Subcontinental crisis

The abrupt change in the country's long-standing nuclear policy has created an impression across the world that, for the first time since Independence, India has a government that is not only overtly aggressive in its designs but also impulsive and unreliable in its international conduct.

AIJAZ AHMAD

THE predicable has happened. If the Pokhran explosions signalled a watershed in the history of modern India comparable to the Sino-Indian war and the declaration of the Emergency, the subsequent developments, including most dramatically the Chagai nuclear explosions in Pakistan, have brought our subcontinent, this beloved land of fraternal hatreds and common scars, to the worst crisis we have known since 1971.

In claiming that the Chagai explosions have only proved that India was always right in claiming that Pakistan is secretly building nuclear weapons, Prime Minister A. B. Vajpayee is being at best disingenuous. Everyone has known for a long time that both India and Pakistan had developed nuclear capacity. Having exploded a nuclear device in 1974, before Pakistan even assembled its own nuclear programme, India had established an early lead. It also has a much bigger, far more sophisticated science and technology establishment, so that superiority in the nuclear arena, if that is what the policy-makers wanted, was easy to maintain. The assumption, inside the country and abroad, was that such a capacity and manifest superiority could be responsibly managed here, thanks to the sturdy traditions of democratic governance in India, which presume that a national consensus shall be built before embarking on drastic shifts on such crucial areas of national policy as the matter of nuclearisation. The Pokhran explosions, coming so soon after the minority Government led by the BJP came to power, showed that this faith in the basic values of democratic governance could no longer be taken for granted in today's India.

Pakistan, by contrast, assembled its nuclear programme much later, with a very rudimentary science and technology establishment, a few capable scientists notwithstanding. It proceeded with stealth and subterfuge, making all kinds of shady deals across the world in order to obtain technologies and materials it could not quickly produce on its own. Pakistan also had no consistent tradition of democratic governance and the kind of restraints that such governance requires. The national security apparatuses, including notably the intelligence services, have had far greater power and freedom in making such policies even in the periods when Pakistan was not governed directly by the military. For all these reasons, Pakistan was feared to be far more capable of unilateral action in the nuclear arena and even deceitful conduct in international affairs.

The unilateral action in Pokhran, combined with the kind of jingoistic flourishes which emanated from the Government thereafter, proved that these assumptions were wrong. Those explosions were carried out by a minority Government, which is said to have misled foreign diplomats and in any case took no one into confidence within the nation except for a very small group of people around the Prime Minister. In Pakistan, by contrast, Nawaz Sharif commands more than two-thirds majority in Parliament, and having been given the gift of bellicosity from the BJP Government, ordered the retaliatory explosions at Chagai with the full knowledge of everyone inside his country and outside.

AIJAZ RAHI / AP
Indian security personnel patrol the border with Pakistan in Pura, 30 km from Jammu, on May 22.

It was obvious, in short, that if either side took a unilateral decision to undertake weapons-oriented explosions, the other side would respond. By acting first, India gave Pakistan the opportunity to portray itself as the injured party. Indeed, in a single stroke, the BJP Government has succeeded in helping Pakistan achieve two of its strategic objectives which it had not been able to achieve through its own efforts over two decades or more. It has been given the opportunity to present its own nuclear explosion as merely a defensive response to India's unilateral decision. India, it claims, seeks "superiority" and "hegemony" whereas Pakistan seeks only "balance" and "parity".

Moreover, Pakistan has always sought, and sought all the more vigorously over the past decade, to "internationalise" the Kashmir issue, whereas India has always argued that it is strictly an internal matter which, purely for the sake of regional peace, we may be willing to discuss bilaterally and within limits with Pakistan. The BJP Government's claim after Pokhran that India's newfound nuclear capacity has altered the balance of force in Kashmir, combined then with Pakistan's swift response, has created an opinion abroad, voiced most clearly by U.S. Secretary of State Madeleine Albright's department, that the "Big Powers" should directly undertake to solve the Kashmir problem as the new threat to world peace, perhaps in Geneva.

If the public pronouncements of the Defence Minister and Vajpayee's letter of explanation to U.S. President Bill Clinton ruined the process of normalisation with China that successive Indian governments and diplomats had secured over a decade or more, the post-Pokhran belligerency of other Cabinet Ministers, notably that of Home Minister L. K. Advani and Parliamentary Affairs Minister Madan Lal Khurana, has helped Pakistan in the pursuit of its main strategic aims. These strategic aims have both short-term and long-term aspects, and even as India launches upon a new arms race in the subcontinent, with fresh and perhaps uncontrollable escalations in Kashmir, it is best to take stock of where it has arrived and the roads it has taken to arrive here.

