Fearless Nuclear Gamblers

For the last month, world leaders worked overtime to prevent tensions between Pakistan and India from exploding into war. Thousands of artillery shells exchanged since the beginning of this year destroyed the lives of border residents. Meanwhile, a million troops from the two countries glowered at each other across the border and air raid sirens were tested in some cities.

Today, nuclear tensions are down one notch and some semblance of normalcy is beginning to emerge. But, even at the peak of the crisis, few Indians or Pakistanis lost much sleep. Stock markets flickered, but there was no run on the banks or panic buying of necessities. Schools and colleges, which generally close at the first hint of a real crisis, functioned normally.

The outside world saw it in very different terms -- as the fierce and suicidal struggle between two nuclear armed states. Foreign nationals streamed out of both countries. We saw the crisis as more of the usual, except the rhetoric became just a little bit fiercer, and the sabre-rattling a little louder.

In a public debate in Islamabad on the eve of the Pakistani nuclear tests, the former chief of the Pakistan Army, General Mirza Aslam Beg, declared "We can make a first strike, and a second strike or even a third." The dreadful vision of nuclear war left him unmoved. "You can die crossing the street," he observed, "or you could die in a nuclear war. You've got to die someday anyway."

Across the border, India's Defence Minister George Fernandes, in an interview with The Hindustan Times, voiced similar sentiments: "We could take a strike, survive, and then hit back. Pakistan would be finished." Indian Defense Secretary Yogendra Narain took things a step further in an interview with Outlook Magazine: "A surgical strike is the answer," he said. But if that failed to resolve things, he said, "We must be prepared for total mutual destruction". Brahma Chellaney, a hawk whose feathers caught fire during the Kargil war, demanded that India "call Pakistan's nuclear bluff".

Pakistan and India are making history in their own way. No nuclear states in the world have engaged in such fiery rhetoric, even though hatreds between them have been intense. The fear of mutual destruction has always put sharp limits on the tone and volume of nuclear rhetoric. So, what accounts for this extraordinary difference between us -- Pakistanis and Indians -- and the rest of the world? Why makes us such extraordinarily bold nuclear gamblers, playing close to the brink?

In part, the answer has to do with the fact that India and Pakistan are largely traditional societies, where the fundamental belief structure demands disempowerment and surrender to larger forces. A fatalistic Hindu belief that the stars above determine our destiny, or the equivalent Muslim belief in "qismet", certainly accounts for part of it. Conversations and discussions often end on the note "what will be, will be", after which people shrug their shoulders and move on to something else. Because they feel that they will be protected by larger, unseen forces, the level of risk-taking is extraordinary. Travelling in a madly careening public bus in Karachi or Bombay, which routinely smash into and kill pedestrians, provides convincing proof .

But other reasons may be more important.

Close government control over national television, especially in Pakistan, has ensured that critical discussion of nuclear weapons and nuclear war are not aired. Instead, in Pakistan's public squares and at crossroads stand missiles and fibre-glass replicas of the nuclear test site. For the masses, they are symbols of national glory and achievement, not death and destruction.

Nuclear ignorance is almost total, extending even to the educated. Some students at the university in Islamabad where I teach said, when asked, that a nuclear war would be the end of the world. Others thought of nukes as just bigger bombs. Many said it was not their concern, but the army's. Almost none knew about the possibility of a nuclear firestorm, about residual radioactivity, or damage to the gene pool.