JUNE 17-30, 2005 War and Peace
Documentary guru Anand Patwardhan’s rousing, engrossing and unexpectedly funny broadside against India’s hot chase of the bomb opens with an old newsreel on Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi’s assassination by Hindu nationalist Nathuram Godse. Patwardhan’s voiceover questions the trajectory that India’s politics later took, ” from non-violence to nuclear nationalism”. Cut to 1998, when the BJP government conducted nuclear tests at Pokhran, the same place India had first tested a nuclear device in 1974. This anti-bomb and anti-war film is also a swipe at the Sangh Parivar’s communal and ultra-nationalist politics. Patwardhan takes us to mandals at the Ganpati festivalthat year where hilarious but ultimately chilling celebrations of India’s new-found “virility” are being enacted; to blood-donation camps where party workers shout “Atom Bomb Vajpayee” in a frenzy. Cut again to self-congratulatory speeches by BJP leaders who constantly underline India’s newfound “security” and gloat over the fact that the globe, especially the United States, has finally “heard” us. The blasts serve as a launch pad for Patwardhan to question the wisdom of pursuing a nuclear programme; the links between nationalism, communal-ism and nuclearisation and the price citizens pay for India’s increased militarism (for example, India spends more on defence than on health and education). To complete the circle, Patwardhan makes forays into Pakistan, where he finds peaceniks and also the Sangh Parivar’s brothers in hate. In a key sequence, Lahore schoolgirls read out anti-India propaganda as part of a class assignment, but later admit that they did so only to get more marks. The Lahore classroom sums up Patwardhan’s theory on why India went nuclear: to max the global exam on military prowess. Nandini Ramnath |