MPhil in Political Thought and Intellectual History 2017 - 2018 __________________________________________________________________________________

Dissertation Title

Hindu Nuclear Politics, 1945-1998

Candidate Number: 6776

This dissertation is submitted for the degree of Master of Philosophy

Acknowledgements

I thank most of all my loving family, for providing me the opportunity to study all these years.

A great thank you to those teachers and mentors who have set me on this journey,

notably Charles Hill, Ariel Ron, Julie Stephens, Eli Stern, Mark Bauer & Shruti Kapila.

I certainly would be no where without those havens in India and Cambridge alike, the

Brotherhood of the Ascended Christ and the Round Church Scriptorium. A big thank you to Frs

Monodeep, Solomon and the rest, and David Illman and Molly Wyer for all their hospitality.

Finally, to my brave editors, Maggie Inhofe and Thomas Hunt, I am forever indebted.

Contents Introduction ................................................................................................................................................. 1

Chapter 1: Political Hinduism, Political Realism, and Indian Nuclear History ................................. 4

Hinduism and Realism ........................................................................................................................... 4

Gandhi’s Ahimsa in a Nuclear Age ...................................................................................................... 8

Golwalkar, Hindutva, & the Bomb .................................................................................................... 12

The Hindu Nation & the Hindu Bomb ............................................................................................ 14

A Brief, Ideological Assessment of India’s Armament ................................................................... 16

Gandhian Nuclear Aversion ........................................................................................................... 17

Golwalkar’s Nuclear Ambition ....................................................................................................... 23

Chapter 2: Humanity’s Nuclear Crisis, Science & Hindu Civilization .............................................. 28

The West’s Nuclear Crisis: Scientific, Civilizational, and Spiritual ................................................ 28

Secularism, Science, and Civilization in 20th Century India ............................................................ 31

Gandhi’s Scientific, Civilizational Critique & the Atomic Bomb .................................................. 32

Golwalkar’s Nuclear Hindu Mission .................................................................................................. 36

The Significance of Hindu Nuclear Politics ..................................................................................... 38

Chapter 3: Hindu Religio-Political Action in a Nuclear World ........................................................ 41

Cosmic War in the Wake of 9/11 ...................................................................................................... 41

The Bhagavad Gita & the Roots of Nuclear Action ....................................................................... 43

Cosmic Motivation and the Allure of Violence ............................................................................... 47

The Logic of Deterrence and the Challenge of Hindu Nuclear Politics ...................................... 52

Conclusion: Hindu Nuclear Politics, Democracy & the Nuclear World .......................................... 56

Bibliography ............................................................................................................................................... 59

1

Hindu Nuclear Politics, 1945-1998

“Now I am become Death, the destroyer of worlds.”

–Dr. Oppenheimer quoting Krishna in the Bhagavad Gita at the sight of the first atomic explosion. July 16, 1945

“I can now believe stories of Lord Krishna lifting a hill.” –Unrecorded Indian nuclear scientist,1 at the sight of the earth heaving upwards from the force of Operation Shakti,

India’s first subterraneous nuclear bomb test. May 11, 1998.

Introduction

Despite copious anxiety and literature around Islamic terrorists and apocalyptic

Evangelicals, it is Hinduism that has had more direct, successful political influence on nuclear

proliferation than any other religious tradition. By coincidence, the bomb’s architect famously

articulated the God-like capabilities of the first nuclear detonation in the words of Hindu

scripture; by design, Hindu politics would eventually achieve a nuclear India. This paper

examines the story, significance, and challenge of Hindu political thought on nuclear war from

the genesis of the atom bomb in 1945, to India’s self-declaration as a nuclear power in 1998.

That this area of Hindu political theory is relatively neglected is as understandable as it is

lamentable. From the perspective of international relations, Hindu thought on nuclear warfare

has admittedly lacked the alluring fanaticism characteristic of religious terrorists, not to mention

the gargantuan impetus provided by 9/11. Nonetheless, Hindu political thought has been far

more decisive in successful nuclear proliferation than any religious terrorist ideology, and more

closely resembles other ascendant religio-political traditions likely to have increased nuclear

influence in the coming decades. Indeed, given the continuing, rapid ascent of such movements

since 1945—particularly within nuclear states—modern religio-political thought on nuclear war

desperately needs examination beyond terrorist concerns. Whether from favorable demographic

trends,2 advantageous political realignments,3 or both,4 religiously-inspired political actors in the

1 The specific scientist to have made the pronouncement was never recorded. Chengappa, R., ‘The Inside Story: India’s Nuclear Blasts and the Men Behind Them’ India Today Magazine (20 June 1998); online edn. [https://www.indiatoday.in/magazine/cover-story/story/19980622-the-inside-story-indias-nuclear-blasts-and-the-men-behind-them-825369-1998-06-20, accessed 31 May 2018]. 2 Kaufmann, E. P., Shall the Religious Inherit the Earth? : Demography and Politics in the Twenty-First Century (London, 2010). 3 See Walzer, M., The Paradox of Liberation: Secular Revolutions and Religious Counterrevolutions (New Haven, 2015).

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US, Russia, India, Pakistan, and Israel are all significantly more powerful now than when the

bomb was invented, and only likely to expand their influence in the foreseeable future.5 In other

words, a majority of contemporary nuclear states have powerful religious factions with increasing

influence in politics—not to mention a Persian Islamist regime with an unfortunate habit of

hiding centrifuges.

The problem of religio-political thought towards nuclear weapons goes deeper than

scholarly omission and political demographic shifts, however. Political science, the mother

discipline of international relations, is notoriously inept at apprehending religious (that is, non-

socio-economic) motivation.6 The sub-field of nuclear strategic studies, by all accounts, appears

to be even more oblivious to non-material factors, and tends to default to such a high degree of

political realism that it borders on “ideology” as a discipline.7 This should concern us, for in a

world in which theoreticians and atomic political actors alike have thus far largely shared a

common outlook of realism in their nuclear calculations, ascendant faith-based politics presents

a conceptual and practical challenge. The closer faith-based decisions come to nuclear codes, the

greater the challenge to the logic of deterrence and contemporary nuclear strategic theory. This is

not to say that proximity of religion to nuclear leavers inherently equates to violence, as has been

theorized in the case of nuclear terrorists. As we shall see, Gandhi’s own brand of Hindu religio-

politics eschewed political realism in favor of reckless pacifism, much as Hindu nationalists have

done the opposite.

The first chapter of this paper relates that story: the strikingly ideological tug of war

between two forms of Hindu political thought among India’s nuclear elite, both of which

subverted the dominant theories of political realism that have sought to explain and control

states’ nuclear ambitions. From the roots of Hindu theology, scripture, and history, I will

explicate the ideological foundations of the nuclear issue in political Hinduism through the

thought of M. K. Gandhi and M. S. Golwalkar, the father of the Sangh Parivar and preeminent

ideologue of modern Hindutva. Thereafter, I will examine the influence of their thought through

India’s nuclear authorities and their decisions regarding India’s armament. India’s nuclear saga

demonstrates how religiously-based political thought has already been a primary, decisive factor

4 Toft, M. D., Philpott, D., & Shah, T. S., God’s Century: Resurgent Religion and Global Politics (London, 2011). 5 See J. Micklethwait & A. Wooldridge, God is Back: How the Global Revival of Faith is Changing the World (New York, 2009), and P. L. Berger, (ed), The Desecularization of the World: Resurgent Religion and World Politics (Grand Rapids, 1999). 6 Hamid, S. ‘What most people get wrong about political Islam,’ Brookings Markaz Blog (1 October 2015); online edn. [https://www.brookings.edu/blog/markaz/2015/10/01/what-most-people-get-wrong-about-political-islam/ accessed 28 November 2017]. 7 “Realism” is a slippery term currently enjoying a renaissance in historical scholarship. I will discuss its meaning more thoroughly in Chapter 1. See Guilhot, N., After the Enlightenment: Political Realism and International Relations in the Mid-Twentieth Century (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2017), p. 4.

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in a state’s acquisition of the atomic bomb. Bucking the calculations of political realists at home

and abroad, India abstained from nuclear armament for several decades during which it had the

ability and strategic demands to arm, stemming from Gandhian moral concerns among its elite.

Years after armament became strategically disadvantageous according to realist calculations,

however, the first Hindu nationalist government detonated the bomb within six weeks of

election. The upshot of this double-subversion of realist expectations is an Indian nuclear history

that demonstrates the potency of Hindu political thought over and against realist political theory.

The second chapter of this paper moves from the potency of Hindu nuclear politics in

history to the structures of meaning that helped to inspire that potency. Nuclear arms hold

symbolic significance for all of humanity, but the fear of annihilation that Neorealists assumed

would initiate sober, material calculations in political thinkers and actors alike had the very

opposite effect on Hindu politics. The spiritual crisis that the bomb initiated in many Western

intellectuals coalesced with strong narratives in India of Hinduism as a civilizational corrective to

ultimately instill a deeper sense of validation India’s spiritual mission. The fact that the bomb was

an achievement of Western science served to only further bolster this sense of confirmation,

conclusively demonstrating for both Gandhi and Golwalkar that Western scientific dominance

was an expression of dangerous civilizational imbalance, not superiority. Thus, rather than the

expected turn to simple calculations of potential material coercion intuitive to realism, the

symbolic meaning of nuclear arms turned Hindu political thought towards the importance of

transcendence in politics with a renewed sense of confidence and mission.

The final chapter of this paper delves into the challenge of modern religio-politics and

nuclear weapons, by enriching the existing literature on religious extremist ambitions for the

bomb with a consideration of Hindu nuclear politics. I will examine the political theory behind

nuclear deterrence as it relates to the history and theory of political action in Gandhi and

Golwalkar’s thought, beginning with their respective approaches to violence in the Bhagavad Gita.

Thereafter, I will examine how their theologies push them towards political action divergent

from a realist perspective compatible with the logic of deterrence. This exploration of the Hindu

case shows that it is not so much a natural proclivity towards violence in religion that should

worry theorists, but the varied ways that religio-political actors conceive of political action that

disrupts the logic of deterrence—particularly in democracies.

4

Chapter 1: Political Hinduism, Political Realism, and Indian Nuclear

History

Hinduism and Realism

This chapter deals with two notoriously elusive “-isms,” which, difficult as it may be to

define either precisely, stand together at the center of India’s nuclear saga. Political realism has

been the default lens of international relations since the discipline’s inception, to such an extent

that “it is only a slight exaggeration to say that the academic study of international relations is a

debate about realism.”8 Political Hinduism, as we shall see, is the clearest manifestation of a

religio-political ideology decisively subverting the logic of political realism during the heyday of

realist dominance. As religio-political movements continue to gain influence in a post-Cold War

nuclear world, the religio-political history of India’s acquisition of nuclear arms is thus of crucial

theoretical significance going forward. By way of introduction to this important history, we will

consider the nature of both political realism and political Hinduism in turn.

Political realism is currently experiencing a renaissance in both scholarship and

popularity, the effect of which has been a great deal of insight, but also obfuscation: its

popularity and rhetorical ability to designate its claimants as “realistic” has meant that an

increasingly diverse array of thinkers, theories, and ideologies have laid claim to the term.9

Meanwhile, international relations theorists and political theorists alike have independently

entered into recent spates of vigorous study and debate over the historical and theoretical nature

of realism, each in its own way expanding and problematizing the notion and internal diversity of

political realism.10 Much as these scholarly interventions on both sides have provided rich

contributions, this paper takes as its starting point those most influential strands of political

realism that may better be understood as “a spectrum of ideas,”11 or a distinctive attitude in

8 Wohlforth, W.C., ‘Realism,’ in Reus-Smit, C., & Snidal, D. (eds.), The Oxford Handbook of International Relations (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008), p. 131. 9 Karuna Mantena’s work on “Gandhi’s Realism: Means and Ends in Politics” is notable here, and makes a compelling case that Gandhi’s methods of non-violence integrated a sense of “realism” in consciously combating the violent tendencies of mass struggle within the prescriptions of his non-cooperation politics. While interesting and important, this use of realism falls outside the classical use of the term in statecraft, and is largely irrelevant to this study; I mention it here only for clarity in my use of realism relative to Gandhi in the context of recent scholarship concerned with the same term, in a different usage. See K. Mantena, ‘Gandhi’s Realism: Means and ends in Politics’ (Fifth Balzan-Skinner Lecture for the Centre for Research in the Arts, Social Sciences and Humanities (CRASSH), delivered 16 May 2014); online edn. [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uwyiPYkmtsE&t=1s, accessed 12 March 2018]. 10 See D. S. Bell, “Political Realism and International Relations,” Philosphy Compass, 12 (2017); online edn. [https://doi.org/10.1111/phc3.12403 accessed 31 May 2018]. 11 J. Haslam, No Virtue Like Necessity: Realist Thought in International Relations Since Machiavelli (London, 2002), p. 249, also quoted in Wohlforth, ‘Realism’ p. 132.

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statecraft that links together the historical thought-currents behind Hans Morgenthau’s Classical

Realism, to Kenneth Waltz’s Neorealism, and resurgent forms of realism today.12 The colloquial

usage of the term “realist” to designate hard-nosed, self-interested power calculations to the

exclusion of “idealist” concerns comes close to characterizing the spirit of political realism I am

invoking. More rigorously, as Wohlforth explains, a family resemblance of political realisms is

discernable around the pillars of (1) nation states as the most significant modern human

groupings, which inherently produce potential conflict with other groups; (2) nation states acting

principally by narrow self-interest; (3) international politics as an anarchic system; and (4)

international relations as a politics of power and security, organized around “the potential use of

material power to coerce.”13

However much alternative forms of “realism” may have flourished beyond this central

family of political realism, it was Morganthau and Waltz’s family of realism that would take over

international relations from its disciplinary birth in the late 1940s to the present day,14 and,

critically, which would come to define the foreign policy of the most influential statesmen of the

Cold War. Perhaps most crucially for our purposes, the Neorealist apex of this trend of thought

sought not only to explain the actions of nations, but also to predict and control those actions—

especially in the realm of nuclear proliferation and warfare.15 It is this distillation of political

realism that failed to both explain and control India’s armament; a failure made explicable, as we

shall see, by political realism’s inability to comprehend political Hinduism.

Hinduism, with its lack of central authority and contested status as a coherent traditional

religion, colonial construct, or emergent ‘world religion,’16 is perhaps even more difficult to pin

down than political realism. For this reason, some may protest my association of Hinduism with

religio-politics in general, let alone the nuclear opinions of either Gandhi or Golwalkar. Gandhi

especially is often seen as distinctive, far removed from the various fundamentalist political

12 For the historical intellectual interrelation of the two schools, see the ‘Introduction’ of N. Guilhot, After the Enlightenment: Political Realism and International Relations in the Mid-Twentieth Century (Cambridge, 2017), especially p. 24. 13 Wohlforth, ‘Realism,’ p. 134. 14 There is some truth to the claim that realism, and especially Waltz’s Neorealism, is a particularly American phenomenon academically. Nonetheless, however much more diversity there may be represented in other IR establishments, the point of realism-as-default generally still stands internationally. 15 M. Kurki & C. Wight, ‘International relations and Social Science’ in Dunne, T., Kurki, M., & Smith, S. (eds), International Relations Theories: Discipline and Diversity, 3rd Edition (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013), p. 27. 16 For an overview of scholarship on claims around Hinduism as a colonial construct, see G. Viswanathan, ‘Colonialism and the Construction of Hinduism’ in Flood, G. (ed.), The Blackwell Companion to Hinduism (Oxford: Blackwell, 2003), pp. 23-45. On Hinduism’s emergence as a ‘World Religion’ see C. A. Bayly, ‘Making Hinduism a ‘World Religion’ Before and After Vivekananda’ (Indian Ministry of Culture Swami Vivekananda Visiting Professor Lecture at University of Chicago, delivered 8 April 2014); online edn. [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sdY9W1qqqlU&t=423s accessed 12 March 2018].

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movements increasingly commented on today in association with identity politics and

communalism.17 For these very associations, Hindutva has likewise been perceived as a threat to,

or perversion of, Hinduism.18

There is some truth to these claims. Hinduism is significantly more diverse in beliefs and

rituals than other religions, and has instantiated a “polycentric system” of authority, scriptures,

gods, and schools of thought unique among major world religions.19 No doubt, it has also

undergone profound changes under colonial rule, including the internal adoption of the very

term “Hinduism,” as late as 1815.20 Even so, David Lorenzen is right to point out that Hindus

developed a sharper sense of identity between 1200 and 1500, based in religious theologies and

devotional practices grounded in texts like the Vedas, the Mahabharata and the Puranas.21 Gandhi

and his followers represent a rather syncretic and innovative form of Hindu spirituality, which,

among other alterations, tends to extrapolate the ethics and duties reserved specifically for the

sanyasi (renunciant) to the whole of Hinduism, and is almost predicated on anti-communalism, in

stark contrast to most prominent religio-political movements of today.22 Likewise, Golwalkar's

brand of political Hinduism is largely informed by the specifics of Advaita Vedanta theology, but

is also unusually fused with communally focused ethnic nationalism.23 No doubt, Hindutva also

represents a very particular form of Hinduism discussed by scholars like Jaffrelot, Hansen, and

17 For an overview of the phenomenon and treatment of the new fundamentalisms, see M. E. Marty, & R. S. Appleby, ‘The Fundamentalism Project: A User’s Guide’ in M. E. Marty, & R. S. Appleby (eds.), Fundamentalisms Observed (Chicago, 1991), pp. vii-xv. For the relation of Hindu nationalism to this phenomenon, see D. Gold, ‘Organized Hinduisms: From Vedic Truth to Hindu Nation’ in Marty, M. E., & Appleby, R. S. (eds.), Fundamentalisms Observed (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1991), pp. 531-594. 18 This fear is perhaps most evident from many within the Hindu religious fold, notably, for instance, Jeffery Long’s A Vision for Hinduism: Beyond Hindu Nationalism, but is also a noted concern from academics involved in the study of Hinduism. See for instance, Lipner, J. J., ‘The Rise of ‘Hinduism; or, How to Invent a World Religion With Only Moderate Success’ (Lecture in the History and Philosophy of Hinduism at James Madison University, delivered 13 October 2015); online edn. [https://www.jmu.edu/gandhicenter/wm_library/juliuslipnerlecture.pdf, accessed 12 March 2018], pp. 15-16. 19 See Lipner, ‘The Rise of Hinduism.’ 20 Ibid, p. 5. 21 D. Lorenzen, “Who Invented Hinduism?” Comparative Studies in Society and History, 41:4 (1999), 630-659; online edn. [https://www.cambridge.org/core/services/aop-cambridge-core/content/view/B15BD087D421352F8F3C3E47FD2D5F59/S0010417599003084a.pdf/who_invented_hinduism.pdf, accessed 31 May 2018]. 22 K. Young, ‘Hinduism and the Ethics of Weapons of Mass Destruction,’ in Hashmi, S. H., & Lee, S. P. (eds), Ethics and Weapons of Mass Destruction: Religious and Secular Perspectives, pp 277-307, online edn. [https://doi.org/10.1017/CBO9780511606861.017, accessed 10 April 2018], p 287. See also F. Devji, ‘Gandhi, Hinduism and Humanity’ (Unpublished essay, University of Oxford, 2018). 23 For a fuller discussion of the dynamics of communalism in Hindu nationalist politics and its influence on religion, see Ram-Prasad, C., ‘Contemporary Political Hinduism’ in Flood, G. (ed.), The Blackwell Companion to Hinduism (Oxford: Blackwell, 2003), pp. 526-550. For the relation between Vivekananda’s Advaita Vedanta and Hindutva communalism, see G. Beckerlegge, ‘Swami Vivekananda and the Sangh Parivar: Convergent or Divergent Views on Population, Religion and National Identity?,’ Postcolonial Studies, 9 (2006), 121-135.

