Anti-nuclear activists fill the streets - New Delhi and Calcutta demonstrations against India and Pakistan nuclear testing - Brief Article

Progressive, The, Oct, 1998

In August, anti-nuclear activists turned out in huge numbers to criticize India and Pakistan for testing atomic bombs.

A number of people not usually associated with anti-nuclear causes showed up for protests on the anniversaries of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Indian writer Arundhati Roy, who won the Booker Prize for her novel The God of Small Things, marched in New Delhi. Mrinal Sen, probably India's most famous living film director, helped organize one of the Calcutta demonstrations, which involved 250,000 people in a series of marches through the city streets, according to press reports.

The march in New Delhi was smaller. Kamal Mitra Chenoy, a professor in the School of International Studies at the Jawaharlal Nehru University in New Delhi, claims that between 8,000 and 10,000 people showed up for the march, although wire service reports put the number at around 3,000.

"The nuclear tests were a signal failure of the peace movement in India," says Chenoy, one of the founders of the Movement in India for Nuclear Disarmament, established in recent months as a response to the tests. The group hopes to bring an end to the deployment and further testing of nuclear weapons in the subcontinent.

Several high-ranking retired army officials from both India and Pakistan have also issued a joint statement condemning the tests. The signatories include Admiral Laxminarayan Ramdas, chief of India's naval staff from 1990 to 1993. Ramdas admits that he felt a "twinge of happiness" when he first heard about the tests. But now he is convinced of the "complete futility" of the exercise and believes that neither India nor Pakistan has the technology to manage the bomb safely. "I'm going to fight against nuclear weapons for the rest of my life," he says.

For more information, contact the Movement in India for Nuclear Disarmament, c/o Kamal Mitra Chenoy, 39 Dakshinapuram, JNU Campus, New Delhi, India, 110067. E-mail: chenoy@ nda.vsnl.net.in.