POLITICS-INDIA: Nuclear Blasts Settle Political Squabbles

By IPS Correspondents Reprint | | Print |

Dev Raj

NEW DELHI, May 12 1998 (IPS) - India’s right-wing government may be losing friends abroad by going nuclear but it is certainly winning friends at home.

When Defence Minister George Fernandes suddenly declared, last week, that China rather than Pakistan posed the biggest threat to India’s security, he was probably priming up the country for the tests on Monday afternoon.

Opposition leaders from the Congress party and the United Front reacted to Fernandes’ statements by accusing the ruling Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) of ‘warmongering’ and wrecking diplomatic relations painstakingly build with its neighbours.

The opposition also charged the BJP with trying to divert public attention away from the incessant spats it seemed to be having with its many coalition partners but most especially with Jayalalitha Jayaraman who controls 27 parliamentary seats from southern Tamil Nadu state.

A.B. Bardhan, leader of the Communist Party of India (CPI), an important member of the United Front which led the last government, said after nearly two months in office, the BJP had only succeeded in undermining foreign relations but was yet to begin the job of governance at home.

Worn down by a “crisis a day” situation Prime Minister Atal Behari Vajpayee, one of India’s’s more popular politicians, withdrew into a shell until Monday afternoon when he emerged to triumphantly announce three successful nuclear tests at the Pokhran range in the deserts of western Rajasthan state.

Vajpyaee’s principal secretary and the country’s senior most bureaucrat, Brijesh Mishra, claimed at a briefing that there was national consensus on “exercising the nuclear option.”

Mishra was right. Political parties cutting across the ideological spectrum seemed to rally behind the BJP-led government’s unexpected decision to end decades of uncertainty and declare itself nuclear weapon state (NWS).

Former prime minister Inder Kumar Gujral who is sworn to oppose the “communal” BJP-led government which he accused of dismantling the “Gujral doctrine,” of friendly relations with neighbouring countries, was suddenly singing a different tune.

Gujral said the nuclear weapons powers had refused to recognise India’s demand that they undertake a phased programme to destroy nuclear weapons. “The response has been evasive and high-handed,” he said.

“At this hour the nation stands united in reiterating our known policy of peace and for making the world free of nuclear weapons,” Gujral said in his statement.

Congress party leader, Madhav Rao Scindia, said every country had a right to protect its own interests and respond to its security environment.

Scindia said Monday’s tests were the logical culmination of a programme initiated by the late prime minister Indira Gandhi who ordered a nuclear implosion in 1974, when India first knocked on the doors of the nuclear club.

That test cost India dearly in terms of sanctions against India by the United States which even banned the sale of ordinary high-speed computers to India.

But the sanctions had the effect of spurring India to develop its own super computers and, as Monday’s tests so vividly demonstrated, its own nuclear technology both for peaceful uses as well as for a weaponisation programme.

“By conducting a thermonuclear test, a fission test and a low- yield test, India has established that it is in a position to make warheads with yields ranging from kilotons to megatons,” India’s foremost defence expert, K. Subrahmanyam said.

Subrahmanyam indicated that India may now offer to sign the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty (CTBT) which it had so vocally opposed as being loaded in favour of the existing nuclear weapon states.

Although the United States said it was considering new and tougher sanctions, the Indian government seemed well-prepared for such an eventuality. “We have taken economic repercussion into account. We will not face any problems,” Mishra said at the press briefing.

Mishra refused to comment on whether or not India would now actually make nuclear weapons although the BJP-led government is committed to “exercise the option to induct nuclear weapons,” according to a national agenda announced by the coalition on taking office.

With a difficult budget session of Parliament looming large at the end of this month, the BJP will need the support of both friends and foes to stay on in power. And the tests are helping.