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others as representing a reactionary form of ‘neo Hinduism’24 or having a “semitization” effect

within Hinduism to more closely resemble Abrahamic faiths.25 More troublingly still, Golwalkar

and Gandhi’s respective political philosophies seem, at points, too divergent to be clubbed under

a common category, especially as the two primary ideologues of Hindu politics.

Perhaps the greatest indictment against Golwalkar or Gandhi as representatives of Hindu

nuclear politics, however, is the fact that more "mainstream" Hindu tradition contains within it

bountiful—and more intuitive—resources from which to consider nuclear questions, from the

use of similarly destructive weapons by the gods in Hindu mythology,26 to a long tradition of just

war theory and kshatriya caste codes, to the 4th century BCE classic in statecraft, the

Arthashastra.27 Our two principal thinkers draw conspicuously little from these sources, whether

from a lack of formal clerical training (as in the case of Gandhi), a strong, largely Western-

influenced sense of foreign policy (as in Golwalkar), or relative lack of access: the Arthashastra for

instance, was only rediscovered in 1905.

Nonetheless, in spite of all of these caveats, a fascinating fact of modern Hinduism is

that Gandhism and Hindu nationalism emerge as the sole, self-identified28 “Hindu” interlocutors

of any appreciable influence in 20th century Indian politics, especially on the issue of nuclear

warfare. Hindu religious writings on the issue of nuclear warfare are relatively scant,29 just as self-

professed “Hindu” political influence on the matter beyond these two traditions is negligible.

In this regard, however unusual their theologies may be, there is no doubt that both

Gandhi's satyagraha and Golwalkar's Hindutva seek to be profoundly religious. From his earliest

major political writing, Golwalkar aims for religion to subsume politics until “politics itself

becomes…a small factor, to be considered and followed solely as one of the commands of

24 See “Introduction” of Jaffrelot, C. (ed.), Hindu Nationalism: A Reader (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2007). 25 Hansen, T. B., The Saffron Wave: Democracy and Hindu Nationalism in Modern India (Princeton: Princeton University Press,1999); online edn. [https://libsta28.lib.cam.ac.uk:2119/viewbooktoc/product/451077, accessed 12 March 2018], pp. 71-4. 26 Young, ‘Hinduism and the Ethics of Weapons of Mass Destruction,’ p. 291. 27 See Young, ‘Hinduism and the Ethics of Weapons of Mass Destruction.’ 28 No doubt Gandhi did qualify the sense in which he was conducting “Hindu” politics. He often suggested that he himself was a Hindu, but sought a politics stemming from a religion above religions. Nonetheless, he drew primarily from Hindu scriptures, appropriated Hindu religious traditions, and theologically is most associated with the Hindu religious tradition, particularly of Advaita Vedanta. Moreover, as Faisal Devji demonstrates, Gandhi did seem to see significant positive value in Hinduism as a political prism. See Devji, ‘Gandhi, Hinduism and Humanity.’ 29 Young, ‘Hinduism and the Ethics of Weapons of Mass Destruction,’ p. 291.

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Religion.”30 Likewise, Gandhi maintains from early on that "there are no politics devoid of

religion...Politics bereft of religion are a death-trap because they kill the soul."31

Most significant of all, perhaps, is that these two uniquely religious traditions in Indian

political thought would be so decisive in India's nuclear saga. Not only were Gandhian and

Hindu nationalist thought the only major expressions of Hindu religio-politics from 1945-1998;

their interplay also largely determined the unusual timing of India's acquisition of the bomb.

However much Gandhi and Golwalkar may or may not represent unusual forms of a

conceptually imprecise “Hinduism,” their movements were the only ones to claim Hindu

heritage in a robustly religious way, and were the drivers of India nuclear policy. To speak of

Hindu nuclear politics from a historical perspective is to speak of Gandhism and Hindutva.

Gandhi’s Ahimsa in a Nuclear Age

Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi requires no introduction. The Father of India is said to

have been the most photographed person alive by the end of his life, and remains to this day an

international icon of non-violence, Hindu religion, and effective political organizing. So great is

Gandhi’s cultural fame, however, that Gandhi the political theorist has tended to be occluded. As

Shruti Kapila points out, non-western 20th century global political thinkers have generally been

overlooked in intellectual history precisely because of their success as politicians.32 Gandhi

represents a paradigmatic example of this phenomenon, only recently coming to light through

the slew of recent scholarship on Gandhi’s thought from a political theory perspective. Far from

the almost hippie-like perception of Gandhi as a wondering guru-organizer, then, we must turn

to the complex world of his political ideas to appropriately grasp the nature and influence of his

thought on nuclear politics.

As one might imagine, the most destructive weapon in the history of humankind

represents a particular challenge to the modern world’s symbolic paragon of non-violence. The

30 M. S. Golwalkar, We, or our Nationhood Defined (Nagpur: Bharat Publications, 1939), p. 24. 31Gandhi, M. K., ‘My Mission,’ from Young India, 3 April 1924, in The Collected Works of Mahatma Gandhi Gandhi (New Delhi: Publications Division Government of India, 1999), 27:162; online edn. [http://gandhiserve.org/e/cwmg/cwmg.htm, accessed 1 June 2018]. All Gandhi quotes are from his collected works as published online from the GandhiServe Foundation, and will be cited in shortened form as ‘CW’ and identified by volume:entry. 32 S. Kapila, ‘Global Intellectual History and the Indian Political,’ in McMahon, D. M., & Moyn, S. (eds), Rethinking Modern European Intellectual History (Oxford University Press, 2014), pp 253-270; online edn. [http://www.oxfordscholarship.com/view/10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199769230.001.0001/acprof-9780199769230-chapter-13, accessed 21 November 2017]. pp. 261-2.

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exact nature of this challenge, however, is rather unintuitive, and rests not so much on Gandhi’s

aversion to violence as his uncanny ability to stomach it in pursuit of larger ends. In the less than

two and a half years during which Gandhi’s life overlapped with nuclear politics, his writings

exhibited a rather perplexing, if not seemingly heartless, approach to victims of the atom bomb,

in large part due to the unique challenge of the bomb to his philosophy of satyagraha (literally,

“truth-insistence”).

Gandhi’s satyagraha sought to conquer enemies through moral conversion. As Gandhi

relates, opponents “must be weaned from error by patience and sympathy…[a] vindication of

truth, not by infliction of suffering on the opponent, but on one’s self.”33 In other words, the

power of suffering through principled non-violence, ahimsa, is employed in satyagraha to win over

enemies to the side of truth by the moral witness of suffering for truth. In this way, non-violence

became for Gandhi a revolutionary call, wherein ahimsa became a “revolution itself rather than

merely its style,” as Shruti Kapila describes—a transformative mode of being that would change

not only the practitioner of ahimsa, but also humanity writ large.34

For Gandhi’s philosophy to be effective, he suggested a spiritual-moral plane of

existence parallel to, greater than, and more enduring than the material plane of human

interaction. Through actions of sincere love and compassion on this moral plane, according to

Gandhi, any human can have substantial causative power in history in any circumstance, a

radically universalistic moral program.

Evidently, Gandhi’s own use of satyagraha did have substantial causative power in

history—particularly in India’s independence struggle. The forgoing argument will therefore

likely be familiar to any cursory student of modern Indian history. What is less known, and what

is pre-requisite to understanding Gandhi’s radical and uncompromising opposition to nuclear

weapons, is the extreme bounds of human suffering that Gandhi permits in the service of

satyagraha. When challenged to apply satyagraha to Nazi Germany, Gandhi’s response was to try to

convert even Hitler himself to the truth of compassion and non-violence. In doing so, Gandhi

went so far as to suggest that the English should not fight the Nazis, but allow the Nazis to

33 Gandhi, ‘Statement to Disorders Inquiry Committee,’ (5 January 1920) CW 19:155. 34 S. Kapila, ‘Gandhi before Mahatma: The Foundations of Political Truth,’ Public Culture, 23:2 (2011), 431-448; online edn. [https://read.dukeupress.edu/public-culture/article-pdf/23/2/431/454484/PC232_13_Kapila_FPP.pdf, accessed 30 May 2018], p. 432.

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invade, and resist them non-violently.35 More disturbingly, the Jews should aspire to suffer non-

violently at the hands of Hitler, even to the point of massacre.36

In this way, as Faisal Devji explicates, Gandhi can be “as hard-hearted as Hitler where

human suffering was concerned.”37 Nonetheless, to make sense of this extreme stance, Devji

brings to light several elucidating elements of Gandhi’s thought. First is to note the absolute

primacy of moral action in Gandhi’s thought as a unique means of change: whereas the material

world is subject to fluctuations and conditions outside of humanity’s control, the moral plane is

constituted purely of the accomplishments and failures of human moral agency, the only truly

“guaranteed outcome[s]” of human action, as Devji relates.38 Given Gandhi’s related belief that

violence can only perpetuate violence, the only way to drive away the force of physical violence

on the material plane is to overcome it with moral strength on the spiritual plane through active,

principled non-violence—even in extreme forms. Second is Gandhi's insistence upon “the moral

universality of ahimsa,” applicable to all violence everywhere, to maintain one’s moral integrity. 39

Perhaps most crucial is Gandhi’s claim of the intrinsic persuasiveness of ahimsa over

time. Gandhi conceives of time non-linearly, and suggests that even those sacrificed in

horrendous circumstances will eventually “convert” the aggressor to the realization of the

superiority of satyagraha. This moral victory may not happen within a lifetime, but over

generations. Thus in their principled, non-violent massacre, the Jews would create a “moral

inheritance” for future generations, as such virtuous actions in the spiritual plane will sooner or

later alter the material, political plane by virtue of the sheer primacy of the spiritual over the

material—a sort of eventual, ineluctable miracle.40

But what becomes of nuclear war, in which the scope of violence threatens to wipe out

humanity entirely, through acts of violence of instantaneous speed? Devji's analysis of Gandhi's

approach to fascism ends with a short reflection on this question. According to Devji, the atom

bomb “seemed to have shocked Gandhi so profoundly as to leave him silent for some time,” but

ultimately led to an even further extension of Gandhi's unyielding logic.41 Just as the violence of

fascism meant that non-violence should continue despite its heightened consequences and

probabilistically further delayed effects, so too should non-violence continue in the face of the

35 F. Devji, The Impossible Indian: Gandhi and the Temptation of Violence (London, 2012), p. 143. 36 Gandhi, ‘The Jews,’ (Harijan, 26 November 1938) CW 74:319. 37 Devji, The Impossible Indian, p. 144. 38 Devji, The Impossible Indian, p. 145. 39 Ibid, 143. 40 Ibid, 146. 41 Ibid, 148.

11

atom bomb—if only by refusing to retreat to bomb shelters—for potentially still further delayed

effects for humanity's survivors. I will return to the theoretical implications of this argument in

Chapter 3. For now, I seek only to further elaborate the trajectory of Gandhi's thought on the

matter in the final years of his life.

More than a year after the first bomb was dropped, Gandhi maintains that he "did not

move a muscle when [he] first heard that the atom bomb had wiped out Hiroshima. On the

contrary, [he] said to [him]self, 'Unless now the world adopts non-violence, it will spell certain

suicide for mankind.'"42 Despite this later description, however, the historical record does seem

to support Devji's claim that Gandhi was actually shocked into silence after the bomb. Gandhi's

first writing on the bomb, a month and a half after its use, was a cable to The Times to negate

rumors that he had yet made any public statements about the use of the bomb. The next record

comes a month later in a letter to an American journalist reaffirming Gandhi's continued refusal

to speak about bomb. He writes, "The more I think the more I feel that I must not speak on the

atomic bomb...help me to observe silence on such matters."43 Indeed, the first substantive public

statement44 on record from the international paragon of non-violence comes almost six months

after the successful use of the deadliest weapon in human history, perhaps due to the challenge it

posed to his satyagraha philosophy.45

Nonetheless, from the moment that Gandhi began to speak out against the atomic bomb

until his death, he was consistent and utterly unyielding in his position. Indeed, though he was

slow to speak out, he worked to make up for lost time, exhibiting a consistently rising frequency

and deepening moral condemnation until the end of his life. Gandhi's first pronouncements on

the bomb focus on its complete incompatibility with satyagraha and its inferior power by

comparison. Thereafter, he interweaves the struggle against the bomb with almost all of the

major other elements of his thought—notably, his antipathy towards technological

advancement,46 the inevitably self-perpetuating nature of violence,47 the primacy of women in

leading non-violence (and by explicit extension, nuclear disarmament),48 the national mission of

42 Gandhi, ‘Talk with an English Journalist,’ (24 September 1964) CW 92:330. 43 Gandhi, ‘Letter to Preston Grover,’ (4 November 1945) CW 88:540. 44 Gandhi does mention the bomb on November 29, 1945, but only passingly, tied to a larger discourse on machinery. Gandhi, ‘Forward to ‘Constructive Programme—Its Meaning and Place,’ (29 November 1945) CW 88:621. 45 Gandhi, ‘Answers to Questions at the Meeting of Teachers and Students,’ (The Hindu, 1 February 1946) CW 89:432. 46 Gandhi, ‘Forward to ‘Constructive Programme—Its Meaning and Place,’ (29 November 1945) CW 88:621. 47 Gandhi, ‘Extract from Talk with A Friend,’ (Harijan, 10 March 1946) CW 90:37. 48 Gandhi, ‘Talk with Women Workers,’ (10 April 1947) CW 94:274.

12

India to "serve as a beacon-light in the world's effort to establish peace,"49 and the broader

mission of the East to bring wisdom to the West.50 With time, Gandhi's rhetoric towards nuclear

issues elevates, until he "hold[s] that he who invented the atomic bomb has committed the

gravest sin in the world of science,"51 claiming that the use of the bomb is "the most diabolical

use of science," and that the production and use of the bomb equates to abject "barbarism."52

Near the end of his life, Gandhi’s views on the bomb reflected his highly idiosyncratic form of

Hinduism which saw Hindu belief as able to turn issues into “genuinely religious but also

political debates” that did not admit Hinduism as a universal or proselytizing religion, but which

nonetheless saw it as a strong, even crucial source of wisdom and guidance for a wider human

project.53

Gandhi's approach to Indian nuclear armament, then, is rather unsurprising. Not only

should India arm under no circumstances, it should also speak out against all nuclear states—

present and future.54 Asked by a scientist what Indian engineers ought to do if asked by the state

to help assemble a bomb, the Mahatma's answer as unambiguous as possible: "Scientists to be

worth the name should resist such a State unto death."55 Whatever we might say about the

conceptual complexities or ruthlessness of Gandhi's approach to nuclear weapons, we can have

no doubt that as far as Gandhi himself was concerned, there was absolutely no place for nuclear

weapons in satyagraha, nor the Indian state.

Golwalkar, Hindutva, & the Bomb

Whereas Gandhi’s political thought suffers from fame-induced occlusion, M. S.

Golwalkar’s situation is the opposite: his work is obscure because he is, especially outside of

Hindutva scholarship.56 This relative neglect stems from an over-prioritization of the intellectual

influence of Golwalkar’s ideological predecessor, V. D. Savarkar, whose 1922 publishing of

Hindutva: Who is a Hindu? is widely regarded as the ideological charter for the Hindu nationalist

movement.57 No doubt Golwalkar and the organization he would eventually lead, the Rashtriya

49 Gandhi, ‘Discussion with a Philippino and Missionaries,’ (7 June 1947) CW 95:203. 50 Gandhi, ‘Speech at Inter-Asian Relations Conference’ (The Hindu, 3 April 1947) CW 94:227. 51 Gandhi, ‘Talk with Englishmen,’ (25 April 1947) CW 94:384. 52 Gandhi, ‘Speech at Prayer Meeting,’ (Harijan, 23 March 1947) CW 94:92. 53 Devji, ‘Gandhi, Hinduism and Humanity,’ pp. 2-3. 54 Gandhi, ‘Talk with Visitors,’ (9 June 1947) CW 25:226. 55 Gandhi, ‘Discussion with Rev. John Kellas,’ (Harijan 24 August 1947) CW 96:333. 56 This is beginning to change, but still largely the case. Promising developments can be seen, for instance, in R. Guha, Makers of Modern India (Cambridge, Mass, 2011), pp. 370-384. 57 Savarkar, V. D., Hindutva: Who is a Hindu? (Delhi, 2003).

13

Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS), owe a great debt to Savarkar’s thought; Golwalkar borrows from it

liberally, and the RSS was initially founded upon the ideas laid out in Savarkar’s Hindutva.

Nonetheless, Golwalkar’s influence in the modern Hindu nationalist movement in many ways

eclipses that of Savarkar’s, as it did for the vast majority of the time between Oppenheimer’s first

bomb and India’s nuclear tests in 1998.

By the time that the first “peaceful nuclear explosive” (codenamed Smiling Buddha) was

tested in India in 1974, Savarkar had been deceased for eight years, whereas Golwalkar passed on

only a year before. Even before their deaths, however, Golwalkar had already clearly established

himself as the leader of the Hindu nationalist movement as early as the 1950’s, during which time

Savarkar increasingly marginalized himself politically while Golwalkar built the numbers and

influence of the RSS to national prominence.58

Even putting aside the question of ideological influence over Hindutva as a whole,

Golwalkar’s hand in the institutions central to India’s acquisition of the bomb make the case for

Golwalkar’s importance fairly indisputable. Golwalkar served as the sarsanghchalak (supreme

leader) of the RSS for the three decades (1940-1973) during which it went from being the small,

unofficial paramilitary wing of Savarkar’s Hindu Mahasabha to the uncontested vanguard of the

Hindu nationalist movement—a longer and more formative period than any other sarsanghchalak.

