COVER STORY

The wages of adventurism

The BJP-led Government's rationalisation for the Pokhran tests was characterised by incoherence and cynicism. A year later, with no gains accruing from its nuclear recklessness, confusion and indecision mark the official thinking in strategic matters.

SUKUMAR MURALIDHARAN
in New Delhi

IF a paralysis of public debate seemed to be the immediate outcome of the Pokhran tests in May 1998, strategic confusion and indecision seem the reality a year on.

Prime Minister Atal Behari Vajpayee finds himself in the reduced circumstances of heading a caretaker administration. The decisive new turn that he sought to impart to India's strategic engagement with the neighbourhood and the world has meandered into a dead-end. Any deprecation of the Pokhran-II tests was once portrayed by spokesmen of the Bharatiya Janata Party as a sign of disloyalty to the country. Today, the multiple ramifications of Pokhran represent a legacy that the BJP seems ill-equipped by both indoctrination and inclination to cope with.

Within the domestic arena, there was only a momentary sense of disorientation, after which a vigorous public debate ensued over the implications of Pokhran. The BJP sought desperately to cut off all dissent by weaving nuclear belligerence into the fabric of national patriotism. But that was an effort in vain. As all the hard questions came up for answer, the political leadership that embarked upon the Pokhran tests with little pause for reflection has had little to say beyond the rote repetition of practised nostrums.

The political responses to Pokhran, even when favourable, embraced a diversity of perspectives - from the pacifist to the jingoist. India has for long chafed under the terms of the global nuclear bargain, which is designed by a system of formal treaties and technology denial regimes, to keep the world safe for nuclear coercion by a privileged few. Among those who approved of Pokhran, the pacifist fringe saw an opportunity in its aftermath, to resume a spirited challenge to the inequities of the global nuclear order. But this was a minimal strain in the spectrum of reactions and it was rapidly drowned out by the jingoist tendency.

MOHAMMED YOUSUF
Home Minister L.K. Advani. The multiple ramifications of Pokhran represent a legacy that the BJP seems ill-equipped to cope with.

Leading this charge was Union Home Minister L.K. Advani, with his monitory warnings to Pakistan, issued ominously enough during a visit to Kashmir, that it should take into account the new strategic realities in the subcontinent. He was followed in quick order by Parliamentary Affairs Minister Madan Lal Khurana's bumptious call to arms against Pakistan. When the expected riposte from Pakistan - which took the form of a series of nuclear tests at Chagai - came on May 28, Advani changed tack. It was now no longer a question of new strategic military realities, but of two countries that seemed on the verge of a lethal arms race, in an environment of global hostility.

OFFICIAL articulations aside, Advani's remarks to a leading national newspaper immediately after the Pakistani nuclear tests provide a brutally clear exposition of the reasoning that underlay Pokhran. "There will be sanctions for both countries now," he said, but some satisfaction could be derived from the fact that these would hurt Pakistan more than India. "My own view," Advani continued, "has all along been that if Pakistan goes in for a test, it would be good for us from all points of view."

After Vajpayee's effort to disarm opposition to the Pokhran tests by placing them in a continuum with India's long-standing foreign policy commitments, Advani's comments brought to the surface a more cynical calculation. Tacitly, the Pokhran tests were an invitation to Pakistan to show its hand and provoke the kind of international opprobrium that India had suffered. As a country with greater strategic depth and a better developed resource base, India would come out of the symmetric application of sanctions relatively less damaged than its neighbour.

Perhaps inadvertently, Advani provided further insights into the basic assumptions of the new nuclear posture. The Government's persistent fudging on this question in the aftermath of Pokhran had caused widespread disquiet. Vajpayee wrote to U.S. President Bill Clinton on May 11, pointedly identifying China's nuclear arsenal and its acquiescence and cooperation in the Pakistani weapons programme as the decisive factors behind the Pokhran blasts. The Ministry of External Affairs was not consulted in the authorship of this important communication, and was aghast when its contents were published, evidently on the strength of a high-level leak, in The New York Times.

Curiously, a statement by Minister of State for External Affairs Vasundhara Raje, placed before the Lok Sabha on May 27, spoke of all-round improvement in relations with China and the mutual resolve of the two countries to "work towards a constructive and cooperative relationship oriented towards the 21st century." Still another described the visit to India in April of General Fu Quanyou, Chief of Staff of the Chinese Army, as a landmark in relations with that country. The Prime Minister, in particular, was on record warmly commending the 1993 agreement on Maintenance of Peace and Tranquillity along the Line of Actual Control and the 1996 Agreement on Confidence Building Measures in the Military Field along the Line of Actual Control in the India-China Border Areas as crucial steps towards a full reconciliation with China.

If incoherence was a distinctive feature of the official rationalisation, a fresh twist was added by Advani's remarks immediately after the Pakistan tests. In response to a specific question, he said that an arms race was a possibility unless "they (Pakistan) give up their obsession with Kashmir or we are willing to give it up." There was clearly, even after the Pakistani nuclear tests, no retreat from his position that the Kashmir issue was India's most basic motivation. But Advani went further, to provide a rather innovative reading of the threat faced by the country: "If we (the BJP) were not there, these people would have given it up. More than the pseudo-secularists, the real threat now comes from pseudo-liberals." Asked for an explanation, Advani characterised the "pseudo-liberals" as "those who would like to hand over Kashmir and buy peace".

