Sanctions and strategies

The "selective and discriminatory" approach adopted by the U.S. in waiving partially sanctions against India and Pakistan has come as a disappointment for BJP strategists, who had expected the sanctions to bite Pakistan more than they would bite India.

SUKUMAR MURALIDHARAN
in New Delhi

IN waiving some of the sanctions imposed against India and Pakistan after their nuclear tests in May, President Bill Clinton drew sustenance from the "substantial progress" that had been made towards defusing the explosive situation in the subcontinent. Both countries had declared moratoriums on nuclear testing and begun engaging each other in bilateral negotiations on a number of contentious issues. These, in the estimation of the United States Government, indicated a possible reconciliation between the long-estranged neighbours and the restoration of strategic stability in the South Asian region.

Within India, the lifting of some of the sanctions came in for a variety of interpretations, typically in accordance with the character of the audience. On the political trail in Bihar, Prime Minister Atal Behari Vajpayee claimed vindication for India's stand on the global nuclear bargain and exulted in what he perceived as the isolation of those who had sought to isolate the country. On a more downbeat note, he later criticised the U.S. for having discriminated between India and Pakistan in the scope of the sanctions waiver. At the same time, the Ministry of External Affairs criticised the U.S. for playing favourites and deprecated its "selective and discriminatory" approach.

Although some sanctions against the nuclear adversaries in the subcontinent have thus been lifted, Pakistan is, on current reckoning, the greater beneficiary of the step. The U.S. has made clear its intention to support Pakistan's case for emergency financial sustenance from the International Monetary Fund (IMF), although it will continue to oppose World Bank lending to India. The scope of the waiver for India would be confined to a limited range of bilateral credits from U.S. financial institutions.

At the Pokhran-II site on May 11. For all its efforts since the nuclear tests, the BJP-led Government has not yet been able to find a way out of a tangle of its own making.

Within the scope of partial relaxation, eligibility to engage in trade with the U.S. would by no means be unrestricted. The U.S. Department of Commerce has drawn up a list identifying a number of agencies in both the government and private sector, which have direct or indirect links with nuclear research, missile technology development or other military applications. Any U.S. company seeking to trade with these entities, of which 40 have been identified as "parents" and around 200 as "sub-entities" in India, would have to obtain prior governmental clearance. And officials from the U.S. administration have already made it clear that such sanction would be declined except in the rarest of cases.

India reacted with a sense of dismay. An official statement of the Ministry of External Affairs deplored the persistence of an attitude of "coercion" which was entirely "misplaced" and would prove "counter-productive". Associations of private industry joined the chorus of deprecation. The Confederation of Indian Industry described the U.S. decision as "uncalled for, untimely and harmful to Indo-U.S. business". The Federation of Indian Chambers of Commerce and Industry said that the decision came as a setback to anticipation that normal trade relations would be resumed following the partial lifting of sanctions by the U.S. President.

Evidently, India's effort to bring the issue of export restrictions to the bargaining table has produced quite the contrary result. Far from waiving or relaxing its stringent regime of technology denial, the U.S. has only extended its scope. All the subordinate research institutions of the Department of Atomic Energy and the Defence Research and Development Organisation have been blacklisted by the U.S. Department of Commerce. This perhaps was of a piece with earlier initiatives in the domain of technology denial to what the U.S. thinks are recalcitrant states. The sting in the latest notification by the U.S. administration lies in the extension of the ban on all transactions to the civilian research and educational sectors.

The Centre for Deve-lopment of Advanced Com-puting in Pune, an autonomous institute funded by the Department of Electronics, now faces the prospect of losing all trade access to the U.S., for the simple reason that it has been engaged in developing parallel processing techniques of computing that could in a remote contingency be applied in weapons development. Also suffering a similar fate are the Departments of Aerospace Engineering in three of India's premier institutions of scientific research - the Indian Institute of Science, Bangalore, and the Indian Institutes of Technology in Mumbai and Chennai. Similar restrictions have also been applied on the Departments of Physics in some of these institutions, and public sector enterprises such as the Bharat Heavy Electricals Ltd (BHEL) and Hindustan Aeronautics Ltd (HAL). Private enterprises such as Larsen & Toubro (L&T) and the Southern Petrochemicals Industries Corporation (SPIC), have also attracted the attention of the U.S. Commerce Department, for reasons that are yet to be clearly understood.