Golwalkar is credited with having written the organizational charter for the RSS (We, or Our

Nationhood Defined, 1939)59 and setting out a new charter after independence (Bunch of Thoughts,

1966). 60 Most importantly, however, Golwalkar was the architect of the Sangh Parivar

(Organization Family), the network of powerful spin-off organizations surrounding the RSS that

would provide the foundation, vision, and synergy for the political victories that would result in

the bomb. Indeed, Golwalkar oversaw the takeover of the Bharatiya Jana Sangh (BJS) political

party by his protégé Deendayal Upadhyaya over the course of the 1950’s61—the first Indian

political party to advocate for nuclear armament, and the predecessor to the Bharatiya Janata Party

(BJP)—the party to ultimately achieve it. Thus, it is no accident that the singular scholarly article

58 Jaffrelot, C., The Hindu Nationalist Movement and Indian Politics: 1925 to the 1990s (London., 1996), p. 107. 59 M. S. Golwalkar, We, or Our Nationhood Defined (Nagpur, 1939). For clarity, I will abbreviate this work in citations to ‘Nationhood.’ 60 Golwalkar, M. S., Bunch of Thoughts (Bangalore, 2000). 61 Kulkarni, P., ‘Deendayal Upadhyaya, Bigoted 'Guiding Force' of a Hindu Rashtra,’ The Wire (December 2017); online edn. [https://thewire.in/featured/deendayal-upadhyaya-guiding-force-hindu-rashtra; accessed 16 March 2018].

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published on Hindu nationalist thought and weapons of mass destruction62 takes the thought of

Golwalkar as its centerpiece.

Discussing the context of Golwalkar’s major writings on nuclear issues in detail is a

problematic endeavor. Golwalkar’s primary post-bomb book was not written as a book, but

published as a collection of Golwalkar’s various writings, speeches, and discussions over the

years as redacted by his followers, under his oversight and direction. It thus represents

something of a speech act in its own right, even if many of the writings are stripped of their

original context (and problematically undated). The few other writings of Golwalkar’s that have

been printed in English (thus signifying their relative importance) fail to mention nuclear

weapons, or discuss them with any substance.63 Thus, as far as Golwalkar is concerned, we are

left with the redacted, undated, and unsystematic Bunch of Thoughts as the sole record of his

approach to nuclear weapons from which to piece together his approach.

The Hindu Nation & the Hindu Bomb

At its core, Golwalkar’s thought is an unusual marriage between the fascist-tinged ethnic

nationalism of Savarkar and the Advaita Vedanta spirituality of Swami Vivekananda,64 made

possible by the innovative use of late 19th and early 20th century German theorists of nationalism

to craft an organicist, blood-and-soil styled Hindu religio-ethnic nationalism.65 The religious

influence of Vivekananda is substantial, no doubt related to the considerable time Golwalkar

spent at Vivekananda’s Ramakrishna Ashram, where he was initiated into Vivekananda’s monastic

order. His writings nonetheless show great reverence for various other Hindu religious figures of

the period, like Swami Dayananda and Aurobindo Ghose.66

62 K. Bajpai, ‘Hinduism and the Weapons of Mass Destruction: Pacifist, Prudential, and Political,’ in S. H. Hashmi & S. P. Lee, (eds), Ethics and Weapons of Mass Destruction: Religious and Secular Perspectives, (The Ethikon Series in Comparative Ethics, Cambridge, 2004) pp. 308-320, online edn. [https://doi.org/10.1017/CBO9780511606861.017, accessed 10 April 2018]. 63 See Golwalkar’s Spotlights (Bangalore, 1974), and Why Hindu Rashtra? (Bangalore, 1960), as well as Golwalkar, M. S., Upadhyaya, D., & Thengadi, D. B., Integral Approach (New Delhi, 1991). 64 For Golwalkar’s self-described relationship to Vivekananda, see H. S. Bal, ‘The Instigator: How MS Golwalkar’s Virulent Ideology Underpins Modi’s India,’ The Caravan (1 July 2017); online edn. [http://www.caravanmagazine.in/reportage/golwalkar-ideology-underpins-modi-india/ accessed 12 March 2018]; see also Beckerlegge, ‘Swami Vivekananda and the Sangh Parivar.’ 65 For a full description of the European influences of Savarkar's and Golwalkar's respective influences in European political thought, see C. Jaffrelot, The Hindu Nationalist Movement and Indian Politics: 1925 to the 1990s, pp. 25-33, 50-58. 66 Golwalkar, Nationhood, p. 66.

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From these influences, Golwalkar paints a picture of Hindus as an ethno-religious race,

similar to the Jews.67 Despite a high degree of inherent racial genius and potential, the Hindus’

accommodative and peaceful hospitality has allowed them to be mercilessly dominated by

foreign invaders—first by Muslims, and later by British Christians. Over centuries, this

domination has led to the internalization of subservience within the Hindu race, to its own

detriment and that of the world. The late colonial period saw the revival of Hindu spiritual

luminaries—a sign that has always preceded the revival of the Hindu race as a whole. Thus, the

immediate duty of all Hindus is to work tirelessly for this national revival through the creation of

a strong nation-state. Only through such a nation can Hindu racial genius and glory be fully re-

awakened, so that Hindus can serve as “beacons of undying spiritual splendour…shedding peace

and plenty over the whole world”68 and guide the world into the global revival of the realization

of "the Ultimate Reality which pervades all Creation"— the consciousness that is "a divine

trust...in the custody of Hindus alone."69

Golwalkar naturally only applies this vision to international relations after independence.

Given the centrality of foreign domination to Golwalkar’s overarching narrative, his commentary

on international affairs is predictably aggressive.70 Golwalkar’s own words on the matter are

striking in a tract devoted to the issue of non-alignment: “The one fact of world politics today is

the existence of nation-states governed by the one supreme consideration of self-interest and

self-aggrandizement.”71 Aligning oneself with any more powerful country is to be subsumed into

its interests at the expense of one’s own, if not eventually “to serve as cannon-fodder in [the

more powerful country’s] future war.”72 From this perspective, “to remain weak is the most

heinous sin in this world, as that would destroy oneself and also incite feelings of violence in

others.”73 Golwalkar explicitly connects this sin to Hindu religious injunctions: “Our forefathers

have said that physical survival is part of the highest religion and for physical survival strength is

the only basis.”74 Connecting this necessity of strength to his ultimate mission of Hindu national

revival, Golwalkar notes:

67 For a rich discourse of the exchange and parallels between Hindutva and Zionism and their relations to religion and ethnicity, see S. Sen, ‘Fascism Without Fascists? A Comparative Look at Hindutva and Zionism’ South Asia: Journal of South Asian Studies, 38:4 (2016), 690-711; online edn. https://doi.org/10.1080/00856401.2015.1077924, accessed 30 May 2018]. 68 Golwalkar, Nationhoood, p. 67 69 Golwalkar, Bunch of Thoughts, pp. 3-6. 70 Bajpai, ‘Hinduism and Weapons of Mass Destruction,’ p. 313. 71 Golwalkar, Bunch of Thoughts, p. 266. 72 Ibid, p. 267. 73 Ibid, p. 271. 74 Ibid, p. 271.

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“Let us at least now recognize the truth that for real national honour and peace, there is no other way except the building of invincible national strength. It is only then that the great principles that we preach to the world will carry weight and prestige. The world is not prepared to listen to the philosophy, however sublime, of the weak…The world worships only the strong.”75

The internal logic and references of these passages suggests that they were written after the Sino-

Indian War of 1962, but before China’s first successful nuclear test in 1964—making Golwalkar

one of the earliest major voices calling for Indian nuclear armament, if not explicitly. The implicit

logic for armament expressed here before a nuclear China, however, Golwalkar makes explicit

shortly after China’s test: “the possession of [the] atom bomb by Communist China has made it

imperative for us to manufacture the same.”76

Though this first overt recorded call for nuclear armament by Golwalkar in English

occurs only after China’s armament,77 the logic behind it follows fairly straightforwardly from his

earliest writings. The need for Hindu contributions to the world—particularly spiritual

contributions—is dire. Prerequisite for such contributions, both in production and reception, is

national strength and glory competitive with the great powers on the world stage, and

commensurate with spiritual eminence. Nuclear armament is thus only a natural outcome of

Golwalkar’s approach to national rejuvenation. As we shall see, neither his nor Gandhi’s nuclear

rationales shall go unheeded.

A Brief, Ideological Assessment of India’s Armament

Much of Hindu nuclear politics’ theoretical importance stems from how it historically

upended those strands of realist thought that became so entrenched in foreign policy theory and

practice throughout the mid to late 20th century. The most amazing feature of this realist

subversion is the fact that it was not a once-off affair, but a consistent, decades-long subversion

of realist calculations. Valiant efforts to recount the full, textured story of India’s surprising

atomic ambitions have been made, most notably in George Perkovich’s tome India’s Nuclear Bomb

and Itty Abraham’s The Making of the Indian Atomic Bomb, to which this study is heavily indebted.

A full retelling is beyond the scope of this paper, as is the subject of most academic study on this

history, which tends to focus on parallel, surprising developments in Indian culture around

75 Ibid, p. 270. 76 Ibid, p. 327. 77 Again, the precise date is not given, but Golwalkar implies that he is writing not long after said nuclear test.

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nuclear weapons.78 Instead, I aim to highlight the decisiveness of ideological elements of India’s

unusual aversion to, and eventual acquisition of, nuclear arms in two parts. In the first, I will

examine the period from India’s independence up to the mid-1990s, and elucidate the failure of

realist calculations to apprehend a principled, Gandhian aversion to nuclear weapons among

India’s nuclear elite, despite a variety of legitimate forces pushing against that aversion.

Thereafter, I will recount in more detail the often-overlooked history of Hindutva-inspired

nuclear activism, and how Hindu nationalists’ decision to arm India is best understood in

relation to political realism and Hindutva. Whereas the influence of Gandhian political thought

was shocking for its aversion to nuclear weapons despite strategic imperatives to arm, the Hindu

nationalist strain of influence was remarkable for just the opposite reason: Prime Minister

Vajpayee’s acquisition of nuclear weapons in 1998 was strategically counterproductive.

Gandhian Nuclear Aversion

The primary way that we know that India’s nuclear policy from independence (and

particularly since China’s acquisition of the bomb in 1964) until the mid-1990s flew in the face of

the most influential theoreticians and practitioners of political realism is because they tell us so.

Just to give a few examples, we know now from declassified US documents that advisors of US

Secretary of State Dean Rusk felt so strongly about India’s strategic imperative to arm that they

considered “the possibilities of providing nuclear weapons under US custody” directly to India

for fear of Chinese aggression after successful Chinese nuclear tests in 1964.79 By July 1966,

Dean Rusk himself even went so far as to recommend that President Lyndon Johnson take “no

dramatic steps to discourage the Indians from starting a nuclear weapons program: this is

because we have been unable to devise anything dramatic which would not cost us more than

any anticipated gain.”80 Both of these statements were made without the full knowledge of how

advanced the Indian nuclear program already was, independent of American help. A decade later,

after India had demonstrated the strength of its nuclear program with a peaceful nuclear

explosion (codenamed Smiling Buddha), the US State Department conjectured that given India’s

strategic situation, further nuclear tests towards military uses were “inevitable.” 81 Indeed, the

78 See Abraham, I., ‘Introduction: Nuclear Power and Atomic Publics’ in I. Abraham (ed.), South Asian Cultures of the Bomb: Atomic Publics and the State in India and Pakistan (Bloomington, 2009), pp.1-19; R. Das., ‘State, Identity and Representations of Nuclear (In)Securities in India and Pakistan,’ Journal of Asian and African Studies, 45:3 (2010), pp. 146-169. 79 Perkovich, G., India’s Nuclear Bomb: The Impact on Global Proliferation (London, 1999), p. 91. 80 Quoted in Abraham, I., The Making of the Indian Atomic Bomb: Science, Secrecy and the Postcolonial State (Postcolonial Encounters, New York, 1998), p. 127. 81 Quoted in Perkovich, India’s Nuclear Bomb, p. 193.

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father of Neorealism himself, Kenneth Waltz, even went so far in 1984 as to give a lecture in

New Delhi arguing for India’s geostrategic right to nuclear weapons.82 India’s own realist

strategic community felt similarly. By 1970, “India’s Kissinger,” K. Subrahmanyam, who served

twice as secretary in the Ministry of Defense (1962-65, 1979-80) and the chairman of the joint

intelligence Committee (1977-79), began consistently and boldly vocalizing India’s strategic need

for nuclear arms over the next two decades. 83

It is not as though these strategists knew something that the decision-makers didn’t, or

vice versa. It was plain to the world that from 1964, India had a nuclear-armed neighbor that it

had just unsuccessfully fought a war with, and with which it continued to have several

unresolved territorial disputes. As the China threat slowly waned, the Pakistan threat quickly

rose, with repetitive conflagrations, and clear signs that Pakistan was seeking nuclear arms with

substantial help abroad. I have highlighted but a few of the more overt expressions of domestic

and international practitioners and theorists’ realist arguments, to stand in for what was largely a

consistent pressure. Realist calculations can often be unclear or ambiguous, but in the case of

India’s nuclear armament they were not for several decades and from a variety of the leading

authorities: with the balance of power as it was in Asia, realists demanded India’s armament.

Beyond strong, vocal realist logic, however, India’s nuclear elite had significant, further

incentives and pressures to arm. From 1971, a public poll showed that 63% of the public favored

a nuclear India, making it politically advantageous for any politician to work towards armament.84

This consensus was further solidified by the overwhelming public support demonstrated for the

government after 1974’s successful Smiling Buddha test. Playing off this public support,

politicians from 1964 onward had to justify their peaceful stand not only to voters, but also to

political critiques of other parties who stood to gain by nuclear advocacy (a charge usually led by

Hindu nationalists).

Moreover, from its inception in 1948, India’s nuclear establishment represented the

paradigmatic exemplar of technological determinism in nuclear proliferation: the tendency of

nuclear scientific communities to push states towards armament out of a desire to accrue

domestic and international prestige, and to achieve the technological heights of modernity.85 The

founding head of India’s Atomic Energy Commission (AEC), Homi J. Bhabha, exerted a

82 C. Xavier, & S. Cohen, ‘The Career and Ideas of K. Subrahmanyam,’ Brookings Event Blog (18 February 2011); online edn. [https://www.brookings.edu/events/the-career-and-ideas-of-k-subrahmanyam/ accessed 28 May 2018]. 83 Xavier & Cohen, ‘The Career and Ideas of K. Subrahmanyam,’ Brookings Event Blog. 84 Perkovich, India’s Nuclear Bomb, p. 156-7 85 See Chapter 4 of J. Circincione, Bomb Scare: the History and Future of Nuclear Weapons (New York, 2007).

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constant pressure on political leaders (and later, on the public) to arm, even going so far as to

openly mislead the public to garner political support for nuclear armament.86 He naturally set the

organization’s pace towards armament, with a rather dubious record of pushing and

manipulating political authority at its most vulnerable towards nuclear weapon acquisition.87 As

Itty Abraham correctly points out, scientific capabilities, strong AEC institutional desire, military

support, raw nuclear materials, tacit superpower support, public backing, and strategic demands

all aligned in India to produce nuclear weapons years before 1974, and resulted only in a years-

late peaceful nuclear explosion, kept at arm’s length from the military establishment.88 Likewise,

unlike the pattern of other powers that started down the road of fission explosions, India failed

to follow its first 1974 detonation with thermonuclear blasts within a few years, despite

continued strategic demands.89

The fact that India did not arm is thus deeply counterintuitive, even beyond realist

calculations. The historical reasons for this successful aversion to nuclear arms owe a large debt

to historical coincidence, animated by a strong Gandhian legacy. Though his aim was not to curb

the military expansion of nuclear capabilities (and possibly was just the opposite), Nehru’s

establishment of the AEC in 1948 structured the organization with an extraordinary degree of

secrecy—greater even than the British and American counterparts90— had the unforeseen

outcome that Gandhi’s thought and legacy would have outsized impact simply by sheer

coincidence of the tiny number of people who ended up controlling India’s nuclear progress.

Aside from the leaders of the AEC itself, the prime minister alone had detailed knowledge of,

and decision-making power over, the AEC. In the period from independence to the first Hindu

nationalist prime minister in 1996, there were only six prime ministers of significant length:

Jawaharlal Nehru (1947-1964), Lal Bahadur Shastri (1964-1966), Indira Gandhi (1966-1977,

1980-1984), Morarji Desai (1977-1979), Rajiv Gandhi (1984-1989), and Pamulaparti Venkata

Narasimha Rao (1991-1996).

These six prime ministers fit into two categories in their relationship to armament and

Gandhism. In the first category are Nehru, Indira Gandhi, Rajiv Gandhi, and Narasimha Rao,

who all took firm, principled public stands against nuclear armament, inspired to varying degrees

by sincere Gandhian moral inspiration, mixed with more pragmatic considerations. Nehru began

86 Perkovich, India’s Nuclear Bomb, p. 71 87 Perkovich, India’s Nuclear Bomb, p. 353, See also K. Frey, ‘Guardians of the Nuclear Myth: Politics, Ideology, and India’s Strategic Community’ in I. Abraham (ed.), South Asian Cultures of the Bomb: Atomic Publics and the State in India and Pakistan (Bloomington, 2009). 88 Abraham, The Making of the Indian Atomic Bomb, p. 114. 89 Ibid, p. 16. 90 Perkovich, India’s Nuclear Bomb, p. 20-21

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this trend in the very founding of the AEC by delineating its explicit aim of developing India’s

atomic energy capabilities with a simultaneous, discrete confession that there was ultimately no

real technological distinction between developing nuclear technology for peaceful and military

purposes.91 Though Nehru shared Homi J. Babbha’s fascination with scientific advancement, he

largely curbed the AEC’s expansionist tendencies and positioned India as a moral compass for

global disarmament—a conscious approximation of Gandhian moral legacy and legitimacy.92 As

far as Nehru could tell, Gandhi’s symbolic legacy was able to endow India with far more moral,

soft power in the international arena than it could have claimed by its material assets alone. In

claiming Gandhi’s moral legacy to not arm, India was able to position itself as a leader among

third world countries and argue in the international arena with far more weight in its first

decades as an independent state than if it had tried to compete in material terms.

Indira Gandhi, Rajiv Gandhi, and Narasimha Rao all followed in, and built upon,

Nehru’s example, in some part from continued Gandhian moral inspiration, and in some other

part from what Itty Abraham calls India’s “double bind,” an institutionalized paradox that

entrenched Nehru’s successors into the Nehruvian-Gandhian non-violent legacy. India’s restraint

in arming was the basis of its legitimacy as a major player in the international community’s

discussion of nuclear issues; however, as the potency of that claim waned, India could not

acquire a nuclear bomb to maintain its relevance without completely undermining the moral

authority it had claimed for so long. 93 In this unforeseen manner, Gandhi’s political thought thus

significantly limited the spectrum of nuclear options that Congress prime ministers could take

without sacrificing their authority in the international sphere.

