Anubhav Shankar Goswami
In March 2022 an accidental launch of the Brahmos missile during a “routine maintenance and inspection” went into the territory of Pakistan and impacted near the town of Mian Channu, slightly more than 100 kilometres west of the international border.India, however, did not allegedly alert Pakistan immediately about the accidental launch using its high-level military hotlines. Furthermore, India took two days since the incident occurred to make a public statement. The unsatisfactory nature of New Delhi’s response in such an unprecedented incident has major ramifications for crisis stability between the two nations and has India taking a beating of its image as a responsible nuclear power.
Now that India has become the only nuclear-armed state to launch a missile accidentally or otherwise at another nuclear-armed state, New Delhi must ask itself whether it wants to be saddled with this dubious distinction or can it do something to recover its broken image? If the Americans have had to face this question instead, ten years down the line perhaps Hollywood would come up with a story that clearly highlights the conventional nature of the missile accidentally launched and the zero likelihood of something similar happening to its nuclear arsenals due to the strict separation of control as well as the locations of conventional and nuclear weapons (Indian context). The narrative spin would shift the focus from ‘one-off’ mistakes to the strict institutional and operational guardrails put in the first place precisely to prevent such a mistake becoming an adverse consequence of epic proportions!
Does Bollywood, however, have the impulse for such soft power conceptualisation to execute the Indian states’ communication potential and manipulation ability?While Motion pictures have played a significant role in defining and influencing American Nuclear geo-political ideology – be it depicting warfighting utility of nuclear weapons in the post-Hiroshima movies to illustrating “nightmarish dread of global thermonuclear holocaust” to displaying “less apocalyptic dilemmas involving nuclear proliferation and radioactive waste disposal” in the post-cold war era–Bollywood films on the other hand have only used its canvas to articulate the unease of nuclear terrorism.Popular examples are The Hero: Love Story of a Spy, Fanaa and 16 December. In the film 16 December, the antagonist Dost Khan (Gulshan Grover) intends to destroy India by detonating a nuclear device he has purchased with hawala money, or illicit funds.The Hero: Love Story of a Spy depicts the plot of a separatist organisation’s efforts to develop a nuclear bomb to free Kashmir from India. The 2006 blockbusterFanaa also had a story where Kashmiri separatists attempted to get hold of a nuclear device.
The common thread around these movies involving nuclear icons is that they only convey stories about “nomadic anti-nationalists”. Nuclear Weapons are conspicuously missing from any India-Pakistan patriotic movie made by Bollywood. Musing over Bollywood’s reticence to show nuclear missiles in patriotic films between the two declared nuclear powers, Raminder Kaur, Professor of Anthropology and Cultural Studies at the University of Sussex, believes that the destructive power of nuclear weapons is “too horrific for any patriot ornation-state to even entertain as potential weapons in ‘push-button patriotic’ films”.
Such an analysis is weirdly ignorant of the prevailing nuclear geopolitics of the Indian Sub-continent where Pakistan has a declared nuclear warfighting doctrine called ‘full spectrum deterrence’which aims to deter threats ranging from sub-conventional to strategic levels. To reaffirm this policy, Pakistan has developed tactical nuclear weapons to ‘plug’ the sub-conventional ‘gap’ in its deterrence posture. The implication is that although Pakistan regards nuclear weapons as ‘weapons of last resort’, it reserves the option of first-use against a nuclear weapon state at (sub)conventional level. Moreover, Pakistani Generals have engaged in nuclear brinkmanship to de-escalate tensions with India on Islamabad’s terms in many instances such as the 1990 crisis, the 2002 Operation Parakram and the crisis of 2019. The destructive power of nuclear weapons, is therefore, hardly ‘too horrific’ for any Pakistani ‘patriot’ or the ‘nation-state’ of Pakistan itself.Therefore, if Bollywood filmmakers indeed believes just as Raminder Kaur did that it is unacceptable for any patriot or nation-state to ever consider using a nuclear weapon, then they are just as wrong as she is.
