The South Asian nuclear mess

Pokhran-II and Chagai have done nothing to enhance the security of the people of India and Pakistan. On the other hand, they have triggered an arms race that both countries can ill-afford.

AMIT BARUAH
in Islamabad

IN the perception of many Pakistani leaders, India's nuclear tests at Pokhran proved to be advantageous for Pakistan in strategic terms. "India did us a favour," a senior Minister told Indian journalists some time ago. "If India had not gone in for its tests, we could never have tested our own devices."

Given the international pressures that have been brought to bear on Pakistan as far as its nuclear programme is concerned, Islamabad's bomb came out of the basement only because of the bellicosity of the Bharatiya Janata Party-led Government in New Delhi which believed that nuclear weapons fetched big-power status.

S. ARNEJA
Prime Ministers A.B. Vajpayee and Nawaz Sharif at the Wagah border post in February 1999. Significantly, the only real progress made by the two leaders at their meeting in Lahore was in the area of nuclear issues, an area of interest to the U.S.

It is well known that Pakistan had since the late 1980s been in possession of an untested nuclear device. The invocation since 1990 of the Pressler Amendment, under which aid to Pakistan from the United States was made conditional on the U.S. President certifying each year to Congress that Pakistan did not possess a nuclear device, was an acknowledgement of Pakistan's undeclared nuclear capability and ambitions. However, only in 1998 did Islamabad muster the courage to test its device, and that too only after New Delhi had played a facilitating role.

Certain domestic compulsions too motivated Pakistan's decision to go nuclear: there were many people who believed that notwithstanding the leaders' bluster, Pakistan just did not have the bomb. This section had to be silenced. But the most compelling reason for the Chagai tests was that India's nuclear "provocation" could not go unanswered.

From a narrow security point of view, the Pakistani establishment believes that it is now equipped with a deterrent. For the first time in 52 years, Pakistan believes that militarily it stands on an equal footing with India, notwithstanding the imbalance that continues to exist in respect of conventional forces. Islamabad's consistent opposition to a no-first-use agreement with New Delhi is perhaps based on its nuclear doctrine. Given the imbalance in conventional military strength, Pakistan is loath to enter into any such arrangement with India since it would blunt its nuclear strike capability.

However, as in India, there are sections of people in Pakistan who argue that nuclear weapons offer no security guarantee and that they are a drain on resources. Pakistan's economic problems, exacerbated by the sanctions imposed by the U.S. and some other countries following the nuclear tests, gave the managers of the economy a scare, but a bail-out programme from the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank materialised in time: the West, spurred by fears of what a nuclear-capable Pakistan would do if it found itself bankrupt, came to the country's rescue. Although economic analysts have pointed out that the impact of the economic crisis has not been fully overcome and that it has only been postponed through debt rescheduling, the spectre of a default in debt repayment no longer haunts Pakistan.

IN the year gone by, India and Pakistan have been locked in an arms race despite the expressed intention of the leaders of the two countries to avoid one. The perceived need to "match" each other's military capability was reflected in the tests of the Agni-II and Ghauri-2 missiles (Frontline, May 8). The Lahore Declaration and other statements of good intentions that were issued by the two countries were evidently not enough to prevent an arms race and the development of weapons delivery systems. The only difference between previous missile tests and the most recent ones is that this time round both countries gave advance information of the tests as they had agreed to in Lahore.

Hawks in both India and Pakistan argue that the two "nuclear neighbours" are better placed than ever before to sort out their differences. Prior to the fall of the BJP-led Government, it was claimed that given the ideological orientation of the ruling parties in Islamabad and New Delhi - the Pakistan Muslim League and the BJP - there would be little domestic opposition within the two countries to any settlement of bilateral disputes that might be worked out by the two right-wing governments.

