
move, the nuclear-apartheid argument announces the place of nu-
clear weaponry as the arbiter of global power and status, and how its
inaccessibility or unavailability to a racialized Third World relegates it
forever to the dustheap of history. It thus makes it possible for "Indi-
ans" to imagine themselves as a "community of resistance." However,
with that same stroke, the nuclear-apartheid position creates and sus-
tains yet another racialized hierarchy, bringing into being an India
that is exclusionary and oppressive. And it is precisely the boldness of
this racial signifier that carries with it the ability to erase, mask, and
exclude much more effectively. In the hands of the BJP, the "nuclear
apartheid" position becomes dangerous - because the very boldness
of this racial signifier makes it possible for the BJP to effect closure
on its hegemonic vision of the Hindu/Indian nation. Hence, this ar-
ticle has argued, in taking seriously the racialized exclusions revealed
by the use of the "nuclear apartheid" position at the international
level, one must simultaneously reveal another set of racialized exclu-
sions effected by the BJP in consolidating its hold on state power. I
have argued that comprehending the force and effect of the invoca-
tion of "race" through the nuclear-apartheid position means to un-
derstand this mutually constitutive co-construction of racialized do-
mestic and international hierarchical orders.
However, if there is one lesson to be learned from Indian nu-
clearization, it is that any vision of substantive peace at the interna-
tional level must incorporate normative claims of justice. There are at
least two conclusions that follow from this that I would like to end with.
First, any serious attempt to halt proliferation requires a demonstrated

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Shampa Biswas 509
commitment to nuclear disarmament on the part of the "nuclear

five," for both ethical and pragmatic reasons. Halfhearted attempts at
arms control, despite the very best of intentions, are always suscepti-
ble to charges of racism, and for good reason. Second, as Simon
Dalby has argued with respect to the question of "environmental
threats," security issues are not peripheral to questions of political
economy.97 Even at the global level, race and class are not discon-
nected issues. Larger structural transformations in the global political
economy are a prerequisite for global peace.
Notes
1. Roxanne Lynn Doty, Imperial Encounters: The Politics of Representation in

North South Relations (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1996), p. 167.
2. See Keith Krause and Michael C. Williams, eds., Critical Security Studies:
Concepts and Cases (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1997) for an
excellent collection of articles that (1) critically examine the newly emerging
literature that adds new threats (economic, environmental, ethnic, and so
on) to a preexisting security problematic, and (2) problematize the way in
which mainstream security studies simply presumes that the state is the only
thing to be secured. See in particular, ibid., Krause and Williams, "From Strat-
egy to Security: Foundations of Critical Security Studies," and R. B. J. Walker,
"The Subject of Security." See also Richard Wyn Jones, Security, Strategy, and
Critical Theory (Boulder, Colo.: Lynne Rienner, 1999), esp. chap. 4; and David
Mutimer, "Beyond Strategy: Critical Thinking and the New Security Studies,"
in Craig A. Snyder, Contemporary Security and Strategy (New York: Routledge,
1999).
3. It is noteworthy here that India exploded a nuclear device in 1974, but
its characterization by the Indian government as a "peaceful nuclear explo-
sion" (PNE) prevented it from earning the status of a nuclear-weapons state.
It is not clear at all that there is anything technologically distinctive about a
nuclear explosion that makes it peaceful, the significance of the characteri-
zation depending, then, on the declaratory intent of the actor to not weaponize
after demonstrating the capability to be able to do so. This indicates at least
two issues that are relevant to the arguments in this article: First, it is clear
here that declarations of intent do matter in IR, and their importance lies in
the normative force they bring to bear on a particular issue. Realist IR, with
an ontology of power that relies on physical capability, is unable to account
for this realm of global politics. Second, given the amount of speculation on
the possession of nuclear weapons (in secret) by nuclear-capable states (this
includes states that are considered to be nuclear-capable but that have not ex-
ploded a nuclear device, such as Israel, Iran, North Korea, and Libya), it is
clear that the line between the two categories is tenuous, even though the cat-
egories as distinct and different have been institutionalized in the nuclear
nonproliferation regime through international treaties like the NPT and the
CTBT. It is commonly recognized, for instance, that Israel possesses nuclear
weapons, and lists published by security-related organizations or peace-activist
groups provide estimates on the number of such weapons. Once again, it
would seem that the constitution of the two categories lies less in the physical