Pakistan too will suffer a similar selective ban on trade transactions with the U.S., though the number of entities listed there is only around 100. This perhaps is less on account of American bias, than of the fact that Pakistan's industrial and research infrastructure is of relatively modest dimensions in comparison to India's. The argument that the U.S. is practising a rather gross form of favouritism in its selective attitude towards multilateral lending however, needs closer attention.

India currently has no need for IMF sustenance, though World Bank lending for specific projects continues to be important. In more enlightened quarters within India, the U.S. action has been read as completely unexceptionable. Since the time it conducted nuclear tests, Pakistan has come perilously close to financial insolvency. A nuclear-armed state in the neighbourhood in imminent danger of economic collapse is clearly not in India's interests. But for Bharatiya Janata Party strategists, who had initially revelled in their anticipation that U.S. sanctions, if uniformly enforced, would damage Pakistan far more than India, the new selectivity is most unwelcome.

Yet when Indian policymakers began formulating their response to the U.S. action, anxiety ran high about its symbolic impact. One of India's major concerns since Pokhran-II has been to persuade the U.S. that strategic engagement with Pakistan is devoid of any long-term rewards. Quite to the contrary, as a nursery for international Islamic militancy, Pakistan would only repay American patronage by indirectly striking at U.S. interests elsewhere in the world. The piquancy of the situation in Afghanistan, where a Pakistan-sponsored militia is sheltering an Islamic militant believed to be responsible for several attacks against American targets, was a handy prop for this line of reasoning.

In pursuing this perspective, India seriously overestimated the value that the U.S. places on logical coherence. Although the Taliban militia in Afghanistan has fallen out of favour by its ideological excesses and its association with the exiled Saudi Islamic militant Osama bin Laden, it remains in American perceptions the best means of pacifying the strategic crossroads of Central Asia. And for all its internal schisms, Pakistan in its consistent sponsorship of the Taliban, offers the best possible springboard into the Central Asian theatre. The association with bin Laden is a relatively minor irritant when weighed against these larger strategic gains.

Pakistan's Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif is due to visit Washington in the first week of December, by which time the U.S. administration hopes, he would have tied up an emergency financial package with the IMF. With this matter out of the way, the Clinton administration hopes to secure Pakistan's accession to the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty (CTBT), which is the centrepiece of its global campaign against nuclear proliferation. Public opinion in Pakistan has already been primed. In September, Nawaz Sharif assured the U.N. General Assembly that Pakistan had few residual reservations about joining the CTBT regime. Unlike in the case of India, subsequent statements from him and his Cabinet colleagues have moved not in the direction of equivocation, but towards definitive affirmation. Foreign Minister Sartaj Aziz is now on record as saying that Pakistan would soon join not only the CTBT regime, but also its predecessor, the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT).

Relative to India, Pakistan has a shorter distance to traverse to embrace the CTBT and all that it entails. All through the negotiations leading up to the treaty, India consistently voiced a complex set of objections, rooted mainly in the global context and the infirmities of the CTBT as an instrument of universal nuclear disarmament. Pakistan, in contrast, had a single-dimensional demand, rooted in the neighbourhood context - it would sign if India did so.

Today, Pakistan's main preoccupation is with gaining a reprieve from the crippling sanctions that it faces and restoring a semblance of normality to its economy. Neighbourhood insecurities have been partly assuaged by the knowledge that an element of nuclear parity has been established with India. Moreover, further nuclear testing by India, even if it does not sign the CTBT, would be restrained by the adverse climate of international opinion.

IN contrast, the Indian Government remains in a cleft stick as far as the CTBT is concerned. There were signs of movement towards accession, but an uneasy ambivalence has been evident since Vajpayee's visit to the United Nations in September.

The Government's statement of May 11, in the first flush of the Pokhran-II tests, had spoken of adhering to "some of the undertakings" in the CTBT, subject to the fulfilment of a number of "reciprocal" conditions. The Prime Minister's statement in Parliament on May 27 spoke of converting the voluntary moratorium declared on nuclear testing into a "de jure obligation". Addressing Parliament again on June 8, Vajpayee spoke of "exploring ways and means" to bring about this "de jure formalisation" of a test ban. And on August 4, he again informed Parliament that "bilateral discussions with key interlocutors" were under way "with a view to arriving at a decision regarding adherence to the CTBT." On September 23, Vajpayee assured the U.N. General Assembly that India was committed to bringing all discussions to a "successful conclusion, so that entry into force of the CTBT would not be delayed beyond September 1999."

