Whatever the feeling, however, the one billion people of India are clearly unanimous that such a decision has to be made by a government in the light of its own perceived security interests. Equally, some of us would agree that other governments are entitled to react– however hypocritically – in the manner they feel appropriate.

So, one has to accept that India proceeds to test its little devices and the West imposes its sanctions. Some in our country expected to have their cake and eat it. They were disappointed.

Here, however, we have an opportunity, largely unnoticed, to reorient our concepts of national security and economic development. It would be a great loss to the nation if we miss it.

National security comes from economic security, not from the amassing of arms and armies. The disintegration of the heavily armed but economically stunted Soviet Union demonstrates this quite clearly. Large armies and huge nuclear arsenals are not enough to hold a country together in the face of attacks from outside or from within.

More to the point, economic security means the economic well-being of all, not of only a few. The strength of today’s disarmed Japan and Germany testify to this just as clearly. Well-off communities backed by small, efficient armed forces and, perhaps, the capacity to assemble the weapons needed for self-defence, has successfully kept outside predators and disintegrating forces at bay.

For India, this means that 500,000 wealthy villages would be the most powerful deterrent to invading armies, backed of course by some soldiers and a few modern weapons – the exact opposite of what we have today.

This, in turn, means that the nation’s investments have to be redirected to the building up of our communities, away from today’s focus on nurturing the urban areas and industries of interest only to the rich – a focus intensified by the patterns of trade and aid that exist today.

That is why the so-called sanctions should be welcomed by all those who wish to see India adopt a genuine, more sustainable development and thus achieve its fullest level of national security. By definition, the sanctions are meant to stop flows of money to India that will hurt the class of people who make economic and security related decisions – the rich and the powerful. They are not designed to touch the poor or the marginalised. And, unlike in the case of Iraq or Libya, this is largely true.

Compared with our overall domestic economy, external trade and foreign aid are pretty small change. They amount to much less than the leaks within the national economy that should be plugged and could easily pay for all that we might be deprived of by the sanctions. On the other hand, external funding – even in its normal, minute quantities – has a huge impact on the pattern of our development. This leveraging greatly distorts the priorities of our nation and the investments we make with our own money.

The sanctions are seen by many as a loss to the economy. This may be so, but in absolute terms it is dwarfed by other losses our economy regularly accepts without a thought. Leakages associated with inefficient tax collection, corruption and black money exceed any sanction-related loss by several orders of magnitude. And so do the losses of our inefficient governmental and public sector systems.

Removal of the unneeded, counter-productive and environmentally perverse subsidies in the national economy alone could pay many times over for the income lost as a result of the sanctions. So could unproductive expenditures on various ill-conceived public "schemes" thrown as bones to keep the dogs of poverty and marginalisation at bay.