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attributes that they are supposed to embody and much more in the normative
parameters that make the distinction between the two sensible and significant.
4. Scott Sagan is one scholar who debunks the security imperatives of nu-
clear proliferation and urges more attention to domestic politics. See Scott
Sagan, "Why Do States Build Nuclear Weapons?" International Security 21, no.
3 (winter 1996-1997): 54-86. Similar arguments are made in the Indian case
by, for example, Braful Bidwai and Achin Vanaik, South Asia on a Short Fuse:
Nuclear Politics and the Future of Global Disarmament (New Delhi: Oxford UP,
1999); and Achin Vanaik, "The Indian Nuclear Tests: Causes, Consequences,
and Portents," Comparative Studies of South Asia, Africa, and the Middle East 18,
no. 1 (1998). The thrust of Ghosh's polemical essay is also on a similar kind
of argument: Amitav Ghosh, Countdown (New Delhi: Ravi Dayal, 1999). An-
other part of a "domestic politics" argument (a part I do not examine here)
would be take account of what one might call the nuclear epistemic commu-
nity in India, consisting at the minimum of a fairly well-entrenched nuclear
bureaucracy (Dept. of Atomic Energy, Defence Research and Development
Organization), one hawkish set of nuclear scientists with political clout, and
a group of think tanks consisting of security experts and policy analysts. In ad-
dition, some military leaders have been nuclear advocates for some time.
5. Other important organizations associated with the Parivar are the Bha-
ratiya Mazdoor Sangh (BMS - Indian Workers' Organization), a large trade-
union federation that, with a membership of forty-five lakhs, now claims a
larger membership than the Congress (I) -affiliated Indian National Trade
Union Congress (INTUC); the Akhil Bharatiya Vidyarthi Parishad (ABVP-
All-India Students' Council), a large, nationwide students' organization
whose importance lies in the fact that the younger population is the highest
rising age cohort of support for the BJP; the Swadeshi Jagran Manch (SJM -
Economic Nationalism Consciousness-Raising Forum), organized to cam-
paign for economic nationalist themes; the Dharma Sansad, an organization
of sadhus (holy men) claiming a strength of about thirty thousand; and tribal
organizations, women's organizations, and so on. The RSS has more than
eighty front organizations that deal with a variety of issues.
6. Most BJP leaders (as well as leaders from most of the other associated
organizations) come from RSS backgrounds. In fact, there is an unwritten
rule that only RSS pracharaks (leaders) can hold posts as BJP general secre-
taries. When dissensions within the BJP have threatened party discipline, the
party has set up RSS-style and RSS-aided training camps (Prashikshan
Sansthans) for all levels of party workers, including members of parliament,
to undergo training in ideology. See "Season for Change," in India Today, Oc-
tober 20, 1997, pp. 18-19, and "Training for Power," ibid., September 15,
1997, pp. 26-27, both articles by Saba Naqvi Bhaumik. Despite the differ-
ences that often surface between the BJP and the RSS, the influence of the
RSS in serving as the "ideological conscience" of the party remains strong.
See N. K. Singh, "Hindu Divided Family," in India Today, December 15, 1996,
pp. 28-32. While the BJP leaders now restrain themselves from speaking pub-
licly on some of the more politically controversial issues (and often even pub-
licly disagree with statements made and positions taken by other organiza-
tions) , restricting themselves to relatively banal public pronouncements like
"anticorruption" and "good governance," the RSS and the VHP continue to
stir up passions on religious and "cultural" issues. See N. K. Singh, "Return of
the Hindu Card," in India Today, October 15, 1995, pp. 42-47. After forming
the government, the BJP had been strategizing to use the grassroots links of

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Shampa Biswas 511
the various affiliated organizations to extend its regional and social network-
ing and building and consolidating its base. See Saba Naqvi Bhaumik, "The
Soul is the Sangh," in India Today, April 13, 1998. My point is that while there
are sometimes genuine differences of opinions and positions among these
different organizations, as we will see on the issue of Swadeshi (economic na-
tionalism), sometimes the differences also serve as a form of political strategy
as the BJP relegates the Hindutva fervor to the VHP and RSS and tries to pro-
ject itself as more moderate. But more importantly, my argument is that there
is a certain level of organic unity that, despite the ambivalences, gives the po-
litical formation that I call Hindu nationalism a certain coherence and logic.
Hence even if the electoral success of the BJP can be attributed to a number
of different voter/constituent interests and motivations (a June 1996 India
Today-MARG postelection survey revealed that only 33 percent of the people
agreed with the statement that the BJP is a communal party; 56 percent felt it
was not: see India Today, June 30, 1996), there are both larger structural
causes and, in particular, consequences of its rise to power. This is also the
reason that simply focusing on the "liberal" face of BJP Prime Minister Vaj-
payee as evidence of the political mainstreaming of Hindu nationalism is in-
adequate: See, for instance, Jonathan Karp, "Sheep among Wolves," in Far
Eastern Economic Review, May 30, 1996. For instances of how Vajpayee's liber-
alism has had to be reigned in due to party and other pressures, see N. K.
Singh, "Operating Oh So Smoothly," in India Today, May 15, 1996.
7. While there are sometimes genuine differences of opinions and po-
sitions among the different organizations in the Sangh Parivar, particularly
on the issue of swadeshi (economic nationalism), it may be argued that this
ambivalent position of the party, while reflecting different internal interests,
serves also a particular purpose (and is sometimes deployed strategically to
that purpose): This is to speak to certain middle-class cultural anxieties gen-
erated with the spread of consumer capitalism without dismantling the bene-
fits and advantages that liberalization has also brought to this section of the
population.
8. This argument is made by Etel Solingen, "The Political Economy of
Nuclear Restraint," International Security 19, no. 2 (1994): 126-169. Solingen
also misreads the BJP's economic orientation by taking some of its economic
nationalist rhetoric at its face value: ibid.: 148.
9. Sumit Sarkar, "The BJP Bomb and Aspects of Nationalism," Economic
and Political Weekly, Tuly 14, 1998, p. 1725.
10. There is a sense in which Congress secularism has always been suspect,
and jingoism or militarism in foreign-policy orientation is certainly not th
sole province of BJP-style nationalist/ religious bigotry. But more importantly
it must be emphasized in interrogating the Hindu-bomb argument that while
the decision to conduct the May 1 1 tests was made by the BJP government, this
decision was made possible by a series of decisions made under prior politica
regimes to develop India's nuclear program to the nuclear-weapons capabilit
level. Itty Abraham has shown how as atomic energy becomes the "epitome of
a modern scientific project" and national security becomes the "prime ratio
nale for state behavior," the very emergence of the Indian postcolonial stat
becomes inextricably (although contingently) intertwined with the Indian
atomic-energy establishment built under the auspices of Nehru: Itty Abraham
"Science and Power in the Postcolonial State," Alternatives 21 (1996): 321-339,
at 330. The BJP inherited a very well-developed nuclear program - ready to
go, if you will - a program that had received the patronage of several politica