Thus, by the time that Indira Gandhi asserted in 1982 that she was “basically against

weapons of mass destruction” to defend her refusal to initiate nuclear tests amid rising pressure

from a rumored Pakistani bomb,94 it is unclear the extent to which she felt genuine moral

aversion, merely relied on precedent, or felt constrained to uphold India’s moral authority. All

three in different ways harkened back to Gandhi’s influence. This tack had only two slight

hiccups. First, in a moment of particular political weakness, senior AEC officials pressured

Indira Gandhi into conducting the Smiling Buddha peaceful nuclear explosion test of 1974, in

which she maintained her Gandhian stance only by being deliberate in expressing that the

explosion was absolutely not for military purposes, and was not even discussed with military

91 Ibid. 92 Ibid, p. 15. 93 Abraham, The Making of the Indian Atomic Bomb, p. 139. 94 R. M. Basrur, ‘Nuclear Weapons and Indian Strategic Culture,’ Journal of Peace Research 38:2 (2001), pp. 181-198; online edn. [http://journals.sagepub.com/doi/pdf/10.1177/0022343301038002004, accessed 7 June 2018], p. 189.

21

leaders.95 The second was in 1995, when Rao was caught half-heartedly posturing towards a

nuclear test, primarily to quiet the AEC’s pressure and to ward off Hindu nationalist nuclear

campaigning. The US discovered this posturing, and quickly pressured Rao out of his bluff. 96

The second category, comprising of Lal Bahadur Shastri and Morarji Desai represents an

even more overt and vigorous Gandhian stance. Shastri’s first foray into Indian politics was as a

part of Gandhi’s noncooperation movement, and he was thus unsurprisingly a convictional, self-

described Gandhian.97 His tenure happened to coincide with the most crucial period of India’s

nuclear saga before the 1990s, just after India’s humiliating defeat to China in the Sino-Indian

War and China’s subsequent nuclear test. Shastri faced mutinous campaigns from the within

AEC, his own Congress party, and the Lok Sabha aimed specifically to “overcome [Shastri’s]

Gandhian inclinations.”98 Shastri barely rebutted these threats by appeal to his staunch belief in

disarmament as a unique Indian mission in the tradition of Gandhi and Nehru, despite the

complete lack of a strategy to address the new balance of power in the wake of China’s nuclear

tests.99 In the Lok Sabha debate that ensued, Shastri boldly contended “India does represent to

some extent the desire to save humanity from wars and annihilation. We cannot give up this

stand.”100 The Hindustan Times rightly called Shastri’s successful Gandhian stand “nothing short

of a miracle.”101

Morarji Desai’s tenure came at a less crucial moment, but his Gandhian aversion was the

most extreme of all. Prior to his election, he was perhaps even more influential than in office by

representing the most dogged, zero-tolerance approach to the bomb in the 1964-5 debates, and

by refusing to use the issue of the bomb to destabilize his political rival, Indira Gandhi, when he

could have weaponized the issue to his advantage in 1966.102 Nonetheless, his ministerial

influence was loud and clear: in his first press conference as prime minister he not only stated

that India would not develop nuclear weapons, but also expressed his distaste for the notion that

any peaceful nuclear explosions were ever necessary: “Even if the whole world arms itself with

the bombs, we will not do so.”103 To this category of prime ministers averse to armament for

more straightforward Gandhian principles, it is also worth mentioning Vikram Sarabhai, the

second head of the AEC, who used his position in the AEC to try to dismantle much of the

95 Perkovich, India’s Nuclear Bomb, p. 178. 96 Ibid, p. 367. 97 Ibid, p. 63. 98 Ibid, p. 65. 99 Ibid, p. 74. 100 Ibid, p. 82. 101 Quoted in Perkovich, India’s Nuclear Bomb, p. 74. 102 Ibid, pp. 125-6. 103 Ibid, p. 201.

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military expansionism that so characterized the organization. Other senior members of the AEC

took explicit issue with Sarabhai for his Gandhian leanings,104 and Sarabhai provided the

scientific arguments and momentum that was perhaps most integral to decisively quell the uproar

following China’s nuclear test in the Lok Sabha.105

Thus, between the more Gandhi-inflected pragmatisms of Nehru, Indira Gandhi, Rajiv

Gandhi, and Rao, and the more idealistic Gandhisms of Shastri and Desai (and, from the AEC,

Sarabhai), Gandhian moral inspiration trumped realist nuclear imperatives between 1948-1996.

No doubt India’s nuclear saga until 1996 was not a simple triumphal tale of Gandhian moral

force, but a highly coincidental and contingent story. External circumstances—notably the

acquisition of the bomb by China, repeated conflagrations with Pakistan, and American efforts

to ensure non-proliferation—largely dictated the strategic costs and benefits of India’s nuclear

aversion, just as the secrecy-insulated structure of AEC coincidentally helped to create the

circumstances in which so few Gandhians could have such outsized impact over and against a

broader political spectrum and population that favored armament. Nonetheless, it was Gandhi’s

thought and legacy that largely set the tempo for dealing with these contingencies and staving the

realist proliferation tide.

Thus, while a broad spectrum of leading realists pontificated about India’s nuclear

strategic demands, only India’s arch-realist K. Subrahmanyam would eventually direct his

arguments towards the ideological root of India’s puzzling nuclear aversion. Taking the lead in

advocating for a more realist approach to armament at a moment of particular concern of

potential Pakistani armament in 1981, Subrahmanyam dedicated his final paragraphs to

reinterpreting Gandhi’s writings and speeches to argue for nuclear arms.106 He knew well that any

critique of India’s insistence on non-armament must be directed at a political culture premised

on a Gandhian legacy of nuclear non-armament, and wrote accordingly. Interestingly enough, it

was not the realists that would succeed in taking over India’s nuclear policies, but a rival form of

Hindu politics—ironically displacing Gandhian dominance just as its nuclear aversion was

beginning to align with realist injunctions.

104 Ibid, p. 114. 105 Ibid, p. 125. 106 Perkovich, India’s Nuclear Bomb, p. 229

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Golwalkar’s Nuclear Ambition

The nuclear influence of M. S. Golwalkar is more difficult to trace, and far less

commented on. As we shall see, however, it has been similarly decisive. Unlike Gandhi, whose

nuclear influence was primarily posthumous and who left a robust, distinct tradition of

‘Gandhian’ thought in his wake, Golwalkar was an interlocutor during much of India’s nuclear

saga, heavily influenced a pre-existent Hindutva discourse, and spread his ideas more through

institutional organizing than posthumous symbolism. Through this alternative method the

genealogy of nuclear stances from Golwalkar’s thought is nonetheless similarly crucial to India’s

nuclear story.

Though Golwalkar adamantly opposed the RSS having any direct political involvement

initially,107 he eventually oversaw the takeover of the Bharatiya Jana Sangh (BJS) political party by

the RSS over the course of the 1950’s. The agent of this takeover was Deendyal Upadhyaya, a

full time pracharak of the RSS personally mentored by Golwalkar himself,108 and commissioned

by Golwalkar to work in the BJS from its inception in 1951.109 Upadhyaya quickly established

himself as an effective political ideologue by developing a political philosophy he dubbed

“Integral Humanism,”110 which was based primarily on the thought of Golwalkar, but with an

infusion of Gandhian language more palatable to the public.111 Upadhyaya quickly assumed the

central position of General Secretary of the BJS after its founding, an office he continued in until

his death in 1968.112 By 1965, Upadhyaya’s Integral Humanism was officially recognized as the

ideological foundation of the BSP.113 Upadhyaya was remembered for having been “very alive”

to the issue of nuclear defense,114 and, in line with his mentor and “Guruji,” Golwalkar, strongly

advocated for nuclear armament as a means of shoring up hard power for India’s prestige on the

world stage.115

Thus it was Upadhyaya’s BJS that led the charge in criticizing the Congress’ position after

China’s nuclear test in 1964, accusing Congress of “ahimsa idiocy” for not beating China to

107 Jaffrelot, The Hindu Nationalist Movement and Indian Politics: 1925 to the 1990s, p. 114, and Hansen, The Saffron Wave, p. 83. 108 Kulkarni, ‘Deendayal Upadhyaya, Bigoted 'Guiding Force' of a Hindu Rashtra.’ 109 Hansen, The Saffron Wave, p. 85; Jaffrelot, The Hindu Nationalist Movement and Indian Politics: 1925 to the 1990s, p.117; and Sharma, J. N., The Political Thought of Pandit Deendayal Upadhyaya (New Delhi: Concept Publishing Company, 2009), p. 21. 110 This is not to be confused with another religio-political work of great importance, namely Jacque Maritain’s 1936 book Integral Humanism. The two are distinct, but seem to have named their programs from similar inspiration. 111 Hansen, The Saffron Wave, p. 85; 112 Sharma, The Political Thought of Pandit Deendayal Upadhyaya, p. 21. 113 Hansen, The Saffron Wave, p. 85. 114 D. B. Thengadi, Ideology and Perception: Politics for Nation’s Sake (New Delhi, 1989), p. 52. 115 M. C. Sharma, Pandit Deendayal Upadhyaya, (Builders of Modern India, Delhi, 2017), p 51.

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nuclear armament—a “criminal folly.”116 Shortly thereafter, the BJS was the first and only party

to formally introduce a motion in the Lok Sabha for India to acquire weapons, the very motion

against which Prime Minister Shastri would have to voice his most brazen Gandhian rationale

for not arming.117 When Sarabhai’s leadership of the AEC turned the tide against nuclear

armament in the summer of 1966, 253 members of Parliament signed a memorandum endorsing

India’s principled, anti-bomb stance, representing every Indian party, except the BJS.118

In 1980, the BJS reconstituted itself as the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), an effort led by the

former BJS senior leader and founding BJP president, Atal Bihari Vajpayee.119 Vajpayee’s career

was far more that of a politician than an ideologue compared with Golwalkar or Deendayal. His

writings and speeches are diplomatically calculated, and he never sets out a systematic political

philosophy, preferring to continue the official adherence to Deendayal’s Integral Humanism as

in the BJS. This continuation was natural: Vajpayee’s youth and early adulthood were largely

shaped by Golwalkar’s RSS. Vajpayee was dispatched by the RSS to help Upadhyaya’s BJS in

1958, and largely followed Upadhyaya as his protégé thereafter.120 Indeed, RSS circles

characterize a direct leadership and ideology lineage from Golwalkar, to Upadhyaya, to

Vajpayee.121

Vajpayee’s BJP was met with a great deal of success. By 1991 elections the BJP was a

major opposition party that marketed itself, among other things, as the pro-nuclear party in

contrast to Rajiv Gandhi’s Congress.122 By the 1995 election season, the BJP’s pro-bomb stance

was established as part of its national image, thus precipitating PM Rao’s posturing towards

nuclear tests.123 In 1996, the BJP won the largest tally of the Lok Sabha, giving it 16 days to form

a government lead by Vajpayee as its prime minster. Vajpayee immediately and unilaterally gave

the AEC the authorization to test a nuclear bomb, and only hesitated to insure that the

government he formed would win a vote of confidence. Vajpayee failed to form an effective

government, and fell 12 days into his reign—aborting a nuclear test so close to execution that a

bomb had already been placed in the testing shaft.124

116 Perkovich, India’s Nuclear Bomb, p. 68. 117 Ibid, p. 82. 118 Ibid, p. 125. 119 Kuruvachira, J., Politicisation of Hindu Religion in Postmodern India (New Delhi, 2008), p. 23. 120 Ibid, p. 20. 121 Ibid, p. 18. 122 Petrovich, India’s Nuclear Bomb, p. 320. 123 Ibid, p. 367. 124 Ibid, pp. 374-5.

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In 1998, Vajpayee would again be elected to the office of prime minister, and again

wasted no time in authorizing the testing of nuclear bombs—despite a forthcoming strategic

defense review promised on the BJP’s election platform.125 Vajpayee’s decision was taken within

weeks of his being sworn in, in consultation with a small handful of BJP leaders and scientists,

and without any substantial strategic re-evaluation or rational.126 On May 11, 1998, the Rajasthani

desert at Pokhran erupted once again in Operation Shakti, this time with full-fledged nuclear

weapons. India had become a nuclear power.

That Vajpayee’s decision was strategically disadvantageous is fairly well attested.127

Nonproliferation attempts by the US had been “closing” India’s window of opportunity to arm

for many years, without any real substantive change in India’s actual ability to arm.128 In the post-

Cold War milieu of the 1990’s, India’s relationship with the US was at a relative high; testing

could only jeopardize that crucial rapport.129 India’s relationship with China was more stable than

it had been in years (and had almost entirely dropped out of public discourse, in terms of any

strategic threat),130 and its relationship with Pakistan was also relatively stable—birthing a nuclear

arsenal only risked drawing Pakistan closer together with China, against India.131 Perhaps most

importantly, India at the time enjoyed significant military advantage over Pakistan, and a nuclear

equilibrium short of weaponized explosives. Thus, raising the stakes with nuclear arms would

only challenge Pakistan to do the same, exposing India to an existential nuclear threat132—which

of course it did. For all these reasons, at the time of testing the great majority of major political

parties, public intellectuals, and even military officials actively opposed nuclear armament.133The

only positive circumstantial impetus to test would have been demonstrated public support for a

nuclear India, which could easily have been achieved by testing later, after arriving at a defense

strategy that integrated nuclear capabilities.

125 Ibid, pp. 404, 411-2. 126 Bajpai, K., ‘The BJP and the Bomb’ in S. D. Sagan, Inside Nuclear South Asia (Stanford, 2009), p. 40, Petrovich, India’s Nuclear Bomb, p. 412. 127 Admittedly, there is relatively more diversity of opinion amongst realists concerning the counter-strategic nature of Vajpayee’s decision to arm, compared with the clearer consensus on India’s stance on avoiding arms before the 1990s as counterstrategic. Scholars like R. M. Basrur maintain that even if the immediate impetus to arm was lacking a longer-term realist calculation might still push a leader to formally arm even if threats are not immanent, or else de-emphasize that formal weapons tests fundamentally shifted India’s nuclear position. Nonetheless, as shall be shown, most realists would still consider Vajpayee’s decision disadvantageous, and, in any case, Vajpayee himself clearly did not take the decision primarily out of realist concerns, as will be shown. See R. M. Basrur, ‘Nuclear Weapons and Indian Strategic Culture,’ pp. 194-5. 128 Bajpai, ‘The BJP and the Bomb,’ p. 30. 129 Ibid, p. 33. 130 Frey, ‘Guardians of the Nuclear Myth: Politics, Ideology, and India’s Strategic Community,’ p. 201. 131 Bajpai, ‘The BJP and the Bomb,’ p. 35. 132 S. Sarkar, ‘The BJP Bomb and Aspects of Nationalism,’ Economic and Political Weekly, 33:27 (1998), p. 1725. 133 Cherian, J., ‘The BJP and the Bomb,’ Frontline Magazine, 15:8 (April 11, 1998); online edn. [http://www.frontline.in/static/html/fl1508/15080040.htm].

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The crucial impetus for Vajpayee to arm must instead be primarily found in his Hindutva

ideology. Vajpayee’s closest advisor, Brajesh Mishra reportedly noted to Vajpayee after a

successful missile test by Pakistan in April that “the Ghauri [missile test is] a good enough excuse

to go ahead with the nuclear test.”134 Thus Vajpayee and Mishra at least felt the need for an

excuse to test for reasons independent of public opinion and strategic demands with Pakistan.

When asked about the meaning of the test, Vajpayee simply responded, “the greatest meaning of

these tests is that they had given India Shakti,135 they had given India strength and they have

given India self-confidence.”136 When Vajpayee first heard the news of the successful test, his

notoriously radical Home Minister, L. K. Advani, shed tears of joy.137 As a magazine article

prophetically warned just after the BJP’s election, Vajpayee had flouted all political pressure and

strategic imperatives to deliver India a “Hindu Bomb” as “an article of faith.”138

With Golwalkar’s vision now achieved, Hindu nationalists reflected Golwalkar’s thought

in religious devotion: the VHP campaigned to erect a temple to the goddess of power, Shakti,

over the test sight of Operation Shakti, where Hindu civilization achieved the power to lift the

earth.139 The same year, Hindu nationalist greeting cards for Diwali exhibited an aarti worship

lamp directed towards geographic India, artistically overlaid with Shiva’s third eye, the lingam,

and a Rutherford diagram of the atom—now all symbols of the holy, annihilating power of the

Destroyer.140 In iconography and in worship, Hindu nationalists thus celebrated Vajpayee’s

success by fusing the scientific power of the atom bomb with Hindu spiritual power, a salient

echo of Golwalkar’s nuclear dreams.

Similarly, Vajpayee’s pronouncements after the tests, both to reporters141 and to the

parliament,142 certainly harkens back more to Golwalkar’s pronouncement that “the world

worships only the strong,”143 than any realist calculations of nuclear armament—much as

Congress aversion to the bomb harkened back to Gandhian principles over strategic concerns.

134 Bajpai, ‘The BJP and the Bomb,’ p. 42. 135 “Power,” also, (significantly) the goddess of power. 136 Bajpai, ‘The BJP and the Bomb,’ p. 37. 137 Petrovich, India’s Nuclear Bomb, p. 416. 138 Cherian, ‘The BJP and the Bomb.’ 139 G. Iype, ‘VHP to Rope in Buddhist Monks from Nepal for Shaktipeeth Project,’ Rediff Report (27 May 1998); online edn [http://www.rediff.com/news/1998/may/27bomb3.htm, accessed 8 June 2018]. 140 C. Brosius (ed), ‘Divali Greeting Card for the Year 1998/9, Depicting the Hindu Pride in India’s Nuclear Tests’ from ‘Celebrating More Than the New Year: The Hindu Nationalist Greeting Cards’ collection in Tasveer Ghar: Digital Archive of South Asian Popular Visual Culture; online edn. [http://tasveerghar.net/hgreet/p10.html, accessed 8 June 2018]. 141 Bajpai, ‘The BJP and the Bomb,’ p. 37. 142 Vajpayee, ‘Nuclear Weapons for Self Defense’ (Parliamentary Speech, Delivered 27 May 1998) in S. R. Sharma, Commitment to Power (Jaipur, 1998), pp. 199-203. 143 Golwalkar, Bunch of Thoughts, p. 270.

