India started dithering on the Iran gas pipeline. The link between "strategic partnership" with the US and ditching Iran, India's long-standing friend, became clear. On September 24, India broke ranks with the Non-Aligned Movement at the International Atomic Energy Agency and voted with the US for reporting Iran to the UN Security Council for minor breaches of IAEA rules.

The vote signified a turning point -- away from independence in foreign policy-making. India had decided on the vote even before Dr Singh left for New York two weeks earlier.

Now, Foreign Secretary Shyam Saran has announced a further shift in India's nuclear posture. In a lecture on October 24, just two days after the India visit of US under-secretary of state Nicholas Burns, he outlined India's new nuclear doctrine.

After 60 years, India has unceremoniously buried the disarmament ghost and decided to become a "responsible" nuclear weapons-state (NWS) which will prevent other countries from acquiring nuclear weapons, while keeping and expanding its own atomic arsenal. That's what the one-sided non-proliferation agenda is all about.

This bias is duly reflected in Mr Saran's speech. The word "disarmament" occurs just once in it -- in a de-contextualised reference to the 1988 Rajiv Gandhi plan for global nuclear abolition, presented to the United Nations. "Global nuclear disarmament" doesn't figure at all. But "non-proliferation" occurs as many as 25 times!

This is a shameful break with India's long-standing policy and the solemn pledge made by the United Progressive Alliance only last year to take "leadership" in fighting for a nuclear weapons-free world.

Yet, Mr Saran claims "continuity and consistency" in India's approach. To do this, he falsifies India's record on nuclear disarmament. Thus, he says, India "can truly claim to be among the founding fathers" of non-proliferation. He invokes Nehru as non-proliferation's apostle.

Nothing could be further from the truth. Nehru campaigned for disarmament, not non-proliferation.

There's a clear difference between the two terms. Non-proliferation is about preventing the spread of nuclear weapons, both horizontally (to countries other than the NWSs), and vertically (expansion and refinement of existing arsenals). Disarmament is about getting rid of all nuclear bombs from all countries.

Non-proliferation accepts the legitimacy of weapons of mass annihilation. Disarmament regards them as an unmitigated evil, which must be abolished everywhere.

Disarmament's premise is that nuclear weapons don't generate security and cannot defend national sovereignty. They are the ultimate instruments of terror. Nuclear weapons aren't even a sign of strength. Their possession doesn't ensure strategic superiority or military victory. Or else, the US wouldn't have lost in Vietnam and the USSR in Afghanistan.

There is of course a link between nuclear weapons elimination and their step-by-step reduction. It's in that spirit that Nehru proposed a Comprehensive Test Ban in 1954, while renouncing nuclear weapons for India. India continued to link nuclear restraint and non-proliferation to disarmament even after the 1974 blast.

Now, that link has snapped. This is a betrayal of the Nehruvian legacy.

Only a decade ago, India pleaded before the International Court of Justice that nuclear weapons are incompatible with international law. India's Foreign Secretary said: "We don't believe that the acquisition of nuclear weapons is essential for national security... We are also convinced that the existence of nuclear weapons diminishes international security."

The Court, the world's highest authority on international law, ruled in 1996 that nuclear weapons are generally illegal.

Two years later, India exploded five bombs and joined the very global order which it had condemned as "Atomic Apartheid." There was no security rationale for this. The Vajpayee government didn't conduct the promised strategic defence review. It merely fulfilled the obsession of one particular political current.

The decision was hidden from the Cabinet, but not the RSS. The sangh mandated it.

Soon, India teased and taunted Pakistan into crossing the nuclear threshold. A year later, the two fought history's most serious conventional conflict between any two NWSs. Today, millions of their citizens have become vulnerable to nuclear missile attacks.

Since 1998, India's military spending has more than doubled. India is getting sucked into two arms races, a minor one with Pakistan, and a major one with China. India's room for independent global manoeuvre has shrunk since Pokharan-II.

Now, India is compounding its 1998 blunder. It has put such high stakes on the US nuclear deal that it can be blackmailed into making all kinds of compromises to save it --pressures on energy policy, trade negotiations on agriculture and services, patents, and on Iran.

Mr Saran has already prepared the ground for the next Iran vote by saying India won't accept "pursuit of clandestine activities in respect to WMD-related technologies." This sounds tough, but reflects US pressures.

By jumping on the non-proliferation bandwagon, India will become the world's laughing stock. It has hypocritically moved from being a force for peace to a force for hegemony. India's capitulation to the US even while it pays lip-service to a multi-polar world will earn it ridicule.

India's nuclear posturing lacks credibility given its miserable rank of 127 in the UN Human Development Index -- among the bottom one-fourth of the world's nations.

India earned the world's respect when it was poorer -- because of its democracy, its moral clarity, its secularism, and its effort at making the world a better place. The new turn will rob India of all this and earn it the world's disdain, even contempt.

Many countries fear mighty states and bullies which sever raw power from moral purpose. But nobody respects them. India is joining the league of the unrespected.

Praful Bidwai is an eminent Indian columnist.