Clearly, Pokhran was an event with multiple dimensions in the conception of the BJP. Just as Ayodhya had been a crucial episode in the campaign of subjugation against secularism, Pokhran and the Pakistani response were designated as defining moments in the BJP's crusade against liberal political opinion. Advani's remarks were followed in quick time by BJP vice-president K.L. Sharma's avowal that the Government was determined to "put an end to the Pakistani menace". For maximum effect, he also directed a good part of his ire at the political parties that had counselled moderation, attacking them for allegedly being indifferent to national security and showing greater concern for the well-being of hostile neighbours.

BY all accounts, the political mood following Pokhran was marked by discord and truculence. That, within a mere eight months, it should have yielded to a new spirit of bonhomie in the neighbourhood would perhaps count as a miracle of modern-day politics. Vajpayee's historic border crossing at Wagha in February this year and the Lahore Declaration that followed constitute in certain perceptions the defining moment when ancient animosities dissolved in a new spirit of concord. This has been rendered in some interpretations into an eloquent illustration of the revelatory powers of the Pokhran tests.

The argument would be convincing for anybody who chooses to overlook the tortuous twists on the road to Lahore. India's effort at a fresh engagement began, in fact, immediately after Pakistan had in the words of Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif, "squared its accounts" with India by setting off a reported six nuclear tests in the Chagai hills of Baluchistan. It commenced as an unseemly game of evasion and manoeuvre. India offered to conduct discussions at the Foreign Secretary level on the basis of the Dhaka proposals of January 1998. This was rebuffed rather brusquely by Pakistan, which insisted that Kashmir - one of eight agreed items for discussions under the Dhaka proposals - merited a distinct place by virtue of its centrality to relations between the two countries.

A later meeting on the fringes of the South Asian summit in Colombo broke up in acrimony, with the Indian Foreign Secretary decrying Pakistan's obsession with Kashmir as "neurotic and irrational".

The tide had begun to shift by early September, when the Foreign Secretaries agreed, on the sidelines of the summit of leaders of the Non-Aligned Movement in Durban, South Africa, on the broad modalities for a resumption of the dialogue. These were formally announced when the two Prime Ministers met in New York later that month, while participating in the United Nations General Assembly session.

Vajpayee characterised the event as a new beginning in relations, although it was no more than the reiteration of an agreed agenda of June 1997 and its further explication the following January. What was indeed different was that a mediator had subtly entered the South Asian arena, with a newly decisive influence. Since the nuclear tests of May, the U.S. had, through parallel bilateral dialogues with both India and Pakistan, been pursuing a keenly-sought outcome - the capping of the two countries' nuclear weapons programme and their accession to the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty (CTBT). India had reservations arising from its longstanding insistence that a ban on nuclear testing should be anchored in a time-bound framework for global disarmament. Pakistan, in comparison, had a simpler view - it would accede to the CTBT if India did.

B.K. BANGASH / AP
India's Foreign Secretary K. Raghunath (right) with his Pakistani counterpart Shamshad Ahmad after talks in Islamabad in October 1998.

GIVEN this asymmetry, the dice seemed loaded against India. Just prior to his visit to China in June 1998, U.S. President Bill Clinton offered the plea to a sceptical U.S. Congress that China had a serious role to play in calming the eruption of animosities in South Asia. Even if it was partly inspired by domestic compulsions, the argument caused deep disquiet within India. Later, with both the Indian and Pakistani Prime Ministers in New York, the U.S. administration seemed, in subtle word and deed and gross disregard of diplomatic niceties, to portray Pakistan as the more amenable negotiating partner.

In October, the U.S. President exercised the provisional authority granted him by the U.S. Congress and waived some of the sanctions that were imposed on India and Pakistan following the nuclear tests. But there was an asymmetry in these waivers that again upset India. The U.S. committed itself to supporting Pakistan's case for emergency financial sustenance from the International Monetary Fund, although India would not enjoy any such privilege. In fact, it was explicitly stated that the U.S. would oppose the sanction of World Bank credits for India. The waiver, in other words, would be limited in scope to restoring India's eligibility for certain bilateral credits from American financial institutions.

Clearly, by around this time, the expectations of the Advani thesis - that sanctions would cause disproportionate damage to Pakistan - were being thorougly undermined. A parallel diplomatic track was also under exploration, for the relaxation of the technology denial regimes imposed against India after its first nuclear test in 1974, as a reward for accession to the CTBT. By September, when India's special envoy Jaswant Singh concluded his sixth direct encounter with U.S. Deputy Secretary of State Strobe Talbott, this hope too was in shambles.

The writing on the wall was very clear. The U.S. would not alter the pattern of its geopolitical engagement to reward India with a much-sought-after role of regional pre-eminence. Nor would it allow a tested regional ally like Pakistan to sink into insolvency as a consequence of economic sanctions. It would, however, stand by as a benign patron should India and Pakistan choose directly to engage in a dialogue over their long-running disputes.

The bus to Lahore was not, by any account, a regional peace initiative that the U.S. had no role in. Nawaz Sharif's dramatic invitation to Vajpayee to take the land route to Pakistan itself came after Talbott had concluded a round of shuttle diplomacy in the subcontinent. And its final outcome, for all the symbolism that it embodied, was not substantively different from the agreed agenda for negotiations dating back to June 1997. The difference is that the neighbourhood dialogue now has elicited the overt interest and patronage of the global policeman. This cannot in any sense be construed as a gain. n