Pakistan?s response in kind to India?s nuclear tests threatens a perilous arms race in south Asia. A veteran correspondent from the region laments developments which are a spiritual defeat for the countries concerned. THERE has always been an apparent contradiction between the Indian doctrine of non-violence and India?s most widely known and admired scripture, the Bhagavadgita. The Gita is the story of a warrior who, because he had pity on his enemies, was unwilling to fight them, and the God Krishna who told him it was his duty to fight. India?s first President, the philosopher Radhakrishnan, resolved that contradiction in his introduction to the Gita, where he wrote: We must fight against what is wrong but if we allow ourselves to hate, that ensures our spiritual defeat. The nuclear tests in the Rajasthan desert are a spiritual defeat for India. They are a surrender to hatred of Pakistan.

The belligerent statements issued after the tests demonstrated this hatred. The Home Minister, Lal Krishnan Advani, second only to the Prime Minister in the coalition dominated by the Hindu nationalist Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), said the tests signified India?s resolve to deal firmly with Pakistan?s hostile activities. He also spoke of a new pro-active policy in Kashmir. The Parliamentary Affairs Minister, Madan Lal Khuranna, was widely reported as saying to Pakistan, Tell us the time and place and we?ll fight a fourth war. After being reprimanded by the Prime Minister he did claim to have been misreported. The leader of the World Hindu Federation (VHP), which is part of the same Hindu nationalist movement as the BJP, was jubilant about what he called the Hindu Bomb. Perhaps this was to be expected from the Hindu nationalist BJP, but the euphoria generated by the explosions so overawed the secular Congress Party that it did not have the courage to mount any effective criticism of them. So Congress, the party of Mahatma Gandhi and Jawaharlal Nehru, surrendered to hatred of Pakistan.

Pakistan?s motive for the tests was even more explicit. In his blustering, bellicose broadcast to the nation after the first round of explosions there, the Prime Minister, Nawaz Sharif, said: We have settled our account with India. That is, if not more justifiable, at least more explicable. India did test first. Pakistan is an avowedly Islamic nation. It lost its eastern wing in a war with India.

The mutual hatred of communal politicians on both sides has now placed South Asia on the verge of an extremely perilous arms race. Pakistan has said it will introduce nuclear weapons into its armoury. India has been less specific but in its present mood there can be little hope for restraint. So India, a country which regards itself as already fighting a proxy war with Pakistan in Kashmir will, unless sanity returns, have missiles armed with nuclear warheads capable of striking anywhere in Pakistan. Pakistan, whose Foreign Minister tried to persuade the world that India was planning to attack its nuclear installations just before his country?s tests, will have nuclear missiles too. Some argue that nuclear weapons prevented the Cold War getting hot, but here we are talking about two countries, not two blocs, two countries which have demonstrated their capacity for hatred by these explosions, two countries which have already fought three wars.

War is not the only danger. Accidents do happen. We now know that there were accidents at a United States nuclear weapons base in Britain in 1956 and 1961 which could have released radiation. There have been narrow misses in the Soviet Union too. There might be even worse in countries where the armed forces are as inexperienced in handling nuclear weapons as they are in India and Pakistan.

The explosions also threaten a diplomatic disaster for India. Already widely condemned, its hopes for a permanent place on the Security Council finally shattered, India now faces the prospect of further isolation. Although Northern Ireland and the Middle East have shown the value of international mediation, the BJP Government with its nationalist agenda cannot reverse India?s stand that its dispute with Pakistan is a bilateral matter. The BJP is not alone in rejecting outside mediation; there is all-party agreement on that, as Robin Cook found to his cost on his ill-fated visit to India with the Queen last year.

Pakistan, on the other hand, would welcome any international mediation with open arms, especially on the Kashmir dispute. There is already pressure for it and that pressure will mount. So India will find itself cast in the role of the big bad bully, while Pakistan will be able to present itself as the injured innocent.

Pakistan is threatened with an economic disaster. Sanctions will mean a dramatic cut in aid from abroad just when the economy can least afford it, with foreign exchange rates so low that they can cover only six weeks? imports. The Karachi stock exchange has slumped by more than 30 per cent in the last few weeks, so there is no hope that international investors will make up for the shortfall caused by sanctions on aid. The Prime Minister has declared a state of emergency, officially to face the threat of external aggression, but in fact to deal with the internal unrest likely to be the result of the suffering caused by the sanctions. But Pakistan?s long history of political instability does not inspire confidence in the politicians? ability to contain riots if they should break out.

The United States believes an arms race in South Asia can be contained by persuading India and Pakistan to sign the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty (CTBT), but here again India cannot oblige without a humiliating climb-down. Every party in the Indian Parliament supported the decision not to sign that treaty, on the grounds that it discriminates in favour of the existing members of the nuclear club, and does not meet India?s demand that there should be a timetable for total nuclear disarmament.

Western diplomats in Delhi say the treaty which took so much time to put together, which has been signed by 149 countries, which does hold out the prospect of eventual total disarmament, cannot be altered, especially by one country which is attempting to bomb its way into renewed negotiations. They have a point, especially when they add the danger of another country trying to get the treaty renegotiated in the same way. But the South Asian explosions show that the present non-proliferation regime does not prevent proliferation or tests. Iran has welcomed the Pakistani explosions as a balance to Israel?s nuclear capability, an invitation to that country to blow another hole in the non-proliferation regime. Is it good enough, therefore, simply to say that the non-proliferation regime is not negotiable?

SANCTIONS are not going to get those signatures on the CTBT. They will not have much effect on India, which is where the problem lies. Pakistan would sign the treaty if India did. The Indian Prime Minister, Atal Behari Vajpayee, has suggested he might give a watertight guarantee that there will be no more tests, and even sign the CTBT on certain conditions. We do not yet know what those conditions are, but with the present rigid stand on both sides there is not much room for hope.

This crisis has put India and Pakistan in the dock, the nuclear powers too, and alongside them, some are arguing, stands religion. One of the participants in a BBC Radio Scotland discussion in which I took part even expressed the fear that the Churches in Britain would lose yet more members because religion had created another threat to peace. I said that it was not religion, but religion misused by politicians, which played a role in the crisis. We obscure the basic issue if we simply blame religion. So long as five nations possess nuclear weapons and dictate the terms under which they will surrender them, those who are excluded from the nuclear club are bound to feel threatened. Although there is one Asian member of the club ? China ? the United States is seen as its chairman, so the present nuclear non-proliferation regime adds another complaint to that long list which has made Islam such a powerful vehicle for expressing grievances against the West, and helps the cause of those who want to turn Hinduism into a tool of aggressive nationalism.

In a recent collection of papers called Transnational Religion, the political scientist Suzanne Rudolph argued that religion can provide the vision and energy to engender collective action and social transformation. But if that is to happen, the Churches in the West must argue against the arrogance of their own countries which makes religion in less prosperous parts of the world a tool in the hands of politicians and priests with irreligious intentions.

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