THE long-term dynamic of Pakistan's strategic thinking is traceable to its defeat at India's hands in Bangladesh and the kind of settlement that ensued from that defeat. Neither its settled policies in Punjab and Kashmir, nor its role in Afghanistan, nor its nuclear programme can be fully grasped outside that context. Meanwhile, neither India's ability to roll back Pakistani infiltration in Punjab, nor the relative success in containing the insurgency in Kashmir, nor the lead in nuclear technology should make it complacent about the real dangers of escalation at this juncture.

For example, Pakistan has at its command tens of thousands of the world's most seasoned guerillas who have gained combat experience in Afghanistan and successfully fought against the Soviet armies. The BJP leaders are simply wrong in claiming that the Pokhran explosions have shifted the balance of power in Kashmir. Possession of nuclear arms makes no difference to hit-and-run-small arms combat, as the Americans in Vietnam and the Soviets in Afghanistan found out.

On the other hand, when Nawaz Sharif warns India's Home Minister against any "misadventure" in Kashmir, he means that he is simply waiting for the actual personnel of the Indian armed forces to cross into Pakistan-occupied Kashmir (PoK) so that he may openly send those guerillas into our side of Kashmir. That is what will bring Madeleine Albright flying into Delhi and then taking the Kashmir issue back with her to Washington, New York, Geneva or wherever. If India does not wish to "internationalise" the Kashmir issue, it has to be very cautious on the ground. And, in that, there is no alternative to the patient work of containing infiltration from Pakistan within the bounds of low-intensity warfare and gaining the time to implement a policy in which all the people of Jammu and Kashmir, Hindus as well as Muslims, can see justice.

Settling the Hindu refugees back in their original homes and giving them the wherewithal to rebuild their lives in dignity and safety must be very much a part of that patient work. But so must be not merely safeguarding but actually fortifying Article 370 so as to reassure the Muslim segment of the Kashmiri population that the rest of India looks at them as a precious part of this polity. Similarly, the youth of Kashmir has to be given secure and enriching livelihood. In the best of times, India has treated Kashmir simply as a tourist playground, destroying much of its natural resources, turning the Dal Lake into a silted cesspool, and tying up the livelihood of Kashmiris largely to this trade. The Government has to clean up and rebuild a whole economy. Short of that, Kashmir shall remain unwinnable, nuclear toys notwithstanding.

In the larger process, India has to understand what Pakistan takes to be its own compulsions, regardless of how India views them. At the end of the Bangladesh war the Pakistani establishment was traumatised but there was also a liberal, progressive opinion that saw the justice of the Bangladeshi struggle. Pakistan had been cut to half its size, while India was not only the much larger power but had also emerged victorious. India should have been generous in victory, as the more sagacious advisers of Indira Gandhi tried to argue with her. That was the time to settle the Kashmir issue in a way that safeguarded all the Indian interests but also gave some sense of dignity to the Pakistani side, as Zulfikar Ali Bhutto kept asking. India did not have the requisite foresight and grace.

For better or worse, and I believe very much for the worse, it was then, after the defeat by the Indian forces in Bangladesh, that Pakistan decided that its own territorial safety required a forward defence, which then meant that it should define its defence parameters inside the territory of its neighbours. The infiltration in Punjab and Kashmir came out of that calculation, as did the initial involvement in Afghanistan when a government took power there that was expected to push the Pukhtoonistan issue. Then came the first Pokhran explosion in 1974, and Pakistan immediately launched on a reckless drive to obtain matching technologies, through means fair or foul - mostly foul.

These are ugly facts, but we need to take stock of all that if a disaster is now to be averted. Successive Pakistani governments have wanted to carry out an explosion of their own but had never been able to find for such an act of international belligerency an excuse that the world beyond South Asia could find persuasive. The BJP Government has provided Pakistan with such an excuse, in two instalments.

First came the Pokhran explosions. Even the former Prime Minister, I. K. Gujral, who owes his current seat in the Lok Sabha to one of the allies of the BJP, has said in Parliament, though rather belatedly, that at the time when he handed over the nation's premiership to Vajpayee roughly two months ago, the Government of India had perceived neither a nuclear threat to the country nor any other strategic reason for carrying out nuclear tests. There is no evidence that any new threat had materialised in the next few weeks.

ANY unilateral decision on the part of India to go nuclear was already a gift to the Pakistani hawks who have always wanted to carry out their own explosions. But the manner in which a minority Government dramatically changed what the nation and the world had understood to be India's long-standing nuclear policy, combined especially with the unbridled rhetoric that followed Pokhran, created the impression, very widely shared across the world by now, that India was governed, for the first time since Independence, by a government that was not only overtly aggressive in its designs but also impulsive and unreliable in its international conduct. What were the main tenors of the rhetoric?