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leaders much before the Hindu nationalist politics of the BJP had burst onto
the Indian political mainstream. It must be remembered here that India's
first nuclear test occurred under Prime Minister Indira Gandhi's (Congress
Party) leadership, and in December 1995 Prime Minister Narasimha Rao
(also of the Congress Party) had come very close to conducting a nuclear test
and backed away only under heavy pressure from the U.S. government. The
history of India's nuclear program does point out that it is clearly inadequate
to understand either the emergence of Hindu nationalism or the decision of
the BJP government to conduct the nuclear tests in a vacuum - that is, with-
out understanding the terrain of possibilities (both physical and ideological)
that enabled the BIP to conduct those tests.
11. See Sarkar, note 9, for an account that attributes the BJP decision to
the masculinist militaristic authoritarianism of the Hindutva project. See
Madhu Kishwar, "BJP's Wargasm," Manushi, no. 106 (1998), for more on the
gendered motivations and responses to nuclearization in India and Pakistan.
Ziauddin Sardar, "Two Asian Film Thugs Square Up," New Statesman, June 5,
1998, points to postcolonial-gendered anxieties that motivated the BJP deci-
sion. Hindu hypermasculinity became a response to the (ef)feminization of
Hindus by the British in contrast to the masculinized violence attributed to
Muslims. See Carol Cohn, "Sex and Death in the Rational World of Defense
Intellectuals," Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society 12, no. 4 (1987):
687-718, for an excellent, more general account of the gendered nature of
nuclear-strategic thinking.
12. For instance, an opinion poll conducted by India Today-MARG in
twelve major Indian cities found that 87 percent of the population approved
of the tests and 44 percent of the population said that their intention to vote
for the BJP in the aftermath of the nuclear tests increased, while only 8 per-
cent said that they were now less likely to vote for the BJP: India Today, May
25, 1998.
13. This realist explanation for India's decision is for instance the main
thrust of the argument made by J. Mohan Malik, "India Goes Nuclear: Ratio-
nale, Benefits, Cost, and Implications," Contemporary South Asia 20, no. 2
(1998). Convinced about China's expansionist interests in the region, Malik
(p. 199) finds India's nuclear policy "aimed at restoring a stable balance-of-
power in order to prevent China from assuming a policing role in South and
Southeast Asia." He sees this as the forerunner to a new global US-China
bipolar balance of power, with an alliance between the United States and
India. Similarly, Mohammed Ayoob's position on the significance of the Chi-
nese threat also seems to be taking such a realist perspective, although in a
more sophisticated way; see Mohammed Ayoob, "Nuclear India and Indian-
American Relations," Orbis 43, no. 1 (1999): 59-74. For a good overview of
India's developing nuclear program, which also takes a realist position in
privileging the security imperatives that have driven India's nuclear program
as well as the 1999 tests, see Sumit Ganguly, "Pokhran II: The Prospects and
Sources of New Delhi's Nuclear Weapons Program," International Security 23,
no. 4 (1999). It is of course common for political leaders and policymakers to
subscribe to, and invoke, a realist paradigm in justifying military postures.
Hence, even Jaswant Singh, senior adviser on defense and foreign affairs to
Prime Minister Vajpayee, who articulated the nuclear-apartheid argument
most clearly to justify India's decision, made the case for India's nuclear pol-
icy on the basis of its immediate security environment. Highlighting the Pak-
istani and Chinese threats in Foreign Affairs article, Singh points out that

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Shampa Biswas 513
"India's motives remain security" since "India lives in a rough neighborhood";

throughout the article, he goes to considerable length to highlight the dif-
ference between a "moralistic approach" and a "realistic approach": see
Jaswant Singh, "Against Nuclear Apartheid," Foreign Affairs 77, no. 5 (1998):
49, 52.
14. This is in contrast with, for instance, China's belligerent posture with
respect to claims in the South China Sea, or with regard to Taiwan and Viet-
nam. Wade Huntley points out that "although China-India relations have
been rhetorically contentious for decades, specific Chinese actions in South
Asia have been more limited than many in India perceive": Wade L. Huntley,
"Alternative Futures after the South Asian Nuclear Tests: Pokhran as Pro-
logue," Asian Survey (May/Tune 1999).
15. It has been remarked that these six tests were an attempt to even
balance of India's five tests plus the one conducted in 1974. Opinion polls
Pakistan confirm (100 percent) that the Indian threat is the sole justific
for the Pakistani nuclear program; the renunciation of the nuclear option
pends largely on the settlement of the Kashmir dispute with India and a
duction of India's conventional military advantage; about 91 percent of P
istani elites agreed that Islamabad should sign the NPT were India to do
same: Samina Ahmed, David Cortright, and Amitabh Mattoo, "Public Opi
ion and Nuclear Options for South Asia," Asian Survey, 1998.
16. The scale of damage that can be inflicted by nuclear-weapons retalia-
tion could, in one kind of security calculus, prevent the initiation of a con-
ventional attack by an otherwise powerful enemy. In that sense, the acquisi-
tion of any nuclear-weapons capability has a fundamentally equilibrating
effect, if any damage caused by nuclear weapons is deemed unbearable. That
other, cheaper, and less technologically sophisticated weapons such as bio-
logical and chemical weapons, can have the same effect has earned such
weapons the name of "the poor man's nuclear weapons." However, in another
kind of security calculus, the existence of nuclear weapons on both sides of a
security equation can make conventional warfare more likely as both (ratio-
nal) actors understand (and trust each other's understandings of) what be-
comes the warfare threshold (i.e., escalation to nuclear warfare).
17. L. K. Advani, India's home minister, called on Islamabad "to realize
the change in the geostrategic situation in the region and the world" created
by the Indian tests, particularly with respect to the Kashmir issue (as quoted
in the Hindu by William Walker, "International Nuclear Relations after the In-
dian and Pakistani Tests," International Affairs 74, no. 3 (1998): 505-528. A
public-opinion survey conducted among Indian elites (Ahmed, Cortland, and
Matoo, note 15) found that the perceived threat from China, which had been
officially named as the justification for nuclearization, ranked well below con-
cerns about the Pakistani threat. While the authors attempt to attribute the
official position to the specific knowledge about China available to govern-
ment and military/intelligence specialists, the question of how perceptions
are formed about the Pakistani threat (i.e., where the discursive resources for
"Pakistani othering" come from) requires more interrogation here.
18. The interpellation of Indians as Hindus requires considerable politi-
cal labor, both to demarcate who belongs to this "community" and to temper
the hierarchies of caste, class, and gender that rend this community. I return
to this issue at much greater length later in the article.
19. These issues included the abrogation of article 370 of the Indian con-
stitution, which gives special status to (Muslim-majority in) Kashmir, the promise