With the BJP-led Government having fallen, that hypothesis cannot be tested immediately. The fact is that the Lahore Declaration and other agreements are yet to be operationalised. Other than the meeting of the two Foreign Ministers in March at Nuwara Eliya (in Sri Lanka), little else of import has transpired since the bus diplomacy was initiated in February.

THE collapse of the BJP-led coalition Government also raises questions about the course of the strategic dialogue between India and the United States, to which the U.S.-Pakistan dialogue process is linked. It is not insignificant that the only real progress made in Lahore by the two Prime Ministers was in the area of nuclear issues, an area of particular interest to the U.S.

The memorandum of understanding (MoU) signed by the two parties reads: "The two sides shall engage in bilateral consultations on security concepts, and nuclear doctrines, with a view to developing measures for confidence building in the nuclear and conventional fields, aimed at avoidance of conflict."

GIVEN the discussions between India's External Affairs Minister Jaswant Singh and U.S. Deputy Secretary of State Strobe Talbott, which were spread over several rounds, there is reason to believe that the U.S. is somewhat disappointed with the fall of the BJP-led Government. The dialogue process will have to begin anew with whichever party or grouping that comes to power after the elections. Further, Pakistan is not inclined towards taking any step on nuclear-related issues unless India takes matching steps. For instance, it will not sign the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty (CTBT) unless India does so, and given the political situation in New Delhi, an Indian decision on this will have to be put on hold until a new government is in place.

It is clear that the BJP has displayed tremendous flexibility vis-a-vis the U.S. in foreign policy matters, especially in facilitating a dialogue with Pakistan; the U.S. perhaps hoped that it would be replicated in other areas as well. The dialogue between the Foreign Secretaries of India and Pakistan, which had been deadlocked since September 1997, was revived only after an agreement emerged at a meeting between the two Prime Ministers in New York in September 1998. In fact, a statement issued by the two Prime Ministers on that occasion reflected a major departure from India's negotiating position on Kashmir insofar as it accommodated Pakistan's stand on the mechanics of the dialogue process.

The joint statement issued on September 23, 1998 said that the two leaders "reaffirmed their common belief that an environment of durable peace and security was in the supreme interest of both India and Pakistan, and of the region as a whole. They expressed their determination to renew and reinvigorate efforts to secure such an environment. They agreed that the peaceful settlement of all outstanding issues, including Jammu and Kashmir, was essential for the purpose."

Had any other Indian government or leader taken such a position on Kashmir (which marks a major departure from India's known stand) and linked a solution of the Kashmir dispute to the question of regional peace and security, the BJP would have been the first to accuse that government of having "sold out" India's interests. But since it was a BJP leader who did it, even the foreign policy hawks in India were silent. The implications of the New York formulation are still to sink in: increasingly, Pakistan quotes not so much from the Lahore Declaration as from the September 1998 joint statement.

In recent months, Pakistan has linked a solution to the Kashmir issue to the larger nuclear question in the subcontinent. Pakistan Foreign Minister Sartaj Aziz informed the Senate on March 8: "The nuclearisation of South Asia also underscored the urgent need for Pakistan and India to resolve all outstanding issues between them, in particular the central issue of Jammu and Kashmir. At the international level, the nuclear tests served to focus attention on the need for resolving the root cause of tensions between the two countries..."

However, it was India's Home Minister L.K. Advani who made the original and strategically ruinous linkage between the Kashmir dispute and the nuclearisation of the subcontinent. Immediately after the Pokhran tests, he thundered that India's "decisive step to become a nuclear weapon state has brought about a qualitative new state in India-Pakistan relations, particularly in finding a lasting solution to the Kashmir problem. Islamabad has to realise the change in the geo-strategic situation in the region and the world." His pronouncement had the effect of achieving what Pakistan had failed to do for many years - internationalise the Kashmir problem.

There is little doubt that Pokhran-II and Chagai have done nothing to enhance the security of the people of India and Pakistan. But given the logic of realpolitik, it is a reality that the people will have to contend with in the future.