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Each camp chronically lacked a nuclear strategy to back up their respective rejection or

acquisition of nuclear arms, as each made its decisions against the grain of realist strategic

calculations. Herein lies the historical fascination of Hindu nuclear politics: though realist

arguments for and against nuclear arms were certainly represented in the public sphere by

thinkers like K. Subrahmanyam, it was two principled and opposed varieties of Hindu political

thought that effectively and consistently fought and won control over India’s nuclear

apparatus—a dramatic refutation of the Neorealist thought so dominant in nuclear strategic

studies, and a striking example of the power of ideas. More interestingly still, though both major

strains of Hindu politics broke with realist calculations of material strategic advantage, they did

so in conflicting, inverse ways: the Gandhist tradition eschewed what would have been (by realist

standards) a responsible level of armament to protect the Indian population to preserve moral

power, while the Hindutva tradition irresponsibly armed in order to augment and expand Hindu

grandeur. Inverse as their stances may have been, the consequences according to predominant

realist calculations would be the same: huge, unnecessary risk for the Indian public and state.

Having now understood the strange, conflicting historical power of Hindu nuclear politics, we

may now turn to considerations of the symbolic significance of the atomic bomb that largely

validated Gandhi and Golwalkar’s divergent stances.

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Chapter 2: Humanity’s Nuclear Crisis, Science & Hindu Civilization

The plume over Hiroshima on August 6, 1945 quickly became a vast dystopian cloud, an

atmospheric portent hanging over the whole of humankind. No society could avoid the fear of

nuclear annihilation—perhaps the first truly global event, and, as Hannah Arendt points out, the

“the most potent symbol of the unity of mankind,” bonded together for the first time by a

common fear of nuclear extinction.144 Without a doubt, the advent of the atomic bomb initiated

a new subjectivity of collective humanity and global history into mankind’s consciousness.

However much the fear of annihilation may have been ubiquitous, its meaning was not

uniform. The world’s grand narratives would interpret the power and fear of nuclear capabilities

in varied, intersecting ways. For the Western civilization145 that gave the bomb its birth, the

bomb’s existence became not only a crisis of survival, but also a crisis of legitimacy—

fundamentally threatening the concept of progress in modernity, and turning the triumph of

science on its head. For Hindu political thought, the survival crisis was no less real, but the sense

of internal validation was deeply intensified, in large part stemming from Western scientific and

spiritual disarray. For Gandhi and Golwalkar, the atom bomb confirmed their criticisms of

Western civilization and science, and expanded the impetus and vision for Hindu civilization in a

world pushed the edge of disaster by a spiritually disoriented pursuit of progress. This section

contextualizes the theoretical and historic currents behind Hindu nuclear politics to explain how

the bomb re-energized and re-oriented both Gandhian and Hindu nationalist visions for India

and the world. Rather than the cold, calculated judgement that realists tend to expect from the

spectre of nuclear annihilation, the nuclear age actually drove Hindu political thought in exactly

the opposite direction: towards a radical reaffirmation of a religious idealism deeply disruptive to

realist thought.

The West’s Nuclear Crisis: Scientific, Civilizational, and Spiritual

Oppenheimer’s famous invocation of the Bhagavad Gita was an appropriate indication of

the coming intellectual crisis to engulf the society that produced the atomic bomb. Reflecting

back on his use of the quote that he had “become Death, the destroyer of worlds,” after the first

144 Arendt, H., Men in Dark Times, (New York, 1968), p. 83.

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nuclear explosion, Oppenheimer suggested in a 1965 documentary that all the scientists with him

also must have “thought that, one way or another.”146

In Europe, the aftermath of the world wars and particularly the Holocaust had already

initiated an intense period of reflection on and critique of the use of technology and state

organization for mass violence. In 1944, Max Horkheimer and Theodor Adorno published

Dialectic of Enlightenment, which set out “to explain why humanity, instead of entering a truly

human state, is sinking into a new kind of barbarism” from its technological, scientific, and social

‘advancement.’147 With this line of thought already firmly established in the intellectual milieu, the

advent of nuclear weapons was seen more immediately within the same vein of dystopian anti-

progress.

As the arms race gained speed, a “decade of deep, thermonuclear anxiety” settled in early

1950s across the world.148 The arms race quickly progressed with such unprecedented speed and

risk that it profoundly disturbed even the politicians and scientists at its helm. Einstein famously

turned against the bomb he petitioned Roosevelt to create, becoming a powerful activist for

nuclear disarmament. Reflecting back on decades of proliferation in 1981, US Cold War

strategist George Kennan observed, “We have gone on piling up weapon upon weapon, missile

upon missile, new levels of destructiveness upon old ones. We have done this helplessly, almost

involuntarily, like the victims of some sort of hypnotism, like men in a dream, like lemmings

headed for the seas.”149

The problem for intellectuals was much to do with this hypnotic, involuntary quality of

nuclear expansion. So intrinsic, so ineluctable was the genesis, proliferation, and (probable)

overwhelming destruction of the bomb in Western society that thinkers felt the need to

transcend disciplinary boundaries to question its basis.150 Not only were civilizational categories

more common at the time, they were also the only categories large enough to capture the crisis

of the nuclear age as an integrated whole.151 For such a monstrous reality to unfold willingly, the

146 J. R. Oppenheimer, in F. Freed, The Decision to Drop the Atomic Bomb (National Broadcasting Company White Paper Documentary, 1965), online edn. [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=T2W9CxVVMAc, accessed, 6 June 2018]. 147 M. Horkheimer, & T. W. Adorno, Dialectic of Enlightenment: Philosophical Fragments, G. S. Noerr (ed.), E. Jephcott (trans.), (Cultural Memory in the Present, Sanford, 2002), p. xiv. 148 Van Munster, R., & Sylvest, C., Nuclear Realism: Global Political Thought During the Thermonuclear Revolution (The New International Relations Series, London, 2016), p. 1. 149 Circincione, Bomb Scare: the History and Future of Nuclear Weapons, p. 36. 150 Van Munster & Sylvest, Nuclear Realism, pp. 6-7. 151 The category of “civilization” has recently attracted a great deal of scholarly discomfort and debate after Samuel P. Huntington’s assertion of a Clash of Civilizations. However much the current discourse may be uncomfortable with the term, I will use it to reflect how the thinkers in question used it.

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roots of the problem must go to the very core of Western culture, modernity, and civilization. As

early as March 2, 1946, Lewis Mumford articulated the point plainly:

“We in America are living among madmen. Madmen govern our affairs in the

name of order and security…and the fatal symptom of their madness is this:

they have been carrying through a series of acts which will lead eventually to the

destruction of mankind, under the solemn conviction that they are normal

responsible people, living sane lives, and working for reasonable ends….Why do

we let the madmen go on with their game without raising our voices? …There is

one reason: we are madmen, too….Treat the bomb for what it actually is: the

visible insanity of a civilization that has ceased to worship life and obey the laws

of life.”152

Mumford’s early pronouncement of dread became shared, in various ways, across most of

Western intelligentsia. Given that the bomb was primarily a technological triumph, science and

technology specifically became central objects of civilizational scrutiny. Since the atomic bomb,

Arendt writes in 1954, “large segments of the population—and not only the intellectuals—are

passionately opposed to, and afraid of, technological progress and the growing technicalization

of our world.”153

The critique went well beyond technological advancement, however. By 1958,

philosopher Karl Jaspers would open his book on the nuclear age, The Future of Mankind, with

spiritual longings for civilizational “salvation.” He relates, “Prophets might save us if they could

cast their spell on high and low alike, convincing everyone by their example, their strong faith,

their call to penance. They would bring about a change in man, without which he seems

doomed. But there are no prophets nowadays, nor could we believe them.”154 Jasper’s diagnosis

for the West is rightly nostalgic and pessimistic, for, with a secularity deeply inscribed into its

intellectual culture, the Western intelligentsia would largely avoid “a return to theological or

metaphysical thinking about politics” in any serious way to respond to their newfound scepticism

towards scientific terror, and instead channel their scientific distrust eventually through recourse

to Thomas Kuhn’s sociological relativization of science.155 In India, however, with an entirely

different cultural and historical approach to questions of science, civilization, and religion, the

newfound scientific crisis would transpire drastically differently.

152 Mumford, L., ‘Gentlemen: You are Mad!,’, The Saturday Review (March 2, 1946), pp. 5-6; online edn. [http://www.unz.com/print/SaturdayRev-1946mar02-00005/ accessed 6 June 6, 2018], pp. 5-6. 153 Arendt, H., ‘Europe and the Atom Bomb’ in H. Arendt, Essays in Understanding, 1930-1954: Formation, Exile, and Totalitarianism, (New York, 1994), p. 418. 154 Jaspers, K., The Future of Mankind, trans. by E. B. Ashton (Chicago, 1961), p. vii. 155 Guilhot, After the Englightenment: Political Realism and International Relations in the Mid-Twentieth Century, p. 23.

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Secularism, Science, and Civilization in 20th Century India

Sudden, dramatic upheavals in the narrative of Western superiority emerging from the

Holocaust and the atomic bomb emanated from American and European intellectuals, and were

quickly carried around the world on the favourable winds of thermonuclear terror. Predictably,

these critiques’ emphases on science, secularity and civilization would have particular resonance

in India, where all three themes had deep colonial significance.

Civilizational discourse was largely the substratum on which science and secularity found

their meaning in India. British colonialism over India was in large part justified according to a

‘civilizing’ mission—inducing complex, simultaneous expressions of deep antipathy, critique,

assimilation, and adaptation of British ideals, values, and institutions in Indian discourse, along

‘civilizational’ lines.156 Simultaneously, however, Orientalist scholars of India developed a

powerful admiration for ancient Hindu society, religion, and philosophy, precipitating a strong

imaginary of spiritual Hindu civilization as a basis for Indian dignity and independence.

Science and secularity each became particularly powerful arenas of contesting India’s

civilizational value in relation to the West. Science carried tremendous symbolic weight,

simultaneously as a source of power that was used to dominate India as well as a space and state

of mind representing universality and progress towards freedom. Awed by the power and

promise of science, and drawing upon orientalist discourse and indigenous tradition, many

Hindu thinkers sought to construct an ancient, scientific Hindu past to contest colonial rule.157

Modernists like Nehru would likewise see scientific advancement and a “scientific spirit” as

India’s central path forward.158 Either way, science represented a particularly privileged place in

the imagination and priorities of early twentieth century India, evidenced well by the Constituent

Assembly debates around the founding of the AEC in 1948. Delegate H. V. Kamath argued that

“our seers and sages, four thousand years ago…said something about [atomic] energy which

scientists today are propounding…the analytic methods of science will bring us to the same view

as was arrived at by the synthetic processes of our sages and seers.” Jawaharlal Nehru

contrastingly suggested that India “became a backward country” for missing the development of

steam power, and could not afford to miss out on the developments of nuclear power.159

156 See “The Thematic and the Problematic” in P. Chatterjee, Nationalist Thought and the Colonial World: A Derivative Discourse, (London, 1993). 157 See G. Prakash, Another Reason: Science and the Imagination of Modern India (Princeton, 1999). 158 J. Nehru, The Discovery of India, (Oxford, 1994), pp. 150-4. 159 Quoted in Abraham, The Making of the Indian Atomic Bomb, p. 28.

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Whether to move forward or to return to former glory, both interlocutors were arguing heavily

in favour of the founding of the AEC. Across the ideological spectrum, early 20th century India

had immense, widespread support for the power and promise of scientific advancement.

Whereas the wholehearted appropriation of modern Western science to past and future

Indian society was widely perceived as crucial to Indian independence, a thorough rebuttal of

modern Western secularity was as much, if not more central to the same.160 Part of this was very

much a function of Orientalist scholarship’s love affair with Hinduism, a respect co-opted into

an argument for ancient Hindu civilizational superiority by various reformers and spiritualists

such as Ram Mohan Roy and Swami Dayananda. The apex of this trend came in the person of

Swami Vivekananda, whose electrifying speech and reception at the 1893 Parliament of World

Religions “was celebrated by many in India as the precise moment when Indian nationhood was

recognized as a force in its own right, separate and superior to British colonialism.”161

Vivekananda’s message presented Hinduism as the essence of Indian nationhood, and a

necessary curative for morally bankrupt Western secularism. This line of thought found

widespread acceptance at home and abroad moving into the 20th century. It is in this context that

we must consider the religio-political thought of Gandhi and Golwalkar’s approach to science

and the atomic bomb.

Gandhi’s Scientific, Civilizational Critique & the Atomic Bomb

Within this broader Indian context, Gandhi’s approach to the atomic bomb is more

readily understood, as are the ways in which Western thinkers largely diverged from Gandhi’s

own sense of satyagraha’s importance to the nuclear age. To most, the global challenges of the

atomic bomb powerfully aligned with Gandhi’s global popularity as a symbol of non-violence.

Gandhi’s unimaginable success in the political sphere as a practitioner of non-violence seemed to

prefigure an answer to the advent of weapons of unimaginable violence. Thus, looking to

Gandhi the political symbol Karl Jaspers asks in 1956, “ Does Gandhi show us the way?”162 just

160 There were, of course, notable exceptions to this trend, such as Jawaharlal Nehru and V. D. Savarkar. 161 C. A. Bayly, The Birth of the Modern World, 1780-1914: Global Connections and Comparisons (Oxford, 2004), pp. 241-242. 162 Jaspers, The Future of Mankind, p. 36.

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as Einstein claims in 1953 that “embodied in Gandhi’s unique personality…[is the wisdom] to

overcome, by means of the awakening of moral forces” the danger of the nuclear age.163

However, the reality of how Gandhi seems to have thought about the issue of a nuclear

world goes much deeper, and harkens back as much to Gandhi’s broader thoughts on science

and civilization within the predominant currents of Indian history, as to his success as a non-

violent political organizer. No doubt Gandhi saw ahimsa as indispensable for the nuclear age, and

deeply intertwined with his critiques of Western science and civilization. However, for Gandhi,

like for Jaspers and Mumford, the more essential issue is much larger—civilizational in scale.

Gandhi’s critiques of Western civilization and science are central to his early seminal

work, Hind Swaraj (“Self Rule,” 1909),164 notably published only a year after his pivotal rejection

of modern technological progress in May of 1908, stemming from a nasty encounter with

fingerprint technology utilized by colonial authorities for racial segregation in South Africa.165 In

the work, he lays out themes that would be carried through the remainder of his career, famously

condemning modern civilization and its science in rather totalizing terms. Gandhi parallels

revolutions in air and rail transportation with being able to “take away thousands of lives by one

man working behind a gun,” as equal parts of civilization.166 He devotes chapters to the ways in

which rail systems and doctors will “ruin” India,167 and concludes his chapter on modern

machinery with the suggestion that “it is necessary to realise that machinery is bad. We shall then

be able gradually to do away with it.”168 If his point was not clear enough, he relates that modern

civilization is a “disease” that currently “afflicts” the English people. In Hinduism’s terms,

modern civilization represents nothing less than “the Black Age.”169

A fuller reading of Gandhi’s works, of course, does not actually lend itself to Gandhi as

the straightforward, anti-civilizational Luddite that these passages might have us believe,

however. Elsewhere, Gandhi perplexingly asserts that “we cannot live without science, if we

keep it in its right place,”170 integrates modern scientific insight into his quest for an elusive “true

163 A. Einstein, ‘Foreword,’ in G. Sharp, Gandhi Weilds the Weapon of Moral Power (Ahmedabad, first published 1960); online edn. [https://www.mkgandhi.org/ebks/gandhi-wields-the-weapon-of-moral-power.pdf, accessed 8 June 8, 2018]. 164 Gandhi, M. K., Hind Swaraj, ed. A. J. Parel (Cambridge Texts in Modern Politics, Centenary Edition, Cambridge, 2009). 165 See Breckenridge, K. “Gandhi’s Progressive Disillusionment: Thumbs, fingers, and the Rejection of Scientific Modernism in Hind Swaraj,” Public Culture, 23:2 (2011), 331-348; online edn. [https://read.dukeupress.edu/public-culture/article-pdf/23/2/331/454444/PC232_08_Breckenridge_FPP.pdf, accessed 30 May 2018]. 166 Gandhi, Hind Swaraj, p. 35. 167 Ibid, p. 46. 168 Ibid, p. 109. 169 Ibid, p. 37. 170 Gandhi, ‘Speech in Reply to Students’ Address, Trivandrum,’ (The Hindu, 19 March 1925), CW 30:244.

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civilization,”171 and perhaps most significantly, appropriates scientific language to describe the

centerpiece of his religious memoire, the spiritual “experiments” that he has “conducted” in the

pursuit of moksha (spiritual liberation).172 What Gandhi wants to communicate, then, is a critique

of civilization and science that is nuanced, but no doubt strong.

Gandhi scholars have sought to resolve the tension between Gandhi’s disparate

endorsements and condemnations of science and civilization by drawing out features of his

critique in relation to other areas of his thought. Skaria proposes that the difference between

these sciences and civilization is ultimately a contrast of trying to make finite man infinite against

a culture of self-limitation by religion;173 Shruti Kapila highlights evil civilization as a spirit of

consumption, compared with true civilization, which is fundamentally a matter of sacrifice.174 For

our purposes, it is best to return to Gandhi’s own strikingly religious characterization of the root

of the West’s civilizational problem, which in a word is “irreligion…[that] has taken such a hold

on the people of Europe that those who are in it appear to be half mad…a Satanic

civilization.”175

From this vantage point, the center of the West’s civilizational malaise is a neglect of

Divinity in its society, which manifests in a political economy and outlook overly concerned with

material advantage, at the expense of spiritual flourishing. For its inherent materialism and its

historical integration with the West’s current irreligion, modern science and technology are given

a privileged place in the diagnosis of this dynamic. Thus doctors counterproductively prescribe

medications that soften the negative physical effects of our graver spiritual vices;176 engineers

create machines that cut out the character-building labor of the many for the profit of the few,177

and sciences naturally develop weapons with more effective violence against enemies.178

Accordingly, Gandhi contrasts the lesser genius of Newton’s scientific accomplishments with the

greater genius of the ancient seers who showed the path to spiritual fullness.179 If left unchecked,

171 Gandhi notably draws upon modern medicine to develop balanced diets for the poor in his political efforts. See R. Pandey, Gandhi and Modernisation, (New Delhi, 1979), pp. 206-7. For Gandhi’s affirmation of “true civilization” see Hind Swaraj, p. 65. 172 Gandhi, M. K., An Autobiography, or, The Story of My Experiments with Truth, trans. by M. Desai, (Ahmedabad); online edn. [https://www.mkgandhi.org/ebks/An%20Autobiography.pdf, accessed, 1 June 2018], p. 3. 173 Skaria, A., Unconditional Equality: Gandhi’s Religion of Resistance (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2016); online edn. [https://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/cam/reader.action?ppg=30&docID=4392046&tm=1527788099387, accessed 31 May 2018], p. 13. 174 Kapila, S. ‘Gandhi before Mahatma: The Foundations of Political Truth,’ p. 445. 175 Gandhi, Hind Swaraj, p. 37. 176 Ibid, p. 61. 177 Pandey, Gandhi and Modernisation, p. 15. 178 Gandhi, Hind Swaraj, p. 35. 179 Pandey, Gandhi and Modernisation, p. 24.