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to build a Ram temple at the disputed site in Ayodhya, where a mosque had
been destroyed by Hindu mobs in 1992, and the creation of a uniform civil
code to replace the personal codes that govern issues of marriage, divorce,
and inheritance among minority religious communities - all controversial,
domestic issues that the BJP had politicized and on which it had campaigned;
see Ayoob, note 13.
20. See David Campbell, "Writing Security ": United States Foreign Policy and
the Politics of Identity (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1992);
Campbell makes this argument in his analysis of US foreign policy in the
Cold War and post-Cold War period.
21. I am not arguing here that this wide scope makes the treaty interna-
tional in any unproblematic sense, given that many states gave their votes in
exchange for aid and that most states that did sign on had no real chance of
developing a nuclear capability, peaceful or military. As I will argue later, for-
mal sovereign equality in the global order masks a much more substantive
structural and racial hierarchy.
22. Article 9.3: "A nuclear weapon State is one which has manufactured
and exploded a nuclear weapon or other nuclear explosive device prior to
January 1, 1967."
23. The three other nuclear-weapons-possessing states that emerged from
the dissolution of the Soviet Union - Ukraine, Belarus, and Kazakhstan - all
transferred their nuclear weapons for dismantlement to Russia, thus leaving
Russia as the only nuclear-weapons state that emerged out of the former So-
viet Union.
24. These are also the P-5, the Permanent Five with veto power in the Se-
curity Council of the United Nations. The question that has arisen recently
is whether India's possession of nuclear weapons now makes it a better or
worse candidate for this august status (which India has been lobbying for) .
25. Strobe Talbott says that the "NPT was explicitly not intended to legit-
imize those arsenals (of the P-5) indefinitely," but rather was a bargain in-
tended to put a "brake on what would otherwise have been a juggernaut of
nuclear proliferation," and in that sense has been largely successful. Strobe
Talbott, "Dealing with the Bomb in South Asia," Foreign Affairs 78, no. 2
(1999): 112-113; see also George Perkovich, "Think Again: Nuclear Prolifer-
ation," Foreign Policy, no. 112 (1998), who agrees with this assessment of the
success of the NPT, even in light of the Indian and Pakistani tests, and thinks
it unlikely that this will lead to more proliferation. For a realist argument that
the NPT cannot prevent nuclear proliferation (although it makes it harder),
since the regime does nothing to address the security imperatives of states,
which is the primary motivation for nuclearization, see Bradley A. Thayer,
"The Causes of Nuclear Proliferation and the Utility of the Non-proliferation
Regime," in Raju G. C. Thomas, ed., The Nuclear Non-Proliferation Regime:
Prospects for the 21st Century (New York: St. Martin's, 1998).
26. In this respect, note the strong words of the principal Indian nego-
tiator on the CTBT deliberations in Geneva: "The transfer of nuclear tech-
nology, weapons, materials or delivery vehicles to another Nuclear Weapo
State is proliferation as much as transferring such technology to a non-N
clear Weapon State. Improving qualitatively or modernizing existing weap
is also, according to India, proliferation." See Arundhati Ghosh, "Negotiat
the CTBT: India's Security Concerns and Nuclear Disarmament, "Journal of
ternational Affairs 51 , no. 1 (1997): 245. That the term nuclear proliferation c
jures up the image of the spread of such weapons to irresponsible terrori

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Shatnpa Biswas 515
states and groups is telling of the way the term is articulated within official
and popular discourse.
27. Justifying India's decision to move from a nuclear-capable to a nu-
clear-weapons state, Jaswant Singh says that "India could have lived with a
nuclear option but without overt weaponization in a world where nuclear
weapons had not been formally legitimized" through the unconditional and
indefinite extension of the NPT; see Singh, note 13. There is a certain odd-
ity that results from Indian and Pakistani nuclearization now since by the
terms of the treaty it is not possible to legally recognize India and Pakistan
as NWSs, creating what Walker calls three classes of states: the "legal" 5 NWSs
(the P-5), the extralegal 3 NWSs (India, Pakistan, and Israel), and 183 NNWSs;
see William Walker, "International Nuclear Relations after the Indian and Pak-
istani Tests," International Affairs 74, no. 3 (1998): 505-528. In other words,
India and Pakistan cannot really sign the treaty as it currently stands unless
they are willing to dismantle their nuclear weapons program completely. Given
that neither country seems willing to pursue that option, the situation now re-
quires some more creative ways to deal with the issue. There has been some
discussion of creating a new category within the treaty to reflect this change.
But according to Deputy Secretary of State Strobe Talbott, who was President
Clinton's envoy on South Asian proliferation and security issues, "The United
States must remain committed to the long-range goal of universal adherence
to the NPT. It cannot concede, even by implication, that India and Pakistan
have by their tests established themselves as nuclear-weapons states with all the
rights and privileges enjoyed by parties to the NPT"; see Strobe Talbott, "Deal-
ing with the Bomb in South Asia," Foreign Affairs 78, no. 2 (1999): 119.
28. Periodic reviews are still held - every two years as stipulated in the
treaty. The most recent one was held in New York in May 2000. As useful as
these reviews might be, the indefinite extension of the treaty has meant the
eradication of any deadline that could be held as a means of exerting pres-
sure to make good on the faith bestowed on NWSs by NNWSs.
29. This process started with the Partial Test-Ban Treaty of 1963 (banning
atmospheric testing) which India joined in 1963.
30. Mohammed Avoob, note 13.
31. It is true for instance that France and China agreed to join the CTBT
only after hurriedly conducting a series of nuclear tests very soon after the
NPT Review Conference. It is interesting here that the United States's ability
to maintain and upgrade its systems in a reliable fashion, despite the ban on
explosive testing, was the "selling point" of the treaty within the United States:
that was the basis on which the Clinton administration attempted (unsuc-
cessfully) to persuade the Republican members of Congress opposed to the
CTBT to ratify it in 1999. Clinton pointed to the existence of the Stockpile
Stewardship Program, which not only ensures the safety and reliability of ex-
isting stockpiles of nuclear weapons, but also allows the United States to con-
tinue to develop and upgrade this stockpile - a program that has been
pointed out by others as indicating the insincerity of the United States with
regard to arms-control treaties.
32. Indeed, even this adoption of "zero-yield" or "no release of energy"
testing may seem progress given the attempt by NWSs to retain some flexibil-
ity for low-yield testing in the earlier stages of the negotiations. See Ghosh,
note 26.
33. This clause required India to sign the treaty by September 1999 or
face the possibility of Iraqi-style U.N.-imposed sanctions; see Malik, note 13:

