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Features| Sunday, Aug. 9, 2009 Many in India hail its nukes
Pankaj Mishra is an Indian writer and frequent contributor to
the New York Review of Books. His most recent books are "An End
to Suffering: The Buddha in the World" (2004) and "Temptations
of the West: How to be Modern in India, Pakistan and Beyond"
(2006). In India, have lessons been learned from the atomic
bombings of Japan in 1945? I wish I could say yes, but that is
not the case. Let's go back to the 1945 war-crimes tribunal in
Tokyo (the International Military Tribunal for the Far East,
1946-48). There, (Indian) Justice Radhabinod Pal, who was once
well known in India but is now all but forgotten, argued that
the Allied powers were also guilty of war crimes, citing the
atomic bombings. This alienated his fellow judges at the
tribunal, but as a result he became famous and respected in
Japan. In the late 1940s, Indian opinion severely judged the
atomic bombings, but since then public opinio