35

the Godless civilization and its science “is such that one has only to be patient and it will be self-

destroyed.”180

As this 1909 prophecy took on chilling new meaning with the reality of nuclear weapons,

so too did Gandhi’s life and satyagraha’s mandate. First, as we have seen, Gandhi’s broader

thought on modern civilization and science became viscerally legitimized by humanity’s terrifying

geopolitical nightmare. Second, whereas Gandhi’s thought had often detailed a suicidal dynamic

within Western civilization on a spiritual level, now the existence of a nuclear age could well

mean material suicide—not just for the West, but potentially for all of humanity. Whereas

satyagraha had previously represented a chapter or revival of the struggle of righteousness against

the forces immorality, the bomb now threatened to put at risk the ability to struggle at all. Hence,

more than just an ideal to aspire to and work toward, satyagraha in the atomic age became “the

only force” able to overcome Western irreligion in the atomic age.181

Thus, though Gandhi’s appraisal of the atomic age is certainly intertwined the principle

of non-violence that he was most internationally associated with, to leave it there is only to

scratch the surface of Gandhi’s civilizational critique and broader thought. On this deeper level,

Gandhi paralleled and approximated many of the Western intelligentsia’s auto-critiques of its

nuclear crisis. Indeed, as Shruti Kaplia points out, much as Gandhi has been painted as a

romantic, traditionalist or an antimodernist in the tradition of the Western thinkers he drew

upon,182 his unique adaptation and transformation of their ideas into a civilizational critique of

modernity significantly breaks with what went before him and prefigures many later themes

taken up in the post-War critiques of the Western modernity posed by thinkers like Theodor

Adorno and Michel Foucault.183 In the spiritualized corrective he offers, Gandhi is

simultaneously firmly in the tradition of Ram Mohan Roy, Swami Dayananda, and Swami

Vivekananda, proposing an Indian spirituality to correct Western material excesses. More than

just a reaffirmation of Gandhi’s commitment to non-violence, the onset of the nuclear age for

Gandhi also validated and heightened his critique of Western materiality in favor of a spiritual

mission.

180 Gandhi, Hind Swaraj, p. 37. 181 Gandhi, ‘Outside His Field,’ (Harijan, 16 November 1947), CW 97:221. 182 Gandhi was famously influenced by Leo Tolstoy and John Ruskin in his critique of civilization and technology, along with now lesser-known critics like Edward Carpenter, Max Nordau, and Godfrey Blount. See Parel, A. J., ‘Editor’s Introduction to the Centenary Edition,’ in Gandhi, M. K., Hind Swaraj, ed. A. J. Parel (Cambridge Texts in Modern Politics, Centenary Edition, Cambridge, 2009), pp. xlix, lii, lv. 183 Kapila, ‘Gandhi before Mahatma: The Foundations of Political Truth,’ p. 438.

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Golwalkar’s Nuclear Hindu Mission

For all their substantial differences, the effect of the nuclear age on Golwalkar was

strikingly similar to Gandhi: intensified justification for Hindu spirituality as a corrective to

Western materialism and irreligion. However, the routes of the two thinkers to this renewed

validation and vigor came from significantly different angles. Whereas Gandhi’s predictions

found dark culminations in the specter of nuclear war, humanity’s Western-sourced nuclear crisis

retroactively (but powerfully) filled a gap in Golwalkar’s thought, and in so doing endowed

Hindu nationalism with a new sense of purpose.

This gap in Golwalkar’s thought has much to do with the fact that Golwalkar, unlike

Gandhi, makes no firm distinction between material and spiritual power, and certainly makes no

hierarchy between the two. Thus, Gandhi’s assertion that spiritual power is superior to material

power was born out by the terror of the nuclear age in a way that Golwalkar’s could not be. Like

Savarkar184 and many other early 20th century Indians, Golwalkar was awed by Western scientific

accomplishments, and sought to appropriate the legitimacy that came with science towards his

own political project. Hence, prior to the atomic bomb, Golwalkar was to some degree at a loss

to explain how and why it was that Western colonizers could so outstrip the strength of the

Hindu people in material power through scientific achievement. Much as Golwalkar took pains

in his first book to convince the reader that his conceptualization of the Hindu nation had

scientific legitimacy to reach the pinnacle of material and spiritual strength,185 grounding that

claim to material strength and scientific ability relative to the West is an obvious, but largely

overlooked omission. Filling this gap, Golwalkar appeals to a rather dissatisfying ancient Vedic

Golden Age in which the Hindus of old pioneered and mastered impressive physical sciences.186

The fragments in Bunch of Thoughts, published 27 years and several atomic bombs after

We, or our Nationhood Defined, reiterates much of these sentiments, including deference and

appeals to scientific authority to justify Hindu nationhood,187 and ancient Hindus as “the good,

the enlightened…who knew about the laws of nature.”188 Like Gandhi, Golwalkar also integrates

scientific language into the content of his spiritual vision, equating “the laws of nature and the

184 Nandy, A., ‘A Disowned Father of the Nation in India: Vinayak Damodar Savarkar and the demonic and the seductive in Indian nationalism,’ Inter-Asia Cultural Studies, 15 (2014), pp. 91-112; online edn. [http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/14649373.2014.882087 accessed 13 March 2018], p. 91. 185 See Golwalkar’s use of science in Chapter 3 of Nationhood, pp. 28-39. 186 Golwalkar, Nationhood, p. 9. 187 Golwalkar, Bunch of Thoughts, p. 43. 188 Ibid, p. 47.

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laws of Spirit,”189 and even going so far as to make sacred Darwinian evolution as a providential

dynamic that endowed the Hindu race with “distinctive traits and features” at the root of their

spiritual mission.190

However, alongside these scientific endorsements, a new, post-atomic bomb narrative

arises around Western science. Golwalkar contrasts Hindu generations’ slow perfection of “the

science of realization of that Great Unifying Principle” with Westerners who have become

“habituated to studying the outer world through their senses.”191 Though the latter have certainly

accomplished great feats in the material world, they have lost sight of the “glorious Inner

Reality,”192 and, carried away with their materialism, allowed science to usurp the role of

Christianity as a new, unstable religion.193 As science began to show its limits, it collapsed as a

religion, leaving “Western man rudderless on an unexplored sea” and creating a civilizational

“vacuity of faith” that in turn led to the scourge of Communism, and the “disaster” the West

now finds itself in.194 The crisis of the atomic bomb thus more coherently justified why the West

had passed the Hindus in scientific and technological progress: their civilization’s fixation on

science had led to scientific advancement, but also a catastrophic civilizational imbalance, now

on full display in the apocalyptic dimensions of the Cold War.

This same catastrophe also entirely re-orients Golwalkar’s mission for Hindutva. Whereas

We, or Our Nationhood Defined focused exclusively on independence and nation-building to re-

awaken Hindus’ spiritual genius for the world, the post-independence, Cold War era Golwalkar

found new, ultimate purpose for Hindu renaissance. Bunch of Thoughts opens and broadly frames

its argument and the mission of the RSS with reference to a world “on the brink of a nuclear

holocaust.”195 Amid this humanity-threatening specter of the Cold War,

“It is the grand world-unifying thought of Hindus alone that can supply the

abiding basis for human brotherhood, that knowledge of the inner Spirit…the

knowledge is in the custody of Hindus alone. It is a divine trust…given to the

charge of the Hindus by destiny…The Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh has

resolved to fulfill this age-old national mission by forging, as the first step, the

present-day scattered elements of the Hindu society into an organized and

189 Ibid. 190 Ibid, pp. 6, 99. 191 Ibid, p. 7. 192 Ibid. 193 Ibid, p. 197. 194 Ibid. 195 Ibid, p. 4.

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invincible force both on the plane of the Spirit and on the plane of material life.

Verily this is the one real practical world mission—if ever there was one.”196

The significance of opening Bunch of Thoughts with this Cold War-inflected vision must not be

overlooked. Golwalkar’s We, or our Nationhood Defined was his only other major work published in

English (a designation of its elevated status) and was quickly accepted by the RSS as its

“charter,”197 but was written for the context of the independence struggle—with dated, favorable

references to now-failed European fascist projects that the RSS would later try to disown.198 This

new publication, written in English and explicitly laying out a mission for the RSS from its

opening is thus clearly attempting to be the new charter for the RSS. This time, however,

Golwalkar is publishing not from relative obscurity, but as the uncontested leader of the Hindu

nationalist movement, now complete with an influential political party (the BJS) and a World

Hindu Council (the VHP). Golwalkar’s framing of the Hindu mission in relation to the potential

destruction of the Cold War thus designates the emergence of nuclear weapons as the symbolic

culmination of the need for Hindu civilization’s resurgence. Indeed, it is noteworthy that just two

years before Bunch of Thoughts’ new, outward-facing spiritual charter for Hindu nationalism in a

nuclear age, Golwalkar initiated the VHP with a founding mandate to strengthen and consolidate

Hinduism’s influence abroad along these lines.199 Thus, all indications are that just as Gandhi’s

thought and actions were electrified by the advent of a nuclear world, so also were Golwalkar’s,

in strikingly similar fashion. In many ways, the nuclear question came to be the lodestar of Hindu

politics, catalyzing principled stands of the primacy of reasserting spirituality and transcendent

concerns into the international political sphere.

The Significance of Hindu Nuclear Politics

The 18th century English writer Samuel Johnson noted that “when a man knows he is to

be hanged…it concentrates his mind wonderfully.” On a macro scale, a similar clarifying

moment seems to be at work in the nuclear age, as nations and political philosophers alike would

have to reorient their politics towards the specter of nuclear destruction. So Karl Jaspers opens

his book, The Future of Mankind: “An altogether novel situation has been created by the atom

196 Ibid, pp. 6,9. 197 Jaffrelot, C., The Hindu Nationalist Movement and Indian Politics: 1925 to the 1990s, p. 52. 198 Mukul, A., ‘RSS Officially Disowns Golwalkar’s Book,’ The Times of India, (9 March 2006); online edn. [https://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/india/RSS-officially-disowns-Golwalkars-book/articleshow/1443606.cms, accessed 1 June 2018]. 199 Van der Veer, P., ‘Hindu Nationalism and the Discourse of Modernity: The Vishva Hindu Parishad’ in Martin Marty, M. E. & Appleby, S. E. (eds), Accounting for Fundamentalisms (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 1994), p. 653-4.

39

bomb. Either mankind will physically perish or there will be a change in the moral-political

condition of man.”200 In this light, the redefined missions of both Gandhi and Golwalkar’s

political philosophies, now both more concretely focused on the risk of nuclear destruction,

appears entirely unremarkable. How could their thought not be drawn into the orbit of

humanity’s nuclear crisis?

Nonetheless, the content of their reorientation is striking, particularly as it relates to

political realism. The political realist assumes that the threat of nuclear annihilation naturally

focuses the mind beyond ideological persuasions (usually conceived of as principles, let alone

theistic concerns) towards the absolute essentials of survival: brute power and security. Clarity in

nuclear distress more or less eventually boils down to being realist, in other words.

Gandhi and Golwalkar’s writings beg to differ. Both characterize a “godless”201 or

“materialist”202 philosophy at the base of Western civilization as being the root of the nuclear

crisis—exactly the sort of rationality scrubbed of transcendent factors at the heart of the realist’s

calculations. By leaving spiritual realities out of its civilizational ethos, the West unwittingly

“progressed” to the precipice of calamity—resolution therefore cannot come from the same

gnarled rationality, but must instead attune itself to transcendent realities—undermining the logic

at the very core of political realism. Both Gandhi and Golwalkar ironically flip the realist’s claim,

and aim through their activism to dissipate the ideologically materialist clouds behind realism to

concentrate on the absolute essentials for survival: humanity’s realization of Truth for Gandhi,

and Ultimate Reality for Golwalkar. Both claim to be just as focused on survival as the realist,

but take the civilizational foundation of realism to be the cancerous spirit of the nuclear age.

The political realist, of course, may counter that all this talk sounds nice until the nuclear

threat becomes not just theoretical but immanent. Surely then strictly material factors will come

to the fore. She would be reminded, however, that the Gandhian Prime Minister Shastri and the

Hindu nationalist Vajpayee both flew in the face of realism, both to the effect of exposing India

to greater existential threat according to realist calculations, and both in the service of these

spiritually-inflected, ideological foundations.

Ironically enough, the historical potency of Golwalkar and Gandhi’s political thought

likely derives in part from the renewed sense of validation that the existence of nuclear weapons

brought to their respective causes. Just as much as the realist might expect the clarifying moment

200 Jaspers, The Future of Mankind, p. vii. 201 Gandhi, Hind Swaraj, p. 69. 202 Golwalkar, Bunch of Thoughts, p. 5.

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of the nuclear age to initiate clear—headed competitions of hard power, Hindu religio-politics

gained self-validation in their prioritization of transcendence from the new connection between

“soul-killing” technological advancement and “the danger of sheer physical destruction.”203

Having now understood Hindu nuclear politics’ subversion of political realism in history and in

narrative, we may now turn to the disruptive intersection of religio-politics and realism in praxis.

203 Arendt, ‘Europe and the Bomb,’ p. 419.

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Chapter 3: Hindu Religio-Political Action in a Nuclear World

Cosmic War in the Wake of 9/11

We have seen the historical potency of Hindu political thought in the realm of nuclear

proliferation, and the significance of the nuclear age for political Hinduism’s self-perception and

ultimate ends. We turn now to the related, opposite question—political Hinduism’s significance

for the nuclear age. To examine this question, we will look at Gandhi and Golwalkar’s respective

philosophies of political action in the context of contemporary anxiety over religio-politics. We

will then apply these insights to the logic of deterrence, to examine the challenge posed by Hindu

nuclear politics to deterrence theory. The lessons learned by these reflections are many: Hindu

religio-politics present many similar theoretical challenges to deterrence as do their other religio-

political counterparts, but with key, significant theological differences that create alternative

disruptions. Chief among these differences is political Hinduism’s embeddedness in democratic

politics, a variation that poses its own particular challenges to deterrence over time.

Current trends of scholarly work on the continued relevance—and even resurgence—of

political religion in global politics have largely come as a surprise to political theorists and

practitioners alike. Reflecting on the violence of the 20th century, Isaiah Berlin noted in 1988 that

“not one among the most perceptive social thinkers of the nineteenth century had ever

predicted” the continuation of religious violence into the 1980s.204 At the close of the Cold War,

whose prolific proportions eclipsed (or subsumed) the vast majority of other geopolitical

conflicts, some scholars began to recognize this surprising, persistent and growing zealotry

around the world. One early voice exploring this phenomenon was sociologist Mark

Juergensmeyer, whose 1993 book The New Cold War? Religious Nationalism Confronts the Secular State

gave some language for this post-Cold War early religious anxiety, as political religions around

the world began to make their presence known in violent acts and even more violent language.

Juergensmeyer suggested that violence is a common, core theme of all religions, but generally

gets sublimated into ritual acts. However, when strong religious ideologies are applied to modern

politics, their violent aspects tend to quickly re-emerge in the form of a “cosmic war” between

204 I. Berlin, ‘The Pursuit of the Ideal,’ in H. Hardy and R. Hausheer (eds), The Proper Study of Mankind: An Anthology of Essays (London, 1998), p. 1.

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the righteous forces of the religious and the evil of the non-believers.205 This cosmic war

dynamic, he feared, seemed to be gaining steam at the close of the 20th century.

Demographic trends over the course of the 90s corroborated this fear, leading most

sociologists to revise their presumptions of the secularization of the world,206 chief among them

Peter Berger, who would go so far as to propose in 1999 that an opposite process was occurring,

namely, The Desecularization of the World. The events of 9/11 collapsed all pretenses of religion no

longer being a player in world politics, and made Juergensmeyer’s concept of a cosmic war all

too prophetic. As a result, a profusion of academic and political attention on religio-politics

ensued, for our purposes, along two relevant strands. The first strand looked at religio-politics

wholesale, beyond the narrow confines of Islamist fixation. As it regards Hinduism, this strand

coalesced with pre-existent work on Hindu nationalism to focus on communal violence and

rioting, as well as dynamics of stigmatization and electioneering, but largely ignored the

Gandhian strand of religio-politics as out of vogue and a different sort of religio-poltical

phenomenon altogether.

The second strand of thought built on a growing concern from a religious “new

terrorism” gaining steam in the 1990s from the 1993 World Trade Center Bombing, the 1995

Aum Shinrikyo sarin gas attack in Tokyo, and Al Qaeda’s call for Jihad against the US in 1996.

After 9/11, this strand identified Islamic terrorism with the magnitude of the Communist threat

during the Cold War,207 and brought new urgency to the field of study around extremist religious

motivations and ends.208 These elements naturally lent themselves to extreme nuclear fear, and

harkened back to their nearest analogue, the Cold War fears of Evangelical theology, which saw a

future nuclear holocaust as inevitable.209

This chapter, more directly concerned with these issues in current affairs and recent

scholarship, finds itself in an unusual position between these two strands of scholarship and

205 See Chapter 6, ‘Why Religious Confrontations are Violent’ of M. Juergensmeyer, The New Cold War? Religious Nationalism Confronts the Secular State (Comparative Studies in Religion and Society, Oxford, 1993), pp. 153-170. 206 Gorski, P. S. & Altinordu, A., ‘After Secularization?’, Annual Review of Sociology, 34 (2008), pp. 55-85. 207 M. Crenshaw, ‘The Debate over “New” vs. “Old” Terrorism,’ (Presentations for the Annual Meeting of the American Political Science Association, delivered 20 August, 2007); online edn. [http://www.start.umd.edu/sites/default/files/files/publications/New_vs_Old_Terrorism.pdf, accessed 2 June 2018], p. 10. 208 See Crenshaw, ‘The Debate over “New” vs. “Old” Terrorism,’ pp. 9-11 for a summary of these thoughts, as well as M. J. Morgan, ‘The Origins of the New Terrorism,’ Parameters, 34:1 (2004), pp.29-43; online edn. [https://search.proquest.com/docview/60149067?accountid=9851, accessed 4 June 2018], pp. 30-31. 209 For a full exploration see M. L. Cook, ‘Christian Apocalypticism and Weapons of Mass Destruction,’ in S. H. Hashmi, & S. P. Lee, (eds), Ethics and Weapons of Mass Destruction: Religious and Secular Perspectives (The Ethikon Series in Comparative Ethics, Cambridge, 2004), pp. 200-210, online edn. [https://doi.org/10.1017/CBO9780511606861.017, accessed 10 April 2018].

43

concern. Gandhian and Hindu nationalist religio-political influence in Indian nuclear armament

have largely been overlooked despite their decisive influence and unique status as the two lone

expressions of Hindu religio-politics at the national level, as the previous chapters demonstrate.

