India's most recent example of missile-rattling has produced a predictable response from Pakistan, which promises to send a comparable missile aloft, and at home, from Indians hailing their country's technological prowess. In reality, says PNS commentator Andrew Robinson, this is no demonstration of expertise but a desperate move by a threatened political party. Robinson, a freelance writer, worked as a consultant on Internet-related issues in Bangladesh and India for three years.

It is no coincidence. Only a few days after he learned that his government was on the verge of dissolution, India's Prime Minister A.B. Vajpayee ordered the test of a nuclear-capable missile.

Just as it was no coincidence that last May, when he ordered underground nuclear tests hardly six weeks after assuming power.

The rapid escalation of India's nuclear weapons program never had anything to do with "making India strong and self-confident in development and defense," as Vajpayee, and many others, claimed. Nor was it, as many apologists have argued, meant to allow India to enter negotiations over nuclear non-proliferation on equal terms.

Rather, India's newfound ability to obliterate entire cities in a matter of minutes has its origins in something much more banal, and much more dangerous: Politics or more specifically, the efforts of a Hindu fundamentalist party, the BJP, to maintain power at all costs.

The BJP governs as part of a coalition of parties. In early April, two members of the BJP's biggest coalition partners resigned, effectively terminating the BJP's majority. The current government is not expected to survive and elections are imminent.

The BJP first established a government in 1996. It lasted a total of 12 days. When they took power again two years later, they formed an equally unstable coalition and were still shuffling cabinet ministers when the Prime Minister ordered underground nuclear tests.

Suddenly the world's media focused on a previously unrecognized India -- an India of technological advancement, rocket science and middle-class computer hackers. In other words, an India which Indian voters, especially Hindu voters, could be proud of. And one which even opposition politicos couldn't possibly rally against.

"At last," wrote one American-based Indian writer at the time, "India has attracted world attention as a technological giant."

Eleven months later, with the BJP on the verge of collapse, the missile test and its effects are like a spell of deja vu. Like last May's underground tests, the missile firing evoked a positive response from all major political parties hailing the development as testimony to India's technological competence and proclaiming the scientists behind it national heroes. The BJP, predictably, described the test as "another feather in the cap of the Vajpayee government."

But those feathers -- like most political plumage -- are absolutely useless for anything but vainglorious celebration.

And no matter how magnificent the technological cap may appear, it is, in truth, cone shaped and hollow -- and falls off whenever the power goes out in Delhi, or a tube-well dries up, or a university student purchases a doctorate degree, or the telephone company finally installs a telephone for an applicant who has been dead for three years. In India, that's all the time.

After fifty years of independence, says the Nobel Prize winning economist, Amartya Sen, "what has happened in respect of social inequality and backwardness is very nearly a disaster -- not in the sense of something going suddenly very bad but something remaining extremely bad without there being any change in it."

For all of India's ability to launch a nuclear warhead 2,500 kilometers, it cannot educate its people -- 48 percent remain illiterate. And 100 of the over 500 parliamentarians basking in the glory of the missile test are convicted criminals -- not just petty criminals, but extortionists, rapists, murderers.

It's not as if India hasn't made any technological progress. Its IRS-1D satellite system is one of the best in the world. Rather, the problem is that advances in weapon systems creates a false impression that India itself is advancing, that just because a government can evaporate massive numbers of people with the push of a button, its citizens should somehow feel proud of themselves.

But that is, of course, what politicians are best at -- stirring up pride in one's country, hatred toward an enemy.

Just such stirrings, after all, brought the BJP to power in the first place. Pride in Hindu "culture" -- or Hindutva. The enemy was not just Pakistan and Islamic culture, but all that came from America: Bay Watch babes on TV and the extra large bottles of soft drinks that began permeating Indian society in the early 1980s.

The BJP's political stroke of genius was making Hindutva nuclear, developing what many in India call the "Hindu Bomb." While the U.S. imposed economic sanctions, the BJP-led government celebrated a remarkable double-victory -- winning the bomb and greater isolation from American cultural influence.

But there are signs that not everyone is falling for the BJP's political militarism. As Sitaram Yechuri, a high-ranking member of one opposition party put it, "the tests have little to do with security concerns and more with the political concerns of the Vajpayee Government."

It's becoming clear that if Hindu Fundamentalist-led jingoism continues on its present course in India, the BJP's gloating slogan, "No one can threaten India now," may mean no one but themselves.