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192. India, Pakistan, and Israel are required to sign and ratify the treaty for
it to come into effect. Israel has since signed it. See Ghosh, note 26, for an ex-
tended discussion of this issue.
34. Given that forty-one of those countries had already endorsed the
draft, Pakistan's signature was conditional on India's endorsement; Israel had
indicated its willingness to sign, and North Korea was the remaining "rogue"
state that would have to be pressured into signing; see Mohammed Ayoob,
note 13.
35. It has also been claimed that the International Monitoring System is
able to detect tests of only about 1-kiloton yields; hence, the surveillance
technology needed to detect explosive testing at very low yields (between zero
yield and one thousand tons) is available to only very few industrially devel-
oped states. So while such testing could be detected (and punished) when
conducted by NNWSs, it could be expected that any breach of the treaty by,
say, the United States might hardly be noticed. See Arundhati Ghosh, "Tam-
ing India," Times of India, Feb 26, 1999. Once again, what this points to is the
unequally structured terrain of nuclear options within the existing global
order.
36. Singh, note 13, p. 48.
37. Raju G. C. Thomas, "Should India Sign the NPT/CTBT?" in Thomas,
note 25, p. 285.
38. Malik, note 13: 201.
39. A BJP spokesman in 1993, as quoted in George Perkovich, "Think
Again: Nuclear Proliferation," Foreign Policy, no. 112 (fall 1998): 16.
40. Singh, note 13, p. 43.
41. It is important to point out here that there have been realists like
Waltz who have been more consistent in their application of the logic of de-
terrence. See, for instance, Kenneth N. Waltz, "The Spread of Nuclear
Weapons: More May be Better," Adelphi Paper No. 171, London: International
Institute for Strategic Studies, 1981. Bradley Thayer argues from a realist per-
spective that the NPT is simply a veil for power politics allowing the great pow-
ers to punish violators "in the name of a more felicitous concept, the mainte-
nance of an international norm," while retaining their own legal access to
nuclear weapons; see Thayer, note 25, p. 103.
42. As quoted in Ghosh, note 26: 249.
43. I am not arguing that the deterrence argument is compelling in it-
self, but that the persuasive force of its logic requires a certain commitment
to universal human rationality, which when it comes to nuclear proliferation
is often found wanting.
44. Pratap Bhanu Mehta, "India: The Politics of Self-Esteem," Current His-
tory (December 1998): 405.
45. Referring to the constructions of those undeterrable "people (s) with
nothing to lose" in making the case for a national missile defense system in
the United States, Marshall Beier points to the image of the savage that such
constructions evoke - such "irrationality" making them "not quite human for
lacking a fully developed awareness of self." See Marshall Beier, "Postcards
from the Outskirts of Security: Defence Professionals, Semiotics, and the
NMD Initiative," Canadian Foreign Policy 8, no. 2 (2001): 39-49, at 46.
46. The argument is sometimes made that the possession of nuclear
weapons by themselves has little to do with international hierarchy. Japan and
Germany are sometimes held up as examples of nonnuclear powers with sig-
nificant clout in international relations (and as the most likely candidates in

158.109.94.83 on Wed, 24 Apr 2024 16:07:57 +00:00
Shampa Biswas 517
a reconstituted Security Council), and Russia is offered as an example of a

nuclear power with dwindling international influence. Partha Chatterjee even
argues that nuclear proliferation in South Asia will in fact strengthen, not
weaken, international hierarchy, as the United States and other NWSs, rec-
ognizing the ineffectiveness of sanctions, feel compelled to intervene directly
to coerce India and Pakistan into signing the NPT and the CTBT; see Partha
Chatterjee, "How We Loved the Bomb and Later Rued It," Economic and Po-
litical Weekly, June 13, 1998, p. 1441. While I agree that the structuring of in-
ternational hierarchy runs much deeper than the simple possession of nu-
clear weapons, and also agree that India's and Pakistan's possession of these
weapons does little to challenge the structural bases of such hierarchy, I still
believe that it is important to draw attention to the fact that the attempt by
NWSs to retain control over such weapons, if need be by direct political in-
tervention, comes from more than simply a benign interest in creating the
conditions of peace.
47. Sumit Sarkar attributes the ability of the BJP to generate enthusiasm
for its decision to the absence, within India, of a peace movement that could
have created the appropriate awareness of the horrors of nuclear war. This
absence, Sarkar points out, has itself been a product of the antinuclear and
prodisarmament position taken by India, even in official discourse and prac-
tice: Sarkar, note 9. It is important to point out here that such a peace move-
ment has now emerged within both India and Pakistan, movements that are
increasingly making connections with those in the First World.
48. An opinion poll conducted by India Today-MARG in twelve major In-
dian cities found that while at least 35 percent of the population expected
India to become more unpopular internationally as a result of the tests, and
49 percent expected India's relations with the United States to worsen, about
92 percent of the population now felt more proud to be Indian. It is also in-
teresting here that about 64 percent of the population did not see the test as
a political move by the BJP; only 30 percent did see it as that: India Today, May
25, 1998. I will argue later that this symbol indeed produces this constituency
as a oarticular kind of oostcolonial entitv.
49. Chatteriee, note 46.
50. See Sarkar, note 9, p. 1727.
51. Ibid., p. 1727.
52. Singh, note 13, pp. 41-42.
53. As Mohammed Ayoob, note 13, argues, the Indian elite as well as the
Indian political public see the Indian state as the legitimate manager of
South Asian politics, similar to the US perception of its own role with respect
to the Americas - and in that sees the so-called "Indira Doctrine" of 1983 and
the more recent "Gujral Doctrine" as analogous to the "Monroe Doctrine."
However, in all fairness tojaswant Singh, when asked "if countries like Iraq
Iran were to conduct tests, would you deny them their right to test?" he said
"No, this is the principle. Do you deny that nations on this earth have the
right to equal and legitimate security?" Quoted in Bidwai and Vanaik, note 4
p. 256.
54. As quoted in Ayoob, note 13.
55. See Chatterjee, note 46.
56. In that sense, South Africa, as the only country in the world to have
dismantled completely its nuclear-weapons program, may be said to have
shown a serious commitment to "nonnuclear democracy." The reports that
the motivation for this dismantling was the fear of the control of such