Thus, despite the popularity of studying the intersection of extremist Islamist groups (and earlier,

Evangelical groups) and nuclear capabilities, it is the influence of Hindu religio-politics that

provides the richest historical and theoretical body from which to explore religio-political action

in a nuclear world.

This is not to say that direct parallels can be made between bin Ladin and Gandhi—the

suggestion is patently absurd. Beyond the obvious, there is also the fact that whereas fear

towards Islamic extremists and Evangelicals tends to be extra-governmental (with the notable

exception of Iran), political Hinduism has had its efficacy through democratic politics, an entirely

different arena of action. Likewise, the completely alternative, non-Abrahamic roots and

theologies of Hinduism no doubt will reflect substantial differences in approaches to nuclear

arms and political action alike. Indeed, it is likely to be the differences between political

Hinduism and more mainstream work on Islamist and Evangelical nuclear issues that are as

much, if not more, valuable to the study of religio-poltics and nuclear strategy.

With this in mind, my aim is to explicate the basic philosophies of political action in both

Gandhi and Golwalkar’s thought through their engagement with the Bhagavad Gita. From that

basis I will consider their propensity towards violence and non-violence alike, before finally

considering the question of nuclear deterrence. Both Gandhi and Golwalkar subvert the realist-

informed logic of deterrence in characteristically inverse manners that share resemblances to—

but also sharp divergences from—parallel religio-political nuclear concerns highlighted in

existent scholarship. Perhaps most interestingly of all, however, is how the embeddedness of

Hindu nuclear politics in a democratic nation-state creates unexpected challenges to the logic of

nuclear deterrence through its ability to alter and even capture democratic political discourses

over time.

The Bhagavad Gita & the Roots of Nuclear Action

We begin where any discussion of Indian political action since the late 19th century must

start: the Bhagavad Gita. The Gita’s retelling of the fratricidal war between the Pandavas and the

Kauravas, and the ethical and spiritual reflections it draws out of an exchange between the

warrior Arjuna and the god Krishna, enjoys a privileged position in the history of the atomic

bomb and Indian political thought alike. Oppenheimer’s rebellious move to study the book as a

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Jewish teenager has proven fateful210—for not only did Oppenheimer use the Gita to endow

history with a terribly appropriate first illustration of the bomb’s power; he also used the Gita

(through the interpretive lens of Sanskrit scholar Arthur W. Ryder) to make ethical sense of his

role in constructing the bomb during and after the Manahattan Project.211

The Gita’s role in Indian political thought is more fateful still. Indeed, “the Gita came to

represent Indian or Hindu political thought” and was designated abroad as “the chief

philosophical statement of Hinduism” from the 19th century onwards.212 Shruti Kapila and Faisal

Devji’s recent publication of Political Thought in Action: The Bhagavad Gita and Modern India is a

timely scholarly intervention that reflects the immense importance that the Gita has had for

Indian political thought, and after the Qur’an its status as “arguably the most influential non-

Western philosophical text in Asia and across the wider world during the last 200 years.”213 The

editors and contributors of this volume have shown how most modern commentaries on the

Gita center on human action with relatively little consideration of God’s providence.214 As we

shall see, however, much as human action does take center stage for both our interlocutors in

their conflicting approaches to violence, the role of providence is nonetheless also present, and

for our purposes, crucial.

The scholarship around Gandhi’s deep love for, and prodigious commentary on, the Gita

is copious. Of the many Indian nationalist readers of the Gita, Gandhi was perhaps the most

devoted:215 he wrote commentaries on its passages, encouraged his satyagrahis to integrate it

deeply into their political and devotional lives, and used the work often in his various ashrams.216

Golwalkar for his part maintained “the Bhagavad-Gita is the greatest treatise on human duties

intended to be followed in our day-to-day practical life,” and lauded the scripture’s return to

popularity as an essential development in the reawakening of the Hindu nation.217

210 K. Bird & M. J. Sherwin, American Prometheus: the Triumph and Tragedy of J. Robert Oppenheimer (New York, 2005), pp. 99-102. 211 Hijiya, J. A., ‘The “Gita” of J. Robert Oppenheimer,’ Proceedings of the American Philosophical Society, 144:2 (2000), pp. 123-167; online edn. [www.jstor.org/stable/1515629, accessed 5 June 2018]. 212 Kapila, S., & Devji, F., ‘Introduction,’ in S. Kapila & F. Devji, Political Thought in Action: the Bhagavad Gita and Modern India, (Cambridge 2013), pp. ix-xv; online edn.. [https://www.cambridge.org/core/books/political-thought-in-action/C1B0A9B27357C4257195D5C5E928CDB8, accessed 1 June, 2018], p. xii. 213 Ibid, p. x. 214 Ibid, p. xiv. 215 Davis, R. H., The Bhagavad Gita: A Biography (Lives of Great Religious Books, Oxford, 2014); online edn. [https://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/cam/reader.action?docID=1717924&ppg=4], p. 90. 216 Chakrabarty, D., & Majumdar, R., ‘Gandhi’s Gita and Politics as Such,’ in S. Kapila & F. Devji, Political Thought in Action: the Bhagavad Gita and Modern India, (Cambridge 2013), pp. 66-87; online edn.. [https://www.cambridge.org/core/books/political-thought-in-action/C1B0A9B27357C4257195D5C5E928CDB8, accessed 1 June, 2018], pp. 70-1. 217 Golwalkar, Bunch of Thoughts, p. 286.

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For our purposes, we need not delve into the full complexities of either thinker’s

treatment of the Gita, but only observe their basic—and diametrically opposed—approaches to

the matter of violence in political struggle in the Gita. Close examination of these basic

approaches draws into sharp relief the fundamental difference between the two in their approach

to spirituality, violence, action, and morality, in turn characterizing the divergent types of

challenges that Gandhi and Golwalkar respectively pose to the nuclear age.

The plot of the Gita narrative in the Mahabarata (the epic poem in which the Gita is

found) is centered on violence. The Gita begins with the warrior Arjuna just before a battle of

horrendous proportions, as he stands at the frontline in full view of his relatives, mentors, and

friends arrayed against him, prepared to fight to the death. Bereaved at the thought of waging

war against his beloved kinsmen, Arjuna asks his divine charioteer, Krishna, how he can fight

such a battle. Krishna explains to Arjuna that he must fight to fulfil his duties as a warrior and as

a prince, and delves into a variety of philosophical, ethical, and religious discourses, which

comprise the vast majority of the work.

The oft-mentioned irony of the Krishna’s call to violence in Gandhi’s interpretation of

the Gita is Gandhi’s highly counterintuitive claim that the Gita is actually a rallying cry to the

overwhelming priority of non-violence. No doubt Gandhi’s hermeneutic in interpreting the Gita

was largely shaped by the nonviolent thought of thinkers like Thoreau and Tolstoy, but also and

especially by his exchange with the Gujurati Jain Rajchandra Ravjibhai Mehta, whom he had

contacted to resolve a variety of religious and intellectual questions he had in 1894, including on

the Gita itself.218 Whatever the origins of his intensely ahimsic approach to the Gita, which he

himself claims to be the simple result of the practice of ahimsa over the years,219 Gandhi explains

his approach to the work in the introduction to his Gujurati translation and commentary of the

Gita. Gandhi writes that the Gita is not historical, but “under the guise of physical warfare, it

[the Gita] described the duel that perpetually went on in the hearts of mankind, and that physical

warfare was brought in merely to make the description of the internal duel more alluring.”220 So

it is that Gandhi places the central message of action in the Gita to instead be the concept of the

“renunciation of fruits of action” described in the fifth chapter, in which Krishna’s appeal to the

importance of detached execution of duty ultimately becomes a spiritual call to the ultimate

218 Parel, ‘Editor’s Introduction to the Centenary Edition,’ pp. lx-lxi. 219 Srinivas, M. N., ‘Gandhi’s Religion,’ Economic and Political Weekly, 30:25 (1995), pp. 1489-1491; online edn. [http://www.jstor.org/stable/4402906, accessed 3 June 2018], p. 1490. 220 Gandhi, M. K., The Gospel of Selfless Action or the Gita According to Gandhi, trans. by M. Desai (Ahmedabad, first published 1946); online edn. [https://www.mkgandhi.org/ebks/gita-according-to-gandhi.pdf, accessed 4 June 4, 2018], p. 3-4.

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expression of disinterested action: sacrificial nonviolence.221 Thus it is that every human becomes

the Gita’s battlefield, in which the “the Kuravas represent the forces of Evil, the Pandavas the

forces of Good…[in] the eternal duel between right and wrong.”222 For Gandhi, Hinduism’s

most precious scripture ultimately seeks to provide abstract, spiritual guidance towards the

internal battle to drive out evil from within mankind and individual men. Insofar as this struggle

touches politics, it is essentially anti-political: the actions of non-violence are specifically valuable

because of their detachment from ends in the outer world, and their singular importance to the

moral, self-contained individual—the true plane of moral and spiritual conflict.223

Golwalkar’s approach to the Gita could not be more opposed to Gandhi’s deeply

internalized, politically detached, and staunchly nonviolent reading of the Gita as a holy scripture

for moral reform. Indeed, he seems to take explicit issue with the Gandhian reading:

“We often hear present-day leaders saying that we have no quarrel with ‘evil men’ as such, but only with their ‘evil mentality.’ But ‘evil mentality’ is not something which is tangible, which can be caught hold of and destroyed. The evil propensities invariably manifest themselves in the form of an evil person or a group of such persons. And it becomes inevitable that in order to eradicate evil we should do away with its supports, i.e., those evil men. If the separation of evil nature from man was possible…there would have been no need for Sri Krishna to…make the Pandavas [Arjuna’s warriors] slay the Kauravas.”224

Golwalkar’s literalist approach thus seems more influenced by more radical nationalist readings

of the Gita, the likes of Tilak or Aurobindo.225 Whereas Gandhi’s reading of the Gita focuses on

its more esoteric features and spiritualizes its violence, Golwalkar largely jettisons the esoteric to

literalize the violence in the embodied, material world. Indeed, it is not only that evil is embodied

in people—it is inextricable from them.

In keeping with his racial-spiritual conception of the Hindu people, Golwalkar even

exegetes Krishna’s call for Arjuna to triumph over the Kauravas to be “our [the Hindus’]

philosophy—the philosophy of victory of the forces of righteousness over the forces of evil—

preached and practised over millennia…faith in the ultimate triumph of the forces of good over

221 Gandhi, M. K., Discourses on the Gita, trans. by V. G. Desai (Ahmedabad, first published 1993); online edn. [https://www.mkgandhi.org/ebks/discoursesonthegita.pdf, accessed 1 June 2018], p. 46. See also Mehta, U. S., ‘Gandhi on Democracy, Politics and the Ethics of Everyday Life,’ in S. Kapila & F. Devji, Political Thought in Action: the Bhagavad Gita and Modern India, (Cambridge 2013), pp. 88-106; online edn.. [https://www.cambridge.org/core/books/political-thought-in-action/C1B0A9B27357C4257195D5C5E928CDB8, accessed 1 June, 2018]., p 99. 222 Gandhi, The Gospel of Selfless Action, pp. 8-9. 223 Mehta, ‘Gandhi on Democracy, Politics and the Ethics of Everyday Life,’ p. 101. 224 Golwalkar, Bunch of Thoughts, p. 320. 225 Chakrabarty & Majumdar, ‘Gandhi’s Gita and Politics as Such,’ pp. 71-2.

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the forces of evil is ingrained in our blood.”226 In his discourse on Krishna and Arjuna, he goes

so far as to connect their ancient struggle to the contemporary geopolitical scenario of the Cold

War for Hindus: “Even today, the demoniac forces of evil are strutting about the world stage,

armed with world-destructive weapons and threatening the very future of humanity. It is only on

the strength of our philosophy which steels our will to win that we can inspire mankind to face

this new challenge of adharma [“irreligion, or non-dharma].”227 According to Golwalkar, then, the

Hindu people are by their birth and philosophy at the forefront of the struggle between the

righteous and the demoniac—a struggle that has recently acquired new, existential dimensions

thought nuclear arms.

Interestingly enough, despite their differences on the issue of violence, both Gandhi and

Golwalkar share in a conception of “cosmic war” characteristic of the type Juergensmeyer

describes in their readings of the Bhagavad Gita. However, where Golwalkar extrapolates that war

to the political plane of (potentially violent) action for the Hindus, Gandhi does the opposite.

Gandhi’s advaita vedantic, monism situates of the pervasive struggle of good and evil in each

individual as the primary plane of moral struggle. It is an arena entirely internal to each person,

and triumph is only possible through anti-political, self-contained, radical expressions of sacrifice

and non-violence. As we shall see, these cosmic wars do pose a significant challenge for the

nuclear age, albeit in unexpected ways.

Cosmic Motivation and the Allure of Violence

After the ideologically-charged violence of the 20th century, any strong sense of waging a

“cosmic war” makes one intuitively feel uneasy—especially in relation to weapons of mass

destruction. Reflecting back on the 20th century in 1988, Isaiah Berlin gives voice to this concern

by noting that the advancement of science and the “great ideological storms” of the era were the

primary shapers of the century, and may conspire together to end humanity’s existence in the

nuclear age ahead.228 The problem, Berlin notes, is much more to do with the ideologies than the

tech, for if one has the correct cosmic vision for humanity, the solution “to make mankind just

and happy and creative and harmonious for ever—what could be too high a price to pay for

that? To make such an omelette, there is surely no limit to the number of eggs that should be

226 Golwalkar, Bunch of Thoughts, p. 287. 227 Ibid, p. 287. 228 Berlin, ‘The Pursuit of the Ideal,’ p. 1.

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broken—that was the faith of Lenin, of Trotsky, of Mao…”229 The genocidal leaders of the 20th

century had a murderous faith in secular ideologies, new tools of coercion to realize their visions,

and humanity reaped the consequences.

A major question of this century as it has unfolded thus far is what happens to that

“faith” in ideology when it becomes religious? The totalitarian regimes that Berlin had in mind

certainly had a strong faith in their programs, but a secular faith. Will faith’s return to its old

home in politics—religion—initiate an even more violent era? Most scholars and secular-minded

individuals seem to think the answer is a resounding “yes.” Humanity’s bloodiest century was

also its most secular, but that was the sheer coincidence of secular ideology’s timing with the

advent of new destructive capacities in warfare. Should those same capacities be made available

to religious ideologies, the results will be all the more heinous.

There is some thought that would push back against this pessimistic prognosis. First of

all, as was already mentioned in Chapter 1 and further underscored in Gandhi’s reading of the

Bhagavad Gita, at least Gandhi’s vision of cosmic war and religio-politics is not so much

predicated on violence as on staunch, not to say reckless, non-violence. Even as it equally brings

a thoroughly Manichean struggle of good against evil in the political sphere, Gandhian cosmic

war simply cannot in principle commit violence at all—though it may expose countless people to

suffer violence. The risk involved in this dogged non-violence thus may not risk any less human

suffering, but it is an overt example of a robustly religious ideology being decidedly less violent

than secular counterparts.

Even in Golwalkar’s case, however, it is not immediately clear what differentiates a

religious cosmic war from a class war, a race war, or any other ideological struggle. As Martha

Crenshaw points out, even those who advocate that the most extreme varieties of religious

terrorism represent a substantively new class of terrorist activities ultimately have a difficult time

differentiating the rhetoric, violent tendencies, or organizational structures of religious terrorists

from secular ones.230 Does the same not hold true for the full spectrum of religio-politics vs.

secular politics? Do the religious motivations of a cosmic war really in any way alter the dangers

of any ideological struggle?

Based upon Gandhi and Golwalkar’s readings of the Gita, there is one facet in which

religious cosmic motivation is crucially differentiated from non-religious struggles: non-material

229 Ibid, p. 13. 230 See Crenshaw, ‘The Debate over “New” vs. “Old” Terrorism,’ for a full discussion on what differences do and do not exist between religious and secular terrorism.

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order in reality. “Cosmic War” in the religious senses that Gandhi and Golwalkar employ carries

a sense in which the “cosmos” is ordered by more than mere material, natural laws. Though it is

not so explicitly stated, a cosmological principle of divine order in history’s Manichean struggle is

evident in both accounts of the Gita and its relation to violent or non-violent action alike.

In the context of considerations of the Gita and nuclear war, Golwalkar makes this

principle clear, though unelaborated. He considers Bertrand Russell’s famous agreement with the

adage “better red than dead,” advocating communist domination over humanity’s annihilation,

should the choice come to it. Golwalkar, harkening back to the example of Arjuna, he decries

Russell’s despair as creating a false dichotomy, asserting that “faith in the ultimate triumph of the

forces of good over the forces of evil is ingrained in our [Hindu] blood.”231 In similar fashion,

Gandhi exegetes that only by transcending self-interested action with disinterested non-violence

can one become attuned with “the immanent power of God” above both good and evil, that will

rule and judge over both.232

The implications of these cosmological principles are great, and help us to understand

better the nuclear stances of both traditions, as well as the relation of each to other religio-

political movements. We have seen before how Gandhi makes clear that the moral, spiritual

plane is greater than the material plane of human endeavor, and has real impact on history; that

is, the cosmos is arranged in such a way that true moral action, true satyagraha, will yield results in

changed history. However, this cosmological principle of righteous action for Gandhi crucially

goes further than its persuasive power that Faisal Devji highlights in his exploration of Gandhi’s

attempt to “convert Hitler.” Certainly, as Devji has noted, Gandhi thought that true, selfless

ahimsa held great persuasive power that could win over persons and societies to righteousness,

even if only generations after the acts in question. However, Gandhi takes this principle of

righteousness triumphing over evil a step still further, asserting that “when the Satyagrahi feels

quite helpless, is apparently on his last legs and finds utter darkness all around him, that God

comes to the rescue,”233 and indeed, that the pious Jew should non-violently resist Hitler “with a

full measure of self-confidence knowing, as a religious man, that his God would not forsake

him,” as Uday Mehta points out.234

231 Golwalkar, Bunch of Thoughts, p. 287. 232 Gandhi, The Gospel of Selfless Action, p. 49. 233 Gandhi, M. K., Satyagraha in South Africa ed. S. Narayan, trans. by V. G. Desai, (The Selected Works of Mahatma Gandhi, Vol 2, Ahmedabad, 1968); online edn. [https://www.mkgandhi.org/ebks/satyagraha_in_south_africa.pdf, accessed 3 June 2018], p. 9. 234 Mehta, ‘Gandhi on Democracy, Politics and the Ethics of Everyday Life,’ p. 101.

