India: Of Men, Women, and Bombs

India declared its manhood last spring by blasting five nuclear devices. “It had to be done,” said the outspoken Hindu nationalist leader Balasaheb Thackeray, “we had to prove that we are not eunuchs.” Picking up on the sexual subtext, a cartoon in a leading Indian newspaper depicted Prime Minister Atal Behari Vajpayee propping up his coalition government with a nuclear bomb. “Made with Viagra,” the caption read.

Indian nuclear scientists and policy makers form an all-male club. Women surely have nothing to gain from the politics of national chauvinism that the explosions reflected, or from the economic sanctions and regional tensions that predictably followed. In large part because of the crash program of nuclear armaments, India’s military budget for 1998–1999 soared by 14 percent to $10 billion, twice the amount it spends on education, health, and social services. Meanwhile, the female literacy rate is 36 percent, women earn 26 percent of men’s earnings, ...