158.109.94.83 on Wed, 24 Apr 2024 16:07:57 +00:00
weapons in the hands of the majority-black government should surely give us

pause. South African president F. W. De Klerk decided in secret to get rid of
his country's nuclear weapons stockpile and to sign the NPT before the South
African public and parliament had any knowledge of such weapons; see De
Klerk, "Think Again: Nuclear Proliferation," Foreign Policy, no. 112 (1998).
That nuclear disarmament in this context was motivated by apartheid-in-
duced racial anxieties is surely ridden with ironies here.
57. Bidwai and Vanaik, note 4, esp. chap. 6, "Indefensible Arms: The
Ethics of War and Nuclear Weapons." Bidwai and Vanaik make this argument
in the context of the morality of nuclear weapons; they make the case that it is
not only the use of nuclear weapons but even the threat of their use through
the doctrine of deterrence (the credibility for which requires the intention to
use as well as the physical capacity to use) is immoral. Hence, the very posses-
sion or manufacture of such weapons would also thereby be immoral.
58. Bidwai and Vanaik, note 4, p. 47.
59. Chatterjee, note 46.
60. Abraham, note 10: 321-339. For a discussion of the exclusionary and
specialized (and gendered) language and discourse of technostrategic com-
munities that is both seductive in its power and inhibiting of democratic par-
ticipation, see Cohn, note 11: 687-718.
61. Here I am drawing on Benedict Anderson's conceptualization of the
nation as an imagined community: Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities:
Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism (London: Verso, 1983).
62. I get this point from Gyanendra Pandey, "Which of Us Are Hindus?"
in Gyanendra Pandey, ed., Hindus and Others: The Question of Identity in India
Today (New Delhi: Viking-Penguin, 1993). I also found this to be the case
from my own survey of BJP documents that reveals the use of vanvasis and gir-
ijans (another word for forest dwellers) rather than adivasis. One of the pri-
mary RSS organizations working among the tribal and hill people is the Adi-
vasi Kalyan (Well-Being) Ashram.
63. Babar was the first Mughal emperor in the Indian subcontinent.
64. As Pandey, note 62, points out, this occurs despite the contradictory
claim also made that most Muslims in India are lower-caste, innocent Hindus
forcibly converted by Muslims. For example, Rajendra Singh, the head of
RSS, said that "ninety-eight per cent of the Muslims in Indian are converts":
see the interview in Yubaraj Ghimre, "In the Limelight, Again," in India
Today, April 30, 1994, p. 24.
65. See Romila Thapar, "Communalism and the Historical Legacy: Some
Facets," in K. N. Panikkar, ed., Communalism in India: History, Politics, and Cul-
ture (New Delhi: Manohar, 1991); Thapar, "The Politics of Religious Commu-
nities," Seminar, no. 365, January 1990; Thapar, "Imagined Religious Commu-
nities? Ancient History and the Modern Search for a Hindu Identity," in
Modern Asian Studies 23, no. 2 (1989); and Thapar, "Syndicated Moksha," Sem-
inar, no. 313 (September 1985). For a critique of Thapar's work, see Brian K.
Smith, "Re-envisioning Hinduism and Evaluating the Hindutva Movement,"
in Religion 26 (1996): 119-128. Smith argues that it is this claim of the amor-
phousness of Hinduism and the difficulties in defining it that have made pos-
sible the Hindutva movement's chauvinism and exclusiveness under the guise
of the impossibility of such chauvinism and exclusivism in Hinduism. In a sym-
pathetic response to Smith, Ninian Smart argues that regardless of the difficul-
ties of defining Hinduism, and even if one can claim that there was no such
thing as Hinduism, one needs to confront the realities of modern constructions

158.109.94.83 on Wed, 24 Apr 2024 16:07:57 +00:00
Shampa Biswas 519
of Hinduism that makes Hindutva possible; see Ninian Smart, "Response to

