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This has been the basis of India's consistent campaign for nuclear disarmament in the past five decades. No other country in the world has exercised the kind of restraint that India demonstrated for nearly a quarter of a century after the first Pokhran test of 1974, despite the fact that India has faced a situation, unparalleled in the world, with two nuclear powers in its immediate and troubled neighbourhood.

The 1990s, however, brought about a qualitative deterioration in India's security environment. This resulted, in the first instance, from the complicity of the "permanent five" guardians of the nuclear nonproliferation regime in the spread of nuclear know-how in India's neighbourhood, which they ignored or overlooked.

Indeed, as seen from India, nuclear technologies began to serve as commodities of strategic, political and economic commerce. For India, nonproliferation efforts began to appear curiously selective.

The deterioration was also a result of new strategic alignments. After the end of the Cold War, a new nuclear club came into existence, stretching from Vancouver to Vladivostok. Spreading across the globe, from the eastern rim of Asia back across continents to the Pacific Northwest, this new security structure left a gap - a vacuum - in South Asia.

Because it is exclusive, selective and inadequate, this protective umbrella, from a South Asian point of view, is also inherently discriminatory. Large parts of the world today enjoy the benefit of the extended deterrence of the nuclear weapon powers. But India does not.

Since this large majority does not share either India's history or its security concerns, closing the gap has not been a priority for it. Again, not so for India.

That is why, in the flood of commentary on our decision to test nuclear weapons, there have been so many ill-informed assessments of India's security predicament. Paradigms of security relevant to others are transposed to us. The people of India, one-sixth of humanity, are seen merely as objects of the security perceptions of others. We are assigned a particular place in the world order and not treated as subjects responding to our own interests.

While the present nuclear powers justify nuclear weapons even against perceived threats from non-nuclear states, a regime of international nuclear apartheid becomes operational whenever India claims a place in the sun.

India's decision to conduct nuclear tests was a step taken in our national interest. By exercising this option, India only brought the existing nuclear reality, hitherto ignored, into the open. It sought to move toward, and has gained, some strategic autonomy. That is India's due. 

Thus, in the absence of any viable alternative, India, through a limited series of tests, has only reasserted that either the international nuclear security paradigm be reviewed or that it be made inclusive. India cannot accept a semicolonial and inferior status as a nation whose security prescriptions are determined for it by others.

We appeal to the international community - particularly to the nuclear weapon powers and all countries that derive their security through nuclear-deterrent protection extended to them - to join us in re-examining the present international security regime. We must find ways and means of moving toward global nuclear disarmament, step by step.

In the wake of India and Pakistan's tests, there have been many calls by the international community for restraint in further development of the nuclear option. India has made several assurances and offers displaying precisely such restraint.

We have stated clearly that we will not be the first to use nuclear weapons. We have announced a moratorium on further testing, and conveyed our willingness to convert that moratorium into a de jure obligation. We are ready to engage in meaningful discussions on a fissile material cut off treaty in the Conference on Disarmament. And we have already announced our accession to the Chemical Weapons Convention.

We have also announced strict adherence to, and a stringent tightening of, export control measures on nuclear, missile, chemical - and biological - weapons-related technologies. 

But the present model of nuclear non-proliferation based only on differential standards of security is not viable. What is required is a balance of rights and obligations in the entire field of disarmament and non-proliferation.

The way ahead is through the evolution of a universal security paradigm for the entire globe. In the nuclear realm, as in all others, humanity is indivisible.

This comment was distributed by the Los Angeles Times Syndicate.