CIAO DATE: 03/04

The Measure of India: What Makes Greatness?

George Perkovich

CASI Working Paper
April 2003

Center for the Advanced Study of India

 

Abstract

In 1999, months after India had tested five nuclear devices in the Rajasthan desert, I was interviewing Inder Gujral, who had been India’s prime minister in 1997. Gujral was known as a peacemaker -- a soft-spoken, thoughtful veteran of the Indian independence movement. With his white hair combed back and his neatly trimmed moustache and goatee, he sat in the library of his spacious home on Janpath Road and repeated the question I had just asked: "What did testing nuclear weapons accomplish for India?" The answer, Gujral explained, was basic and profound. "The world gives respect to countries with nuclear weapons. Do you think it is an accident that the five permanent members of the Security Council have nuclear weapons?" Gujral insisted that India would never use nuclear weapons offensively, or in a first-strike. He did not really think of them as weapons. Rather, nuclear weapon capability manifested India’s worldclass greatness. Nuclear weapons marked India’s arrival as a major power.

Leaving the former prime minister’s house, I admired the manicured lawn adjacent to the driveway. I exited through a security-guarded gate, past the wall protecting the house, and walked toward the taxi I had asked to wait for me. The taxi sat under a shady tree, on the dirt buffer between the wall and the wide capital boulevard. As I approached, the driver bolted upright from the passenger seat. He had been napping and the sound of footsteps awakened him and sent him scrambling out of the car and around to the hood. He held in his hand a dark tool that resembled a tire iron. He raised the hood and pushed the tool into the engine block and began cranking. He cranked and he cranked, trying to get the engine to turn over. When finally the motor sputtered to life, the driver looked up at me gleefully and bid me into the car. As the taxi trundled along the boulevard leading away from Gujral’s house, I sat in the back and chuckled. I thought of what the former prime minister had said. The driver heard me and turned his head slightly back, shrugging his shoulders in humility. "Old car," he said, endearingly. "Yes," I said, as much to myself as to him, "and it works."

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