Beyond these periodic declarations of intent, there has been little by way of a dialogue to arrive at a domestic consensus on the CTBT. To no one's surprise, the main Opposition parties have been unconvinced about the new negotiating tack that the Government has adopted since May. But the new strains of scepticism that have crept into the official discourse on the CTBT seemingly have little to do with domestic opinion. The stronger influence has perhaps been exerted by American obduracy, and the Government's failure to win acceptance for the conditions it has laid down for accession to the CTBT.

The new spirit of scepticism has been evident since Jaswant Singh, Deputy Chairman of the Planning Commission, concluded his fifth round of talks with Strobe Talbott on the sidelines of the Prime Minister's engagements in New York. The two are scheduled to meet in Rome on November 19, against a background of growing unease in India about the intents and purposes of their dialogue.

Defence Minister George Fernandes was among the first to disclaim any intention to arrive at a deal of mutual convenience with the U.S. on the CTBT. There would be no decision on this matter, he said, without the approval of Parliament. He was followed by Vajpayee's more explicit, though rather puzzling, disavowal in an interview with a newsmagazine: "We still have serious reservations in signing the CTBT in its present form and we have been communicating our views forcefully in our talks with the U.S. and other countries. For example, one of our major concerns is about ratification. Will every signatory to the treaty give an undertaking about ratification by their respective legislatures within a stipulated time?"

These locutions point to concerns that have never been central to the Indian debate on the CTBT. Article XIV of the CTBT makes it clear that ratification by 44 nations - comprising the nuclear weapon states and all countries considered to have access to nuclear fissile material - is necessary for the treaty to enter into force. One holdout is sufficient to scupper the entire treaty. The concern over ratification is premature and carries little credibility as an alibi for holding out. If any one of the 44 countries fails to ratify, the CTBT becomes infructuous.

The reality since Pokhran-II is simply that the country has been expected to derive all its knowledge about the new global political realities on the strength of disjointed statements from the Prime Minister and his Cabinet colleagues. Reading between the lines, the Prime Minister's recent reservations seem to point directly to the domestic political context in the U.S., where the Clinton administration faces an uphill struggle in winning ratification from the Senate for its move. After five rounds of strategic dialogue with the U.S., the Indian position seems finally to have come around to a conditional willingness to sign the CTBT, provided the U.S. Senate ratifies it. Since Jesse Helms, Chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, has said that he will not take up the CTBT until India and a few other countries sign on the dotted line, this effectively puts the process of engagement with the U.S. into gridlock.

MEANWHILE, a parallel track of strategic negotiations has been opened up with France. Gerard Errera, a special emissary of French President Jacques Chirac, met Brajesh Mishra, Principal Secretary to the Prime Minister and the designated representative from India, in the last week of October. This, the first of a number of planned discussions, was a relatively low-key affair, although France's greater empathy with Indian concerns was evident. India has made little headway in its effort to induce the U.S. to relax the technology export restrictions that have been in force since India's first nuclear test in 1974. Neither has it managed to obtain U.S. backing for its credit requirements from multilateral financial institutions. France could bridge the lacuna in respect of technology, within the limits permitted by its global strategic alliance with the U.S. It has, however, considerably less clout in the matter of finance. The dialogue with France, though intended to compensate for the faltering negotiations with the U.S., seems limited in the potential rewards it could bring India.

Talks with a U.S. expert group produced statements of satisfaction about India's seriousness of intent in preventing the proliferation of nuclear weapons knowhow. A visiting delegation of Foreign Ministers representing the European Union troika also concluded discussions that were certified as mutually beneficial and productive.

Yet the road ahead remains complex. Pakistan has sought and will in all likelihood achieve, an early reconciliation with the rules of engagement of the American nuclear imperium. The BJP-led Government seemed inclined to move in this direction if India was assured of strategic pre-eminence in the neighbourhood. But the difficulty of squaring this demand with the U.S.' other interests has set back this line of approach. Majority political opinion in the country remains, as ever, resolutely opposed to the asymmetrical and grossly iniquitous rules of the global nuclear bargain. And for all its efforts since May, the BJP-led Government has not yet been able to find a way out of a tangle of its own making.

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