In their treatment of an opinion different from theirs, fanatics in both India and Pakistan behave like identical, spoiled twins. And in Islamabad, some of the journalists invited to cover a press conference joined hands with a religio-political group to hurl chairs and insults at some learned men and women whose only crime was their conviction in ideas of peace, in their dream of a world without nuclear weapons. Giving our newly-made bombs images of deities, couching them in religious metaphors and glorifying these weapons as a deed ordained by God is pathological.
Bombs know no religion.
They destroy, or, at best, create the fear of mass destruction. This was precisely the point Eqbal Ahmed, AH Nayyar and Samina Ahmed were making before and during the scary scene Tuesday. But, after demonstrating their fearsome capabilities, the governments and popular media in India and Pakistan are exploiting the emotions of an unthinking populace by presenting nuclear arms as panacea for their woes of existence. Attributes of masculinity engender false beliefs of 'superiority' in one poor country over the other. The people on the two sides are being made to believe that learning how to produce weapons of war by splitting atoms of radioactive elements is the biggest achievement of their nations since the British left.