Brian K. Smith: Re-envisioning Hinduism," Religion 26 (1996): 137-140.
66. See Kancha Ilaih, Why I Am Not a Hindu: A Sudra Critique of Hindutva
Philosophy, Culture, and Political Economy (Calcutta: Samya [an imprint of
Bhatkal and Sen], 1996) for an excellent critique of Brahminical Hindutva
from a Dalit perspective. Ilaih rejects assimilation into the Hindu fold despite
an abundance of messages that claim sudras as part of the Hindu order, find-
ing more commonality in his experiences with Muslims and Christians than
with upper-caste Brahmins and Baniyas.
67. There is also a regional aspect to this Hindu identity. Some of the
early Hindu nationalists (such as Dayanand Saraswati) did not recognize that
India south of the Vindhyas could also be drawn into the Arya movement. See
Pandey, note 62. Even now, the success of the BJP is most prominent in the
North Indian "Hindi heartland," even though the party has begun to make
some inroads in South India. Regional political parties from the South, such
as the DMK and the TDP, have always been somewhat suspicious of the BJP's
stand on the language issue - of imposing Hindi. In West Bengal, the party
has made a concerted attempt to incorporate Bengali national leaders like
Shyama Prasad Mukherjee and even Subhas Chandra Bose more explicitly
into the campaign, albeit with only limited success. This North Indian focus
of the party is also evident in the use of Ram (who is worshipped mostly in
northern India) as the icon of Hindu nationalism.
68. India Today, September 15, 1990.
69. The decision by the V. P. Singh government to implement the Mandai
Commission recommendations greatly enhanced the appeal of Hindutva among
upper-caste and middle-class Hindu groups. The government-sponsored Mandai
Commission report, submitted in 1980, recommended that 27 percent of cen-
tral-government jobs and government-supported higher-educational seats be
reserved for the 52 percent of Hindus that were classified as Other Backward
Classes (OBCs), thus extending reservations from those assigned for Sched-
uled Castes (15 percent) and Scheduled Tribes (7.5 percent) and bringing
the figure close to 50 percent. The decision to implement the recommenda-
tions in August 1990 generated significant and quite violent protests (that in-
cluded some dramatic headline-grabbing self-immolations) in urban North
India by upper-caste students from the middle and lower-middle classes: L. K.
Advani, "Basis of Our Nationalism Is Our Culture and Heritage," presiden-
tial Address delivered at the BJP National Council Session, June 10-12, 1994,
Vadodra, Gujarat, as reproduced in BJP Today, June 16-30, 1994, p. 12. The as-
sertion sometimes made in Hindu nationalist camps that caste is an anachro-
nism that is being used instrumentally for political gains by other political
parties is clearly contradicted by Kanchi Ilaih's excellent and extensive docu-
mentation of how caste hierarchy structures every aspect of Indian society; see
Ilaih, note 66.
70. See "Minister Kesari [sic] asks Dalits to renounce Hinduism," in BJP
Today, August 16-31, 1995, p. 16; and Sudheendra Kulkarni, "Between Ram
and Kanshi Ram, History Turns a New Leaf," in BJP Today, July 1-15, 1995,
pp. 12-14.
71. See T. N. Madan, "The Double-Edged Sword: Fundamentalism and
the Sikh Religious Tradition," in Martin E. Marty and R. Scott Appleby, Fun-
damentalisms Observed (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1994).
72. Veer Savarkar was one of the first to articulate the idea of Hindutva
that the BJP now uses, and M. S. Golwalkar is regarded as having articulated

158.109.94.83 on Wed, 24 Apr 2024 16:07:57 +00:00
the ideology of the RSS. Savarkar defined Hindus as a nation despite their lin-
guistic, social, and regional differences, the three main components of the
Hindu nation being geographical unity, racial features, and a common in-
herited culture. See Veer Savarkar, Hindutva: Who Is a Hindu? ( Bombay: Veer
Savarkar Prakashan, 1969). Golwalkar uses five criteria to define the nation:
geographical unity, race, religion, culture, and language; see M. S. Golwalkar,
We, Or Our Nationhood Defined (Nagpur: Bharat Prakashan, 1939).
73. For the influence of European ideas of race, including Eugenic ideas
of German fascism, on Savarkar and Golwalkar (as well as other early Hindu
nationalists) , see Christophe Jaffrelot, "The Ideas of the Hindu Race in the
Writings of Hindu Nationalist Idealogues in the 1920s and 1930s: A Concept
Between Two Cultures," in Peter Robb, ed., The Concept of Race in South Asia
(New Delhi: Oxford UP, 1995). Savarkar and Golwalkar were certainly not the
first to articulate a notion of the Hindu race; see, for example, Har Bilas
Sarda, Hindu Superiority: An Attempt to Determine the Position of the Hindu Race in
the Scale of Nations (Ajmer: Rajputana Printing Works, 1906). More recently,
Shiv Sena leader Bal Thackeray, a self-professed admirer of Hitler, has com-
pared Muslims in India to Jews in Nazi Germany, and BJP leader Malkani in
a television interview stated his belief that many Indians admired Hitler. See
Tapan Raychaudhuri, "Shadows of the Swastika: Historical Reflections on the
Politics of Hindu Communalism," Contention 4, no. 2 (1995): 141-162.
74. Hindus are not merely the citizens of the Indian state because
they are united not only by the bonds of love they bear to a com-
mon motherland but also by the bonds of a common blood. ... All
Hindus claim to have in their veins the blood of the mighty race in-
corporated with and descended from the Vedic fathers.
V. D. Savarkar, note 72, pp. 84-85. Yet the idea of genetic racial purity is
rejected by Savarkar. His historical account of the formation of the "Hindu
people" assumes that Aryans and foreigners intermingled when the former
entered India, and he calls on foreigners who aspire to become Hindus to
marry Hindus, have Hindu children, assimilate into Hindu culture, and so
on. This is also true of the definition in Golwalkar (note 72), where the bio-
logical factor is even more underplayed.
75. Savarkar, note 72, pp. 115-116.
76. Golwalkar, note 72, p. 21.
77. This leads Brenda Crossman and Ratna Kapur to conclude that "de-
spite the emphasis on racial differences, it was the difference of religion that
remained as a constituting movement of the oppositional identities," so that
even though contemporary Hindu nationalist discourse still carries some
"traces" of the "racial construction of Hindus," the emphasis clearly is on re-
ligion. See Cossman and Kapur, "Secularism: Bench-Marked by Hindu Right,"
in Economic and Political Weekly, Sept 21, 1996, pp. 2617-2619. However, I be-
lieve that this distinction between religion and race can often be somewhat
tenuous. The point is that religious (and cultural) differences can be "racial-
ized." Jaffrelot calls it a "special kind of racism" that borrows from the hier-
archical principles of "Indian traditional xenology"; see Jaffrelot, note 73, p.
56. Hence, while in this early Hindu nationalist discourse, the category of race
is explicitly used in the process of racialization, the contemporary discourse,
as I will point out below, continues to racialize, albeit with a much more muted
explicit invocation of race. It is interesting to see that at one point, "possessing"
race in Savarkar's discourse is considered good, since "Mohammedans are no

