Conflicting Emotions Erupt After India’s Nuclear Tests

NEW YORK — Ahmad Farooq fired off an e-mail to the prime minister of Pakistan. His message was simple: Blow up a nuclear bomb.

“The Indians think they are on top of us,” he said, cocking his head toward the door of his restaurant to the street outside. “That’s why I say Pakistan should do its own test, to say, ‘We are equal.’ ”

Farooq buys his spices from the Indian store down the street, where Kumar Sinha on Monday was poring over newspaper articles dissecting India’s decision to detonate a nuclear device and intimidate archrival Pakistan.

“I was very proud,” Sinha said, as the sweet smoke of sandalwood incense curled among the Hindu icons that lined a shelf of his shop. “India has no choice. Take the gun in the hand or die.”

Both men work in a section of Manhattan’s lower Lexington Avenue called Little India, a three-block stretch that is a curry of different cultures from throughout South Asia. It provides an example of the emotions that have come into play as two nations play a dangerous game of nuclear politics while Washington tries fitfully to referee.

India’s defiant decision last week to test three nuclear devices has brought a rare moment of attention and a measure of unity--not to mention a jolt of adrenaline--to a highly assimilated and largely low-profile ethnic group that is generally better paid, better educated and more apt to fill a professional job than most other groups in the United States.

Many Indians woke up last week to find themselves almost giddy with pride over the nuclear explosions that have suddenly transformed a perception of India as an overcrowded Third World land into a global player with a killer trump card.

“I think there is a real resurgence of national pride,” said Sonya Mehta, a psychologist and former Bryn Mawr College associate dean who now heads a rural development foundation in India. “There has been a lot of contacting of other people on the phone, on the ‘Net, everyone saying ‘What do you think? What do you really think?’ ”

Emotional Times for Indian Americans

Indian leaders here already are beginning efforts to lobby U.S. lawmakers to see India’s point of view, which is that its nuclear strength is an important counterweight to Chinese hegemony in the region.

“I’ve been here for 31 years, and I have not seen this kind of unity,” said Dr. Mukund Mody, a Staten Island pediatrician and head of Overseas Friends of the Bharatiya Janata Party, which wields influence with the Hindu nationalist group in power in India.

Yet others are deeply worried about the suddenly chilly relations between the reigning superpower and the one that wants to be one. And others point out that blowing off nuclear bombs is a bad way to get attention and command respect.

“I was frightened,” said Ravi Batra, a lawyer with an office in Little India and a former member of a State Department advisory council on India. “I can appreciate the thrill and the increase in psychic capital. But I was frightened because this encourages other countries to come out of the nuclear closet.”

Pakistan already has threatened to set off its own nuclear device.

Batra, who was born in India, said many ethnic Indians in this country have had a close-up view of a foreign policy that favors the interests of neighboring China over India, even though India has been a democracy and China remains an authoritarian nation with a woeful human-rights record and a practice of peddling nuclear expertise to Pakistan.

Echoing a widespread belief of other Indian Americans, he said he would not be surprised if Washington itself had tacitly allowed India to announce itself as a nuclear power, and then feigned surprise and disgust, so it could corral China without offending it.

South Asians in general are a relatively recent addition to the country’s immigrant pastiche, and one of the most successful. There are about 1 million ethnic Indians in this country (roughly 10 times the number of Pakistanis), with the largest concentrations in metropolitan New York, Chicago, Los Angeles and Washington.

According to American Demographics magazine, nearly a third of them are professionals--most of those doctors, engineers or college teachers. They own more than half the budget hotels in the U.S. and many of the convenience stores. A second wave of less-affluent immigrants from South Asia fill the service sectors, including 40% of the cabbie jobs in New York City, the magazine said.

A Community Thrives in Artesia

More than 200,000 Indians live in Southern California, one in four of them within a 10-mile radius of Artesia in Los Angeles County. As in Little India on the East Coast, Indians along Artesia’s Pioneer Boulevard could not suppress their glee over India’s nuclear might.

“Now they have something to show the whole world they’re one of the world powers,” said Bobby Sohal, the 25-year-old manager of his family’s Bombay Sweets and Snacks shop. “They feel safe from the threats from Pakistan and China.”

Real estate broker Dixit Patel, 32, of Manhattan Beach, said the sanctions imposed by President Clinton will not hurt India, which he intimated is more important to the United States than the United States is to India.

“Where is the U.S. going to find a billion people with the largest middle-class group to buy American and world products?” Patel asked. “Yes, there is pride. We don’t want to be known as a country that anybody can tell what to do. We want to show we’re somebody to contend with. Don’t just sell us your products and forget about us.”

Artesia’s India Post, a weekly newspaper, stopped the presses last week to squeeze in news of the nuclear testing, said Kusum Mahajan, assistant administrative manager. Like many others, she scoffed at Clinton’s sanctions, which are dwarfed by the income of Indian expatriates that, according to some analysts, nearly matches India’s entire gross domestic product.

“I don’t think anyone is really worried about sanctions,” Mahajan said. “We’re getting letters from people saying things like if the half-million Indian families in the U.S. gave just 1% of their income, they could collect $500 million in one day to support India.”

Jubilation and Some Trepidation

Those most likely to be jubilant over last week’s nuclear tests are the first-generation immigrants, particularly the older ones who remember the wars with China and Pakistan and a U.S. foreign policy they felt went awry when Nixon visited China, Mehta said.

That would include people such as Kumar Sinha, who runs Foods of India on Manhattan’s Lexington Avenue, and who carefully underlined some contentions of an American newspaper columnist who blamed U.S. technology transfers to China for India’s decision to assert itself atomically.

“It’s for my son,” said Sinha, 54. “Every night I have a fight with him. He’s for the U.S. I’m for India.”

Yet even people who oppose the nuclear tests felt a perceptible twinge when word leaked out that India was going overtly nuclear.

Muhammed Mujeed has one leg each in two countries drifting dangerously apart. He processes and packages herbal remedies in India, sells them in the United States and runs the whole eight-figure operation from headquarters in Piscataway, N.J.

Rationality tells him that India’s decision to trigger an arms race was a mistake, that the money spent on such a race would be better off going to the vast underclass in the country. Yet there was something about it that gave him a guilty pleasure. “There is a sense of pride among all Indians.”

Times staff writer Bob Pool in Los Angeles and researcher John Beckham in Chicago contributed to this story.