THERE was little mention of nuclear weapons during the 15th Lok Sabha election campaign in India. Pakistan is fighting what some term as an 'existential battle' without any discernible role of nuclear weapons.

President Asif Zardari was welcomed to the United States with a lecture by his US counterpart as to how Pakistan's fixation with India was a misplaced security concern. Other officials of the administration expressed their fears about Pakistani nukes falling into unpredictable hands.

Nuclear weapons were supposed to perform assorted wonders for India and Pakistan. Eleven years ago on May 11 the then Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP)-led government authorised the conduct of nuclear weapons tests near the desert town of Pokharan. Pakistan followed suit within weeks of the Indian tests by conducting half a dozen tests of its own in the Chagai region of Balochistan. How have nuclear weapons performed militarily, politically and culturally 11 years down the overt nuclear path? They have followed somewhat dissimilar trajectories in the two countries.

India and Pakistan have traditionally assigned different military roles to their nuclear weapons. For Pakistan the nuclear weapons are there to deter a conventionally superior India from fighting a conventional war. Pakistan has never ruled out the possibility of using nuclear weapons. That is why Asif Zardari, rather naively, had to eat his words when he suggested a few months back that Pakistan was interested in the no-first-use policy. Pakistan's nuclear weapons, as far as military logic is concerned, are solely India-centric.

In the minds of New Delhi's strategic pundits their nuclear weapons are not Pakistan-centric. Furthermore, nuclear weapons in the India-Pakistan strategic equation are only to deter a nuclear war between the two and are no guarantee against the outbreak of a conventional war between them.

In the last 11 years, India and Pakistan have had a number of military stand-offs under the nuclear shadow. Within a year of the 1998 tests there was Kargil. Then in December 2001 there was an attack on the Indian parliament that led to the amassing of armies across the India-Pakistan border for much of 2002. The Kargil crisis was diffused when Pakistan chose to accept the proxy surrender in Washington, DC.

Nuclear hawks in Pakistan are convinced that these military crises between India and Pakistan did not turn into a full-fledged war as Pakistan possessed nuclear weapons. Their counterparts in New Delhi do not see the causal link between nuclear weapons and the outcomes of the 1999 and 2002 military crises. Kargil for India was a limited conventional war that it won. The 2002 crisis was diffused because India managed to achieve its goals through coercive diplomacy and mounting international pressure against Pakistan.

In short there is no conclusive proof that the two countries consider nuclear weapons as guarantors against a conventional war, a necessary precondition for effective nuclear deterrence, between the two.

But nuclear weapons in the subcontinent are not only meant to serve in national arms panoplies. These are the weapons that have been and continue to be used as political and cultural ingredients of state-sponsored nationalism. It is in these areas that nuclear weapons have shone rather less brightly since the conduct of 1998 tests.

Fewer self-congratulatory pieces in newspapers regarding the May 1998 tests are one indication of declining enthusiasm for nuclear nationalism. That said, the custodians of nuclear nationalism in India can claim few feathers in their caps. The fate of A.P.J. Kalam and A.Q. Khan show the ironies that nuclear nationalism can breed. Kalam, a self-effacing scientist from southern India, was chosen by Hindu nationalist BJP as the president of India. By supporting a Muslim for the coveted post the BJP tried to alleviate its communal credentials and beef up its nuclear nationalism.

A.Q. Khan, on the contrary, was made to confess his crimes under the glare of the television camera by a president in military uniform. Dr Khan, in terms of public demeanour, had been the exact of opposite of Kalam. He had cultivated the image of an infallible national icon. His disgrace to some degree challenged the personality cult that went hand-in-hand with Pakistan's nuclear nationalism.

Beyond the diametrically opposite personal destinies of the two architects of the Indian and Pakistani nuclear programmes, India has been more successful in positioning itself as a responsible nuclear power. New Delhi used the nuclear tests as India's entry ticket into the club of global powers. That may have remained a pipe-dream but Jaswant Singh, India's minister of external affairs during the BJP-led government, was successful in convincing officials of the Clinton administration, especially Strobe Talbott, of India's good nuclear intentions. Diplomatic hard work paved the way for the India-US nuclear agreement signed years later by the Congress-led government of Dr Manmohan Singh and the Bush administration. However, in 2008 the Manmohan Singh government came close to collapse as the Indian Left withdrew its support over the issue of the India-US nuclear deal.

Pakistan in the intervening years has been implicated as one of the shady characters in the international nuclear bazaar. While India is courted by major nuclear powers as a partner and valuable customer, aspersions are cast on Pakistan's ability to safeguard its nuclear assets.

Nawaz Sharif, prime minister at the time of the 1998 nuclear explosions, claimed that the nuclear tests have made Pakistan's defence impregnable. He was mixing up defence with deterrence. Pakistan's defence is far from being impregnable in 2009. Nuclear weapons are simply not meant to counter such challenges.

Dominant discourses in India and Pakistan inflated the role nuclear weapons could play in augmenting national identities and meeting the challenges to these identities. Nuclear weapons have only limited utility in building the national identity, and subsequently ensuring national security, in these heterogeneous societies.

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