When the father of the atom bomb, Robert Oppenheimer saw the first mushroom cloud above a New Mexico desert in 1945, he quoted the Hindu epic Bhagavad Gita: "The radiance of a thousand suns ... Like the splendor of the Mighty One". And, "I am become Death, the shatterer of worlds".
In India, a new type of Hindu activist increasingly quotes Oppenheimer's words. For them, his use of their sacred text shows how Hindu ideas of deity are connected to modern times ... The visage of creator-god Vishnu is like the brilliance of the nuclear flash, they argue.
India's own weapons programme plays off Hindu myth and symbols. The name of one Indian rocket, the Agni, means "god of fire" in Sanskrit Trishul, another missile, stands for the trident of righteousness held by Vishnu. The nuclear bomb tests in May were code-named Shakti, which means cosmic energy and is the name of the consort of Shiva the destroyer.
Yet after these tests, experts in Washington are not speaking of a "Hindu bomb" as they speak of an "Islamic bomb". But ... Hinduism is a basic element of Indian civilisation - and the BJP has been packaging and selling a new interpretation of it: "Hindutva" has been very popular in a country still smarting from the psychic wounds of a British colonial past ...
To BJP leaders, India is a Hindu state that has ignored the discipline and martial skill in Hinduism. They seek to replace the Gandhian ideals of Hindu nonviolence with a more muscular Hindu tradition.
"For the BJP, India had been a great empire, but one subject to invasion for thousands of years because of a lack of martial qualities," says Francine Franket, director of the Center for the Advanced Study of Indian in Philadelphia. BJP has reinterpreted Hinduism to include a manly assertiveness.
BJP leaders, for example, emphasize the tradition of the Hindu warrior kings (Rajputs), who, for their righteous purpose (dharna) of protecting the innocent, wield a stick or weapon of power.
Such ideas are quite familiar to Hindus. In Sanskrit, scripture is "shastra", weapon is "shaastra". It is a "deeply embedded concept in Hindu culture that you hold scripture in one hand and a weapon in the other", says Sanskrit scholar Surendra Gamphir of the University of Pennsylvania. "In Hindu lore, the weapon must be controlled by scripture". Yet a number of scholars feel that the BJP has distorted Hinduism by overemphasizing its military dimension and hostility towards faiths like Islam.
Fundamentalist Hindu thinkers in recent years have pointed out that Hindu warriors can fight without feelings of guilt because the souls of those killed will be reincarnated.
A leading Hindu politician, Balasaheb Thackeray of the Shiv Sena party, said in a press conference after the nuclear tests, "We are not eunuches any longer".
But perhaps one of the greatest appropriations of Hindu values came in the mid-1980s when Hindu leaders started a campaign to focus the sprawling Hindu faith into a politically effective programme. State TV began in 1987 to broadcast a series of Indian epics.
. "The BJP coopted and hijacked Hindu values", write University of Chicago scholars Susanne and Lloyd Rudolph.
1992 established a collective "Hindu consciousness" by the BJP. Militantly anti-Muslim, it resulted the destruction of a mosque in Ayodhya by Hindus.
But Stephen Cohen, a scholar at the University of Illinois, says that, in part, the nuclear test by India is a kind of "international Ayodhya". "For BJP, it's defining moment", he says "meaning that things will never be the same again. (Source: The Christian Science Monitor, 4 June, 1998)