American movies, both past and present, have never shied away from depicting rogue patriots or even the enemy national government using nuclear weapons to pursue their megalomaniac group or national interests. Currently premiering on Amazon Prime Tom Clancy’s Jack Ryan Season Three is a case in point. The villains are a rogue faction within the Russian government who plans to detonate a low-yield nuclear warhead in Central Europe to ignite a world war with the goal of reviving the old USSR.Movies like 13 Days, on the other hand, portrayed the historical event of Cuban Missile Crisis of 1962. It astutely shows how America tried everything it can to find a non-offensive solution to removing the missiles from the island to prevent the crisis spiralling out of the ‘brink’. The Kennedy administration’s decision to ‘quarantine’Cuba– instead of a ground and air offensive– to force the removal of Soviet nuclear missiles that had been installed there was depicted deftly as a mature sign of a responsible nuclear power.
To be fair to the Russians, mistakes and accidents also happened from the American side which could have sparked a war during those crucial thirteen days.For instance, during a US anti-submarine operationclose to the island of Cuba, explosives were dropped around Soviet submarines to compel them to surface. This caused the Soviet captain to mistakenly assume his submarine was being attacked and nearly launch nuclear-tipped torpedoes at the Americans. Another episode during the crisis included a U-2 spy plane that had accidentally entered the Soviet airspace, which led Premier Khrushchev to believe that Washington was refining coordinates for a nuclear assault.Any one of these actions could have had sparked a nuclear World War III, but the narrative shaped by Hollywood movies have successfully projected an image of America as the model nation for nuclear manageability.
Movies after movies this skewed portrayal is promoted to reinforce a particular narrative that the terror of nuclear weapon is not so much in the “formidable technology itself but in those who want to utilise it”, in this case the Russians.The United States, meanwhile, is always shown practising the politics of deterrence.
Coming back to the dynamics of India-Pakistan, narrative shaping on the Indian side fortunately requires no major whitewashing like the Americans as New Delhi has had a stellar nuclear manageability record. Also, Pakistan’s record of nuclear proliferation and ‘sabre-rattling’inevitably provides a lot more fodder for narrative shaping than the Soviets ever gave to the Americans.For example, the lowest point of Pakistan’s nuclear weapons programme came in 2003 when international smuggling of nuclear technology by Pakistani nuclear scientist Abdul Qadeer Khan into North Korea, Libya and Iran came to light.
In the absence of India’s own narrative, the thrusted but prevalent western narrative of South Asia being a nuclear flashpoint of the world gets perpetuated. Since both India and Pakistan belong to South Asia, nuclear bogey narrative creates a farce equivalency between a nation known for selling nuclear secrets and holding to a‘first-use’ posture to a nation with memberships to three export control regimes and maintaining a declared No First-Use (NFU) posture. Like an albatross around its neck, the weight of ‘South Asia as nuclear flashpoint to some extent might have constrainedNew Delhi’s options to inflict a ‘Limited War’ on Pakistan as a response to Islamabad’s support for proxy wars. The only way India can counter this global narrative is by de-hyphenating itself from Pakistan by amplifying their record of proliferation and brinkmanship, while portraying itself as a benign responsible nuclear power.Motion pictures, in this regard, have a huge potential in shaping a favourable narrative for India.
While Bollywood is well within its rights to not push India’s narrative, the Indian government also deserves some rap on its back for not ‘nudging’ the industry with incentives to bring out movies on nuclear geopolitics. More often than not, Indian filmmakers are denied shooting in strategic locations. On the other hand, in the US, the United States Air Force (USAF) liberally permitted several minutes of footage in the 1955 Paramount picture Strategic Air Command depicting B-36s and B-47s flying against gorgeous settings to justify the need for a burgeoning strategic bomber fleet against the Soviet threat. During one of the movie’s briefing scenes, one of the commanding general’s remarks, “…one B-47 with three crew members has more destructive power than the entire B-29 fleet against Japan”. Other instances of symbiosis between Hollywood and the U.S government included the film Beginning or the End (1947) which was made with the Truman administration’s blessing to justify the atomic bombing of Japan.
The Indian government can also take a leaf out of the American playbook and turn to Bollywood to effectively communicate a narrative of nuclear geopolitics favourable to India.
The author is Research Associate, Centre for Air Power Studies, PhD Scholar, OP Jindal Global University.
Disclaimer: Views expressed are personal and do not reflect the official position or policy of Financial Express Online. Reproducing this content without permission is prohibited.