158.109.94.83 on Wed, 24 Apr 2024 16:07:57 +00:00
Shampa Biswas 521
race nor are the Christians. They are a religious unit, yet neither a racial nor
a national one. But we Hindus, if possible, are all the three put together, and
live under our ancient and common roof; see Savarkar, note 72, p. 134. But
this is not a consistent position: Muslims (and Christians) are often identified
as "races" in much of the early Hindu nationalist discourse.
78. Purshottam Agarwal, "Surat, Savarkar, and Draupadi: Legitimizing
Rape as a Political Weapon," in Tanika Sarkar and Urvashi Butalia, eds.,
Women and Right-Wing Movements: Indian Experiences (New Delhi/London: Kali
for Women/Zed, 1995).
79. Quoted in Saba Naqvi Bhaumik, "Toothless Wonder," India Today, De-
cember 15, 1997; p. 15.
80. This is a takeoff on the well-known Indian family-planning slogan
"Hum Do, Hamre Do" ("We are two, and we have two children"), urging In-
dians to restrict the size of their families.
81. The Indian defense budget for the year 2000 showed the biggest per-
centage increase since the 1964 Sino-Indian war.
82. In addition to the prominent work of Edward Said, John Esposito and
James Piscatori have been two of the most articulate critics of this tendency in
the Western academy; see John L. Esposito, The Islamic Threat: Myth or Reality?
(New York: Oxford UP, 1992); and James P. Piscatori, Islam in a World of Na-
tion States (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1986).
83. Esposito, note 82, p. 182.
84. Atal Behari Vajpayee, Secularism: The Indian Concept, the Dr. Rajendra
Prasad Lecture 1992, organized by All-India Radio, December 2 and 3, 1992,
published as Bharatiya Janata Party Publication No. 124 (New Delhi: 1992);
p. 28 (the italics are mine).
85. Hence, in the second sentence following my italics in the above Vaj-
payee quote on "keeping a watchful eye on the developments in neighbour-
ing . . . countries," the implicit reference is primarily to Pakistan and
Bangladesh.
86. "Our Foreign Policy Agenda for the Future," Foreign Policy and Reso-
lutions (New Delhi: Bharatiya Janata Party Publication No. E/17/95, 1995),
p. 5 (the italics are mine).
87. BJP Today [n.a.], December 16-31, 1994, pp. 25-26.
88. BJP on Kashmir (New Delhi: BJP Publication E/13/95, 1995), p. 36
(the italics are mine).
89. Ibid., pp. 37. In particular, a relationship with Israel, "which has had
a long experience of fighting fundamentalism and terrorism," is strongly rec-
ommended on this score. Might it be well here to have a brief update - given
the mixed reception Colin Powell received recently in New Delhi (said to be
because of the Kashmir complication)?
90. Simon Dalby, "Contesting and Essential Concept: Reading the Dilem-
mas in Contemporary Security Discourse," in Krause and Williams, eds., note
2, p. 10.
91. David Mutimer, "Reimagining Security: The Metaphors of Prolifera-
tion," in Krause and Williams, eds., note 2, p. 191.
92. Mutimer, ibid., pp. 211-212.
93. The term new racisms has been used by Martin Barker in The New
Racism (London: Junction Books, 1981). Others who have highlighted the
centrality of culturalist forms of racism in the contemporary period include
Paul Gilroy, There Ain't No Black in the Union Jack (London: Hutchinson, 1987);
and David Goldberg, introduction to David Goldberg, ed., The Anatomy of

158.109.94.83 on Wed, 24 Apr 2024 16:07:57 +00:00
Racism (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1990), and "The Social

Formation of Racist Discourse," ibid.
94. James Blaut, as quoted in Peter Jackson and Jan Penrose, eds., Con-
structions of Race, Place, and Nation (London: UCL Press, 1993), p. 10.
95. Racialization does not necessarily lead to racism, but it can also be a
means for struggle and resistance by subordinated groups, as for instance in
anticolonial struggles or the Black Power movement in the United States in
the 1960s.
96. Doty, note 1, p. 169.
97. Dalby, note 90.

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Nuclear Apartheid

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"Nuclear Apartheid" as Political Position: Race as a Postcolonial Resource?

Author(s): Shampa Biswas

Stable URL: https://www.jstor.org/stable/40645031

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Reflecting on the colonial traces that remain in the current conduct

*Whitman College, Walla Walla, WA

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security, and so on. Little attention, however, journalistic or scholarly,

weapons of mass destruction, I argue that there is an epistemic g

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from seeing the Indian decision to test as a statement against a racial-

nationalism in contemporary Indian politics, finding the immediate

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and racial hierarchies that make possible the effective deployment of

The "Hindu Bomb''?

The Rise of Hindu Nationalism

The Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) is the mainstream, most public, a

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increasing visibility of several Hindu nationalist organizations, many

BJP Foreign Policy

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India's decision to nuclearize only helps foreign capital, as the "BJP

the issue of nuclear policy. Party manifestoes since the inception o

India Goes Nuclear: Competing Explanations

Now it is important to keep in mind here that India's nuclear pro

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surprisingly, the Indian government found itself embarrassed by th

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argument in the ability of nuclear policy to performatively constitute

Enunciating the "Nuclear Apartheid" Position

Understanding the "nuclear apartheid" argument and the manner in

The Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty

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Britain, France, and China24 - -are thus recognized as NWSs by the

The Comprehensive Test-Ban Treaty

The CTBT has brought up a host of similar issues. Following a series

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