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In this brazen assertion of divine intervention, we see Gandhi in his most conspicuously

religious form—the unmistakable “medieval Catholic saint” side of Gandhi that Nehru describes

as being in paradoxical tension with Gandhi the shrewd “practical leader.” 235 Much as Gandhi

scholars today236 make room for Gandhi’s political theory to exist in that tension—a politics that

is “deeply religious while retaining at the same time some [effective] political meaning despite

itself,”237—we must not forget Gandhi’s occasional propensity to assert the direct, necessary

activity of Divine force in political action. This facet of Gandhi’s thought is particularly

important for this study, as it represents an unequivocal rejection of realism’s commitment to

disordered anarchy between geopolitical actors and coercive material power as the currency of

politics.238 If a divine force intervenes according to a moral order, as Gandhi (and Golwalkar)

suggests, neither anarchy nor coercive material power ultimately reign.

Incidentally, Gandhi shows this side of his politics perhaps most clearly in the case of the

atomic bomb. In an interview, Gandhi claims that “Ahimsa is a mightier weapon by far than the

atom bomb. Even if the people of Hiroshima could have died in their thousands with prayer and

goodwill in their hearts, the situation would have been transformed as if by a miracle.”239 If there

was any doubt as to whether or not this was an appeal to the natural persuasive power of ahimsa,

Gandhi makes the matter clear in another interview: “the pilot will not see…faces from his great

height, I know. But the longing in our hearts—that he will not come to harm—would reach up

to him and his eyes would be opened. If those thousands who were done to death in

Hiroshima…had died with that prayerful action…their sacrifice would not have gone in vain.”240

In this passage, there can be no question that Gandhi is positing a moral principle of causality

beyond physical reality, which, in the context of his wider thought, clearly refers to divine

ordering in the universe of some kind.

Golwalkar’s principle of divine order in the struggle against evil is less elaborate, but

perhaps more straightforward for its simple triumphalism. Those in tune with the Supreme

Being and with the courage to fight for righteousness simply will eventually succeed, and, much

as they must be shrewd in their maneuvers, cannot and should not consider contingencies in

which righteousness will not prevail. Applying this principle to nuclear weapons, Golwalkar’s

235 J. Nehru, An Autobiography, (New Delhi, 1962), p. 403. 236 Exemplary of this pattern is Bilgrami’s treatment of Gandhi in Secularism, Identity, and Enchantment (London, 2014); Mantena’s treatment of ‘Gandhi’s Realism’; Skaria’s Unconditional Equality; Devji’ The Impossible Indian, and Kapila’s Gandhi before Mahatma.’ 237 Devji, The Impossible Indian, p. 149. 238 Wohlforth, ‘Realism,’ p. 134. 239 Gandhi, ‘Interview to Margaret Bourke-White,’ (Harijan, 22 February 1948), CW 98:324. 240 Gandhi, ‘Interview to General secretary, Y.W.C.A.,’ (Harijan, 22 February 1948), CW 98:325.

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position in relation to Divine influence is perhaps best articulated by his protégé and the official

ideologue of the BJS and BJP, Deendayal Upadhyaya. Upadhyaya maintained that matters of

world annihilation and peace was the work of God, and that India must accordingly “leave the

work of world peace to almighty God and start making nuclear bombs,” commensurate with its

prestige.241

Thus, both Golwalkar and Gandhi’s respective philosophies of political action, violence,

and non-violence suppose a cosmic war that includes within it a sense of active divine influence

in the outcomes of righteous and unrighteous action in history. This is not to say that political

Hinduism is unique in this regard: other expressions of political religion also tend to exhibit this

trait of transcendent influence on causality. However, the Hindu case is particular in relation to

the other notable scholarly explorations of religious motivations in nuclear affairs. Fear of radical

Islamist nuclear calculations has famously hinged on a disregard for death (or even a welcoming

of martyrdom in the Islamist cause) based upon a belief of rewards accrued for the afterlife—not

so much a cosmological principle within history as a corrective principle for actions in history,

after history. The Evangelical case is slightly more complex, and is intertwined with a

dispensational theology that assumes an apocalyptic end of the world resonant with—if not

directly descriptive of—nuclear holocaust.242 As Martin L. Cook relates, “it is but a short

additional step from passively waiting for apocalyptic events to occur as part of God’s timetable

to thinking one might be assisting the Divine Plan by initiating destruction on that scale.”243

The sources of these differing religious motivations are also notable: the Islamist and

Evangelical ideals derive from interpretative traditions of divine, scriptural revelation. The

Hinduisms of Gandhi and Golwalkar do not share this same hermeneutic, but, in accordance

with their shared Advaita Vedantic outlook, also draw upon transcendent sources, predominantly

from experiential Hindu traditions of monist spirituality. For Gandhi, the clearest reflection of

Divine insights alongside the Gita came from a spiritualized notion of conscience, the “still small

voice” within himself that he often appealed to as a conduit of Divine Truth and guidance.244 For

Golwalkar, the path to righteous action is illuminated by Hindu “spiritual sciences” that help

241 Trivedi, P., Architect of a Philosophy (Kanpur, 2017), p. 124, and Mahesh Sharma Pandit Deendayal upadhyaya p. 51. 242 See Cook, ‘Christian Apocalypticism and Weapons of Mass Destruction.’ Notable also is H. P. Duus’s exploration of ‘Deterrence and a Nuclear-Armed Iran’ which diagnoses simultaneous martyr motivations with eschatological concerns: H. P. Duus, ‘Deterrence and a Nuclear-Armed Iran,’ Comparative Strategy, 30:2 (2011), pp. 134-153; online edn. [https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/pdf/10.1080/01495933.2011.561731?needAccess=true, accessed 7 June 7, 2018]. 243 Cook, ‘Christian Apocalypticism and Weapons of Mass Destruction,’ p. 207. 244 Pandey, Gandhi and Modernization, p. 208.

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individuals and societies attune themselves to “the Ultimate Reality which pervades all

Creation.”245

Much as these differences may seem trivial, they exhibit important distinctions. For

example, the inevitability of nuclear apocalypse in Evangelical dispensationalist theology makes

efforts at arms reduction particularly futile,246 whereas even Golwalkar considers nuclear

weapons adharmic (at variance with dharma) and worth eliminating if possible.247 Thus, much as

India must keep nuclear arms to maintain parity with other nuclear powers, the existence of arms

is an aberration that is still worth opposing for Golwalkar, unlike within a dispensationalist

framework. This is to say nothing of Gandhi, whose spiritual priority for disarmament takes on

ultimate significance, even at severe risk and sacrifice. Likewise, the Islamist priority of

martyrdom-as-motivation suggests a certain recklessness in considering one’s own survival from

violence or political action. Golwalkar’s triumphal righteousness, by contrast, accepts a higher

degree of risk in struggle according to cosmological principles, but falls far short of pressing for

martyrdom. Gandhi’s thought is more ambivalent towards the material welfare of the actor in

question after the actions in question, but also stops short of valorizing martyrdom for

martyrdom’s sake. Indeed, both Golwalkar and Gandhi eschew calculations of the afterlife from

their philosophies of action altogether. Comparing these features of cosmic struggle in political

Hinduism with radical Islamism and dispensational Evangelicalism is not meant to suggest that

the three are analogous movements in nuclear considerations by any means. I do mean, however,

to note the great variance and significance of theological and motivational differences between

religio-poltical movements that have played (or are feared to play) a role in the nuclear age—a

broadening of the spectrum and dimensions of religio-political challenges to the logic of

deterrence that have hitherto been studied.

The Logic of Deterrence and the Challenge of Hindu Nuclear Politics

Deterrence is an ancient concept of war, which highlights the importance of building up

arms and reputation to outweigh enemies’ incentives to attack for fear of retaliatory costs. The

concept took on new meaning after the creation of the atomic bomb, however, with the

formalization of a concept of nuclear deterrence by the “American Clausewitz” Bernard Brodie

in his 1946 publication, The Absolute Weapon: Atomic Power and World Order. Brodie would further

245 Golwalkar, Bunch of Thoughts, p. 4. 246 Cook, ‘Christian Apocalypticism and Weapons of Mass Destruction,’ p. 206. 247 Golwalkar, Bunch of Thoughts, p. 287.

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elaborate his historically unique doctrine of deterrence, which was quickly adopted as the realist

centerpiece of American Cold War strategy, in his 1959 work Strategy in the Missile Age, where he

tersely notes, “the kind of deterrence we speak of today has certain novel features, especially the

requirement that it absolutely must not fail.”248 Amid the specter of nuclear-armed superpowers,

and funneled through the thought of Brodie and American foreign policy realism, nuclear

deterrence came to be an existential game of building up enough arms to end life on earth

several times over. By threatening the existence of the major players involved, the deterrence

game bid neither power detonate. The concept always held a certain calculated madness to it, at

once seen by the most powerful men in the world as humanity’s greatest chance for survival, and

at the same time representing humanity’s “obvious insanity.”249

What worked on a larger scale with the superpowers was seen to also work, in a less

totalizing way, among smaller nuclear states. Even if their nuclear capacities would not destroy

the whole world, the risks of drawing nuclear destruction on oneself was understood to be

sufficient to dissuade states from arming, and certainly from using nuclear weapons. According

to this principle, realists have largely agreed that acquiring nuclear arms is generally

disadvantageous for state actors, unless they can guarantee that their rivals will not be able to

gain access to the same.250 It is this dynamic of deterrence that India flouted—first in failing to

match China’s acquisition of the bomb in the 60’s despite the ability to do so, and second in

acquiring the bomb in full knowledge that their rival Pakistan had developed capabilities to do

the same.

Much as profuse literature has been produced on deterrence theory, the central idea is

rather simple, as is political Hinduism’s subversion of it. Nuclear deterrence ultimately claims

that the threat of the overwhelming, materially destructive power of atomic bombs is effective at

keeping any actor from using the bombs themselves. It rests on two aforementioned staples of

realist thought: (1) that the actions and reactions of states occur in an anarchic system, and (2)

that international relations are arranged around “the potential use of material power to

coerce.”251 We have seen already in the first chapter how Gandhi and Golwalkar’s conceptions of

power militate against this second supposition: for Gandhi, non-material power is greater than

material power, defanging the ultimate threat of, and need for, nuclear arms. For Golwalkar,

248 B. Brodie, Strategy in the Missile Age, (Princeton, 1959); online edn. [https://www.rand.org/pubs/commercial_books/CB137-1.html, accessed 4 June 2018], p. vii. 249 H. Arendt, On Violence, (USA, 1969), p. 4. 250 Mearsheimer, J. J., ‘Structural Realism’ in T. Dunne, M. Kurki, & S. Smith (eds), International Relations Theories: Discipline and Diversity, 3rd Edition (Oxford, 2013), p. 82. 251 Wohlforth, ‘Realism,’ p. 134.

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material power works in concert with spiritual power, and on principle each must be put in the

service of the other.

This chapter, however, has shown the ways in which Hindu nuclear thought has militated

against the first supposition, vis-à-vis an alternative conception of cosmic order in moral and

immoral action. Once applied to the sphere of international relations, this means that the Divine

has arranged governing principles also of international actors, fundamentally undermining the

seeming anarchy of states. The consequences of actions and reactions of states are not purely the

result of the volitions and calculations of actors, as in the realist framework, but intertwined with

God’s hand in the eternal struggle of righteousness and iniquity. For Gandhi, this means the

principled use of non-violence (even at devastating risk to populations) will be efficacious either

through Divine rescue,252 or through a sacrifice that is redeeming to the rest of humanity.253 For

Golwalkar, standing up to the embodied forces of evil with the proper alignment of spiritual and

material power, even at the risk of obliteration, will result in the inevitable triumph of

righteousness.254

The priority of these non-material sources of power and non-anarchic, divinely governed

conception of international relations is the essence of political Hinduism’s rebellion against

political realism generally, and the logic of deterrence specifically. As we have seen, these tenants

have significant differences in source and substance with the particularities of other religio-

political threats to the world’s nuclear equilibrium highlighted in post-9/11 scholarship, much as

they all share in a general appeal to the transcendent over and against realist calculations. For

political Hinduism at least, these appeals and understandings are not trivial, spiritual dressings on

a fundamentally realist framework. They represent alternative modes of reasoning, deeply

intertwined with theological philosophies of political action from the Bhagavad Gita, as well as a

view of a spiritual civilization-mission deeply validated by the very existence of a nuclear age.

Hence, much as defenders of deterrence may suggest that its logic requires only “simple

rationality” in state leaders to operate effectively, Hindu nuclear politics presents a fundamental

challenge: that different sorts of rationalities, with alternative premises, may easily “rationally”

subvert the logic of deterrence, in armament at least.255 It was not deterrence-defying “reckless

lunacy” that caused India’s leaders to abstain from arming when they should have, nor arming

252 Gandhi, Satyagraha in South Africa, p. 9. 253 Gandhi, ‘Interview to General secretary, Y.W.C.A.,’ (Harijan, 22 February 1948), CW 98:325. 254 Golwalkar, Bunch of Thoughts, p. 287. 255 Quinlan, M., Thinking About Nuclear Weapons: Principles, Problems, Prospects (Oxford, 2009), p. 27.

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when strategically disadvantageous, but an alternative philosophy of power and political action, a

fact with broad implications for the world at large.256

256 Ibid.

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Conclusion: Hindu Nuclear Politics, Democracy & the Nuclear World

We have now explored a rather wide survey of Hindu nuclear politics between 1945 and

1998. We have seen the curious fact that the Hindu tradition evolved only two self-identified

expressions of (highly idiosyncratic) religious politics after independence, with starkly opposed

conclusions on the matter of nuclear armament; explored the potency of these strands of Hindu

nuclear politics in their historically overlooked, decisive subversion of realist calculations;

considered how the symbolic meaning and narratives of the nuclear age altered and re-

invigorated their respective world views and missions; and analyzed how the respective

theologies of Hindu nuclear politics theoretically subverts the logic of nuclear deterrence, in

reference to broader scholarship on religio-politics and violence. By way of conclusion, I think it

only appropriate to attempt to synthesize these insights into a final, brief reflection on what

Hindu nuclear politics means for our still-nuclear world.

The story and thought behind Hindu nuclear politics is a testament to the importance

and power of ideas, with disruption at its core. Certainly non-ideological factors were central to

this story, but it cannot be denied that the thought behind Hindu nuclear politics has disrupted

political realism in history, predominant narratives of civilizational progress, and the logic of

deterrence (at least in proliferation) in the latter half of the 20th century.

The upshot of these thought-disruptions is highly significant for deterrence theory in the

21st century, for deterrence inherently “is a concept for operating upon the thinking of others. It

therefore entails some basic presuppositions…about that thinking.”257 The alternative modes of

thought exhibited in—and realized through—Hindu nuclear politics is thus a challenge not only

to the logic of deterrence in India’s immediate context, but also deterrence writ large, which still

today is the primary theoretical approach to explain and manage nuclear issues around the world.

Based as it is on the thought of others, the logic of deterrence is a dynamic theoretical

ecosystem: its efficacy and its formulation are deeply contingent on correctly understanding the

thought patterns of states actors. If even one major state demonstrates a pattern of thought

alternative to those accounted for by the logic of deterrence, it is not the logic of deterrence

towards that one state that must alter, but the deterrence ecosystem as a whole. Hindu nuclear

politics, by effectively subverting the political realism presumed to be animating states in nuclear

decisions, disrupts and destabilizes the concept of deterrence altogether.

257 Ibid, p. 27.

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In this sense, Hindu nuclear politics poses a unique theoretical challenge to the logic of

deterrence, but one which is significantly divergent from that posed by other religio-political

movements that have garnered more academic attention. The primary challenge posed by

Evangelical Dispensationalism and radical Islamism has tended to center on concerns over extra-

governmental organizations, non-territorial entities, or lone wolf actors within government acting

on religio-political thought incompatible with the logic of deterrence (with the notable exception

of Iran). In the case of Hindu nuclear politics, the concern is just the opposite: injecting religio-

politcal thought into the center of a democratic state. If religio-politics was feared to circumvent

the logic of deterrence through radical Islamists, Apocalyptic Evangelicals or radical cults like

Aum Shinrikyo, religio-politics subverts the logic of deterrence through the state itself in Hindu

nuclear politics.

Intuitively, subjecting religio-political thought to the moderating and compromising

processes of democratic politics would seem to have the effect of tempering the strong stances

of ideologues. Certainly history shows some of this effect in the compromises of prime ministers

Shastri and Indira Gandhi, for instance. Nonetheless, the converse is also true: democratically

enmeshed religio-politics can also pull and transform democracy towards extremes by virtue of

democratic processes themselves. Indeed, not only did Gandhian and Hindu nationalist camps

consistently form the extreme poles of nuclear opinion between which the rest of Indian nuclear

discourse took place, they also heavily, if not decisively, influenced all of India’s most important

nuclear decisions. It is not even the case that those in power necessarily had to adhere closely to

a Gandhian or Hindutva framework to have their decisions powerfully influenced by either: the

symbolic power and legacy of Gandhism and the insurgent pull of Hindu nationalist political

maneuvering each at different times defined the range of feasible nuclear policies available to

political leaders. Given that these two camps derived stances from vantages of cosmic wars, it is

unsurprising that they defined either extreme of public opinion on nuclear issues. That they were

so effective in influencing, transforming, and even capturing public discourse in a democratic

nation-state, however, is as surprising as it is disturbing in a world in which a majority of nuclear

states have ascendant religio-political movements.

Thus Hindu nuclear politics takes on deeply disturbing significance for the 21st century.

In some ways, through its example of state-influence, political Hinduism presents perhaps the

most salient model of the nuclear disruptions likely to originate from religio-politics in the

coming decades. As Thérèse Delpech points out, nuclear terrorism is rightly considered a

relatively peripheral issue in nuclear policy, despite all its fanfare. Now as ever, nuclear states

58

pose the most important threats to nuclear equilibrium.258 The story of Hindu nuclear politics as

a disrupter of deterrence theory, progress narratives, and nation-state politics alike thus

highlights an important and largely overlooked facet of humanity’s increasingly problematic

nuclear equilibrium, already under threat from a shift from a unipolar to a multipolar world.259 If,

as many once-paragons of realist deterrence are now claiming, the logic and execution of

deterrence is becoming blurrier in a more multivariable and multipolar world, Hindu nuclear

politics instantiates a further unwelcome disruption that must be accounted for in the next

century: the surprising resurgence of faith-inspired politics.

258 Delpech, T., Nuclear Deterrence in the 21st Century: Lessons from the Cold War for a New Era of Strategic Piracy (Santa Monika, 2012), p. 2. 259 Shultz, G. P., Perry, W. J., Kissinger, H. A., & Nunn, S., ‘Deterrence in the Age of Nuclear Proliferation,’ The Wall Street Journal, (7 March 2011); online edn. [https://www.wsj.com/articles/SB10001424052748703300904576178760530169414, accessed 4 June 2018].

59

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