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OF FIREFLIES AND WAR Amidst the headlines about nuclear war worries in South Asia, a little-noticed news item appeared on the BBC World News.1 The BBC reported on May 14, 2002, that in the middle of the dangerous military buildup along the border with Pakistan, with careless talk of nuclear war in the air, the Indian government had funded scientists in the nation’s premier defense research institutes to develop techniques of biological and chemical warfare based on Arthashastra , a 2,300-year-old Sanskrit treatise on statecraft and warfare. The venerable Sanskrit book is supposed to include recipes for “a single meal that will keep a soldier fighting for a month, methods for inducing madness in the enemy as well as advice on chemical and biological warfare,” according to Shaikh Azizur Rahman, the BBC reporter from Mumbai. Space scientists and biologists are trying to replicate the ancient formulas consisting of special herbs, milk, and ghee (clarified butter) that will keep soldiers going for a month without food. Other projects include “shoes made of camel skin smeared with a serum from owls and vultures than can help soldiers walk hundreds of miles without feeling tired. . . . A powder made from fireflies and the eyes of wild boars that can endow night vision. . . . A lethal smoke [made] by burning snakes, insects and plant seeds.” Rahman reported that scientists next plan to turn their attention to other ancient manuscripts that “claim to provide secrets of manufacturing planes which can not be destroyed by any external force and remain invisible to the enemy planes.” The scientists were said to be “excited about the possibilities and do not for a moment think that the idea is crazy.” What is one to make of it? Comic relief? A nostalgia trip for those aghast at the prospect of nuclear annihilation (if only all our weapons came out of fireflies and boars and insects and plants)? Looked at in isolation, this is just a funny little story, a sideshow. After all, what does this minor project matter when India continues to spend millions of rupees (close to 18 percent of the national budget each year) for developing or acquiring modern methods of mass destruction? Dharma and the Bomb Postmodern Critiques of Science and the Rise of Reactionary Modernism in India Meera Nanda 179 But this is no sideshow. This project is not about defense. It is about Hindu supremacy. This project is aimed not at an external enemy but at extending the reach of Hindu nationalism in India’s schools and other institutions in the public sphere. This project is about the rising tide of reactionary modernism in India. To place this incidence in a larger context, let us go back to May 1998, when India test-fired nuclear devices in the desert of Pokharan. THE BOMB: INDIA GOES NUCLEAR The media around the world carried a picture that should have sent a chill down our collective spine. It showed crowds of ordinary, everyday men and women dancing in the streets of New Delhi to celebrate India’s successful nuclear tests. (Think about it: celebrating the making of a nuclear bomb.) For these mobs, the technological hardware of the bomb was a symbol of their national greatness, their strength, and even their virility; it was a Hindu bomb against the Islamic bomb of Pakistan. It is not a coincidence that many among the jubilant mobs also served as foot soldiers in the Hindu nationalist crusade against all those who refuse to accept the equation of India with Hindu dharma. Such persecuted minorities include not just Muslims and Christians but also secular artists, writers , filmmakers, and political activists accused of disrespecting Hinduism. An India that celebrates its bombs is an increasingly intolerant and illiberal India. Antinuclear activists and progressive intellectuals in and from India, struggling valiantly to retain some degree of hope for a return to sanity, have argued that these pictures pander to orientalist expectations of India—ignorant, nationalist , third-world know-nothings. The Western media’s emphasis on mobs celebrating the nuclear tests, the critics claim, misrepresents the actual sentiments of the majority of Indian people who, by and large, are opposed to nuclear weapons or are at least indifferent to them. The overwhelming public approval for the prospect of India building the bomb captured by public opinion polls, the argument goes, was a statistical aberration stemming from the bias of the poll takers for urban folks with telephone connections. For the sake of peace...

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