Sarita Sarvate

Now we have lived through three wars with neighboring nations — the U.S. Navy’s 7th Fleet looming over the Indian Ocean during each conflict. Weapons no longer seem abstract concepts but real necessities of daily life. True, we gave Mahatma Gandhi to the world and preached it a lesson in nonviolence, but we had also witnessed the death of our brokenhearted idol Jawaharlal Nehru after India’s defeat at the hands of the Chinese.

Our ancient epic, the Mahabharata, tells of a weapon so powerful it will destroy the world. Our ancient scripture, the Bhagavad-Gita, provides a spiritual basis for deploying such a force. “It is your moral duty to annihilate those that spread evil in the world,” God Krishna advises the warrior Arjuna when he despairs at the prospect of killing his own.

Not until I came to California in the late ’70s was I aware of the liberal movement against nuclear weapons. Although I endorsed it wholeheartedly, a nagging unease stayed at the back of my mind — not at my fellow graduate students’ zeal to save the world, but at the absolute moral righteousness with which they viewed the universe.

In seminars and group discussions, I tried to point out that many Asian and African nations, given our shared history of colonization, viewed the U.S. and other Western governments with a legitimate skepticism and did not trust them to handle nuclear weapons any more responsibly than our governments. I tried to make them understand that the nation that was feeding its best brains to the profit-making machinery of the Silicon Valley was offended at the West’s inability to treat it on equal terms in international policy.

But these arguments fell on deaf ears — and still do.

Most people in India today are proud of its nuclear capabilities, for exactly the same reason that many Americans are proud of their country’s achievements in atomic science. The nation of Buddha, the Veddas, Mahatma Gandhi, Ravi Shankar and Srinivasa Ramanujan (the mathematician) wants to be reckoned as a technological force. And having been ruled by the British for 150 years, and by the Persians and the Afghans for 600 years before then, Indians today wish to stand tall as a strong and independent nation.

For myself, I have long since abandoned my dream of becoming a nuclear physicist, turning my attention instead to the “Small is Beautiful” approach to development in countries like India. The world should not only cease any development of new atomic weapons, I believe, but should rid itself of its existing stockpiles.

But I am torn as I read the newspaper headlines. On the one hand, there is my fear for family members back home, and concern at atomic blasts still taking place in the French territories of the Pacific as well as in India. And I am outraged at the failure of America to understand the historical and cultural momentum leading up to India’s actions.

But I am also glad that India has at last attracted world attention as a technological giant. I am hopeful that India’s refusal to sign the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty on the grounds that it be modified to include a clause requiring the superpowers to reduce their arsenals will now receive due attention.

During the 1960s and 1970s, politicians in my native country, India, used to brandish the slogan “Stop Brain Drain” — a reference to the fact that the cream of India was leaving for the lucrative shores of England and America.

In that post-independence era, when everything foreign was considered tainted by colonialism, we talked of cottage industries and economic imperialism. We threw Coca-Cola out and invented “Thumbs Up.”

But it was also the era of Sputnik, of nuclear power and the green revolution. Every year, on Independence Day, our Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru spoke of the benefits of science and technology.

Our institutes of technology, built with European and American aid, offered students free room and board, even stipends. Indian taxpayers footed the bill in the hope that one day the graduates would help reconstruct the nation.

I was one such student. But poring over my textbooks late at night in the library of the Indian Institute of Technology (IIT), I would dream, not of India, but of America, the land of opportunity. Many students like me, indeed, left during those years, never to return.

So our government set up special programs to tempt foreign graduates. Our leaders saw parallels to the independence movement founded by people like Nehru and Gandhi who, after imbibing Western political ideology at institutions like Eton and Oxford, returned home to serve their motherland.

But few foreign graduates came home to “redeem their pledge,” as Nehru had put it. Our leaders had failed to foresee that the emphasis on symbol manipulation at IIT left little room for social ideology and much scope for capitalistic greed.

Over the next two decades, IIT graduates — educated at the expense of Indian taxpayers — played a major role in founding California’s Silicon Valley. The personal computer revolution and the invention of the internet made the demand for skilled labor mushroom to such gigantic proportions that even if every American child were to study nothing but science from now on, we would be unable to keep pace with demand in the decades to come.

In other words, the legislation would benefit not foreign workers, but American industry which would be crippled without it. In India in the meantime, the entire education system has shifted gears to feed the appetite of the American computer industry. As IIT cannot graduate enough students to fill these needs, so every street corner now sports billboards for private academies offering diplomas in computer programming.

At a book show in my hometown of Nagpur recently, hordes of young people pored over books on engineering and software.

Rhetoric about “Brain Drain” doesn’t hold much water when every politician has a son or a daughter aspiring to go abroad.

And why bother rebuilding the nation when the only goal is to abandon it? At the Nagpur book show, for example, the latest American social treatises were conspicuous by their absence and India’s politically conscious elite has been replaced by a new generation, riding on the wave of the Internet, making fortunes within a span of years.

This new elite has abandoned all talk of economic imperialism in favor of market economics. Indians now put garlands around Bill Gates’ neck and offer him the kind of reception once offered only to the queen. And Thumbs Up is a subsidiary of Coca-Cola.

Mid-sized cities like Bangalore are now the Silicon Valleys of India — their workers generate demand for the very goods they produce. But the nation is slowly disintegrating. India’s population recently hit 1 billion, but its infrastructure in water, transportation and health care is fast crumbling; its citizens breathe air that is dangerously polluted.

India has gone from an agrarian society to the cyber-revolution, bypassing intermediate stages such as the welfare state and the creation of social services.

Perhaps it is time to enact legislation calling for a “Brain Trust.” Funded by corporations like Microsoft and Intel which have drained India of its brains for decades, the trust could set up new institutes in India aimed at training students not in symbol manipulation, but in social thought. Such an effort is our only hope of creating the social infrastructure needed in the next century.