passion. Be it an injured animal that needed instant
attention, or the wait for the pigeons to fly out of their nests in
his bedroom every morning before the fans could be switched on, Rajiv
held a missionary respect for God's greatest gift to humanity - Life. This found a verbatim translation in the global context where
he stood his ground as the most vocal, fearless advocate of disarmament.
'There are 50,000 nuclear warheads poised to wipe out the world several
times over: equivalent to three tones of TNT for every man, woman
and child–One single taskforce of a big power costs more than
the GNP of 86 countries. What madness is this that puts a trillion
dollars into armaments every year and leaves but a pittance for human
well-being,' he told the Co- ordination Bureau of the Non-aligned
Movement in New Delhi.
Like his grandfather Nehru, Rajiv too was a 'queer mixture of East
and West, out of place (read standing out) everywhere.' And very much
like Nehru, he declared that 'the atom bomb introduced a fundamental
change in the nature of the world–the use of the atom bomb in
Hiroshima brought a wholly new dimension to the extent to which man
was prepared to destroy man in order to secure victory in war–
Today, by a strange reversal of logic, nuclear weapons of ever-increasing
destructive capability are produced and stockpiled on grounds that
they preserve stability and peace in the world– The people of
the world must rise to assert themselves against this evil.' From
Russia to the United States of America, his opinion was as firm as
it was stringent.
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He told the Kremlin, 'there are no winnable nuclear
wars,' as candidly as he told the White House, the very survival
of humankind today rests in the hands of a very few countries.'
Deterrence, for Rajiv, was just a camouflage for balance of power
which again was a veneer for destructive ambitions. His answer was
a difficult but a direct opposite: Peaceful co-existence with a no-nuclear
warhead world. 'We defend ourselves not with weapons but with words.
By building public opinion against war.'
On another plane altogether, he saw in armament the main breeding
ground for economic instability, for poverty, hunger, disease and
death. 'Spend the armament funds to target humanity's bigger enemies,
not humans themselves,' he exhorted the Big Two, giving them an upright
example to follow - his India. 'We have no intention to produce
a nuclear weapon. We don't want it; we think it is wrong and it is
bad–To go nuclear will be our last choice,' he said. Through
the famous New Delhi Declaration, Rajiv Gandhi not only gave India
its first taste of technological convergence of a world initiative
by linking six nations from Five Continents through satellite, but
also issued a clarion call for disarmament. The nation Heads called
for an immediate halt to testing, development and production of warheads.
'Initiative must start with superpowers– other nations can only
build up public opinion,' he asserted, accepting the subsequent Beyond
War Award on behalf of the Clutch of Six. |