There was, first of all, the scientistic inflation. Not just the Government but the whole breadth of the media as well as the loyal Opposition, were euphoric about the "state-of-the-art" technology that the Indian scientists had achieved in their pursuit of weapons of mass destruction. Nothing Pakistan could now do would be good enough, because we were now the new yankees.

Second, the Prime Minister's letter to Clinton focussed on China, retrospectively legitimising the provocations that the Defence Minister had been hurling. This was curious. The Prime Minister did not feel constrained to address the international community, nor the progressive and peace-loving peoples of the world, nor nations of the Third World that had looked upon India as a force of peace in the world, as a leader in the movement for destruction of nuclear weapons, as the home of Mahatma Gandhi's moral authority, as the nation-state whose formative years had been linked, in Nehru's era, to the making of a non-aligned world and the promulgation of the Five Principles of Peaceful Co-Existence. No, none was worthy of an explanation, except the President of a country that has, according to India Today (June 1, 1998; page 57), 1,400 nuclear weapons aimed at China, as against the 14Chinese weapons, all of which are deployed for defence against the U.S.

Then came the Prime Minister's press statement that India had now become a "nuclear weapon state." The unmistakable implication was that the Pokhran explosions were no mere "tests" in pursuit of a future weaponisation capability but a "state-of-the-art" demonstration that India already had such weapons. How many? When did these weapons come into being? Who authorised them? What are the delivery systems? Where are the command and control systems? Who will push the button, after what process of deliberation, with what system of checks? We do not know.

REUTERS
Pakistan's Chief of the Army Staff, Gen. Jehangir Karamat, in the trenches on an inspection tour of Pakistan-occupied Kashmir on May 26. The BJP Government's claim that Pokhran-II has altered the balance of force in Kashmir, combined with Pakistan's swift response, may have the effect of "internationalising" the Kashmir problem.

Then came a volley of statements from the Home Minister, the Parliamentary Affairs Minister, the highest officials of the ruling party, to the effect that the changed nuclear situation had shifted the balance in Kashmir decisively, that India was now ready for 'hot pursuit' of the infiltrators coming from Pakistan, that India shall now pursue a policy to 'vacate' Pakistani aggression in PoK. When the Prime Minister tried to distance himself from Khurana's more extreme provocation, K.L. Sharma, a vice-president of the BJP, reiterated the position in a lengthy statement and the Department of Jammu and Kashmir Affairs was shifted from the Prime Minister himself to the Home Minister, whose own statement had got the whole rhetoric on Kashmir going.

These rhetorical inflations have had sizeable consequences. Inside Pakistan, Nawaz Sharif was already in a position of extraordinary strength and if the Pokhran explosions handed to him a national consensus in Pakistan for an immediate nuclear response, the threats from the BJP that the Indian armed forces may cross the Line of Control in Kashmir to get Pakistan to 'vacate' PoK have given him the opportunity to declare a state of emergency and thereby throttle what little opposition progressive Pakistanis might have been able to mount there.

Second, China was irritated by the flourishes of Fernandes, stunned by the explosions and then irrevocably dismayed by Vajpayee's letter to Clinton. For the first time in decades, the Chinese Government has used the sharpest language and the Chinese media have dredged up all the claims of 1962. An Asian cold war is already on.

Third, Western perceptions of India's designs have changed and so has the prospect of sanctions, direct and indirect. In the immediate aftermath of the explosions, most Western powers had remained subdued, the World Bank had indicated that its grants and commitments shall remain unaffected, Japan had announced sanctions but had twice de-escalated them, the United States itself was in the grip of a debate about how to impose as well as undermine the sanctions that were required by law but were seen as detrimental to American businesses. And so long as the focus had been on China, India's changed foreign policy was inherently attractive for the Americans.

Then came the inept retaliation against Australia and, more alarmingly, the war noises on the issue of Kashmir. Suddenly, the perception arose that the BJP was not only useful in the cold war against China but also impulsive in dealing with international opposition from friendly countries such as Australia, and that it was posing a threat not only to U.S. interests in South Asia as a whole, including Pakistan, but also to peace and stability in the region.

It is very much a welcome sign that the Opposition has finally woken up to the fact that nuclearisation and the consequent jingoism can only bring disasters for the country. It is most unfortunate that the BJP's allies in government have not even begun that process. But the need of the hour is for all the patriotic forces to demand unitedly the resignation of this Government before it launches some other spectacle for whipping up hysteria in its own favour. Chances are that as the policy of nuclearisation begins to backfire, the Parivar may well decide to try and win popularity by suddenly starting to build the mandir. On this count too, the greatest vigilance is necessary.

Aijaz Ahmad is Senior Fellow, Centre for Contemporary Studies, Nehru Memorial Museum and Library, New Delhi.

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