India, like China, did not at once share the financial and economic disarray of many East Asian countries. In this respect, undeniably, past policies favoured her. Congress governments, though moving away somewhat from the socialism of the early years of independence, had long been strongly influenced by protectionist, managed, nationally self-sufficient, even autarkic ideas. The price had been low rates of growth and social conservatism, but with them came also a lower degree of vulnerability to international capital flows than other countries.
In 1996 the Hindu and nationalist Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) inflicted another major defeat on Congress and became the largest single party in the lower house of parliament. It was not able to sustain its own government, though, and a coalition government emerged that did not survive another (very violent) general election in 1998. This, too, was inconclusive in that no clear parliamentary majority emerged, but the BJP and its allies formed the biggest single group in it. Another coalition government was the outcome, whose Janata supporters soon published an ominously nationalist agenda that announced that ‘India should be built by Indians’. Some found this alarming in a country where nationalism, though encouraged by Congress for a century or so, had usually been offset by prudent recognition of the real fissiparousness and latent violence of the subcontinent. The new government appeared also to offer small likelihood of accelerated social change except, possibly, in a regressive and sectarian way. There was still no sign that India could sustain a programme of real modernization from its own cultural resources. There were still too many people interested in keeping things as they were.
Though it seemed consistent with a determination to win domestic kudos by playing the nationalist card, it was nonetheless in the context of the running sore of the old quarrel with Pakistan that the world had to strive to understand the Janata government’s decision to proceed with a series of nuclear test explosions in May and June 1998. They provoked the Pakistan government to follow suit with similar tests of its own; both governments were now members of the club of nations acknowledged to have deployable nuclear weapons. Yet larger contexts in which to set this fact (the Indian prime minister pointed out) were those of Indian fear of China, already a nuclear power and remembered by Indians as the victor of the Himalayan fighting of 1962, and a growing sympathy shown by the Pakistan government to Islamic fundamentalist agitation in other countries - notably, Afghanistan, where 1996 had seen the establishment of an intensely reactionary government in Kabul, under a faction named ‘Taliban’. Some gloomily pondered the notion that a Pakistani bomb might also be an Islamic bomb. In any case, there had been a huge setback to the curbing of nuclear proliferation so far achieved; there was universal alarm at the evidence the tests provided of the spread of nuclear weapons. Several ambassadors were withdrawn from Delhi and some countries followed the lead of the United States in cutting off or holding up aid to India. Such action, though, did nothing to deter Pakistan from following India’s example. The world, evidently, had not rid itself of the danger of nuclear warfare by ending the Cold War. That danger, too, had now to be understood in a world that some thought much less stable than the 1960s had been and with India-Pakistan relations still bedevilled by the Kashmir issue.