By IPS Correspondents
NEW DELHI, May 28 1998 (IPS)

Two weeks after India shocked the world by gatecrashing into its nuclear club, confusion reigns over its strategic doctrine and policy while cracks became visible in the early “consensus” favouring nuclearisation.

The Atal Bihari Vajpayee government has made a series of contradictory pronouncements on its plans for the nuclear weapons it is admittedly manufacturing. To start with, he first explained the rationale of the nuclear tests not to the Indian public, but to the United States president.

This does not mention the lofty, “principled”, “universal” reasons the Bomb’s apologists invoke, for instance “nuclear apartheid”, the weapons states’ reluctance to disarm, the Non- proliferation Treaty’s (NPT) indefinite extension.

It only cites nuclear China, which “committed armed aggression” against India in 1962, and which has “helped” Pakistan build a nuclear capability. And it fancifully pledges “cooperation” and “friendship” with Washington.

On May 15, Vajpayee pledged to use India’s Bombs only in “self-defence”. This makes no distinction between nuclear and non-nuclear conflicts and can even include pre-emptive use. Later, the government said it would not be the first to use nuclear weapons, but then clarified that this was not a unilateral pledge, but a proposal for a multilateral agreement.

On May 21, India announced a nuclear test moratorium. But on May 25, it retreated by making it conditional upon negotiations with “key countries”. However, why should they negotiate this when they have already signed the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty?

New Delhi’s policy disarray became starkly evident when the prime minister’s political adviser, Pramod Mahajan, was told not to make statements on the nuclear issue.

India has not even gone as far as China in advocating nuclear restraint. For instance, China has made a unilateral no-first-use pledge — irrespective of circumstances and the status of the adversary.

India’s doctrinal confusion derives from the fact that its nuclearisation is devoid of a strategic rationale, and not rooted in any perceived security threat. It is a product of a political obsession: the Bomb is an article of faith for the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) which leads the ruling coalition.

This hard-right Hindu-chauvinist current has advocated the Bomb since 1951 — regardless of threats from China or Pakistan, and irrespective of the state of India’s external relations.

The BJP and its partners, especially the secret society-like RSS, are strongly militarist and regard Gandhian non-violence as destructive of “manliness”. Their ideologues’ agenda was to “unite and militarise Hindus”. That India’s Bomb has become a symbol of male-chauvinist potency is no accident.

Thus, there have been jubilant, flag-waving celebrations of the “Hindu” Bomb. And a BJP associate, Vishwa Hindu Parishad, now demands that India be constitutionally declared a “Hindu state”.

The government’s Kashmir policy has considerably hardened too. Home Minister Lal Kishan Advani is threatening a “pro-active” policy on Kashmir, in the context of the now-changed India- Pakistan power balance. War-mongering has become the order of the day. Last month, Indian troops reportedly entered the Pakistani part of Kashmir and reportedly killed 26 civilians in revenge for a massacre by Pakistani-backed militants.

In this sense, India’s nuclearisation is the triumph of the brand of frustrated, belligerent, sectarian nationalism which the BJP represents and which it has advanced over the past decade.

India is only coping awkwardly and diffidently with economic sanctions and cancellations of multilateral loans. The full impact of U.S. sanctions will only be felt over time. Meanwhile, however, private capital flows pose the biggest problem to the government, in addition to aid cuts, which will affect the poor.

India’s credit ratings have been lowered and that intangible called “investor confidence” could take a beating. That could create a run on the rupee, with disastrous consequences.

Cynically, Indian nuclear hawks desperately hope that Pakistan will test, as that will take some economic heat off India, and also rationalise India’s own nuclearisation.

As India lurches towards nuclear weapons production, and probably deployment, worries are rising over the likely economic and security costs. India’s nuclearisation will destabilise security equations in Asia and lead to a nuclear arms race.

Nuclear weapons are extremely expensive to build and service. China’s nuclear programme, for instance, was meant to be a modest one, but has ended up costing over 100 billion dollars. Deployed nuclear weapons need advanced command, control, communications, which alone account for half the costs of the programme.

According to a conservative estimate, even a “minimal” deterrent will cost India about 5 billion dollars today, bloating its military spending by 50 per cent.

Just maintaining a tiny arsenal would cost India 0.5 to 1 percent of GDP, raising the defence budget by 25 to 40 percent, when there is a case for reducing it. Already New Delhi spends twice as much on the military as it does on health, education and social welfare.

Greater military spending is unlikely to be popular. The Left has opposed it and significant sections of the Congress Party — India’s oldest and largest — want to distance themselves from the BJP on strategic, political and economic grounds.

The BJP’s opponents are alarmed at the explosion of jingoism now in evidence and seriously worry that the BJP will ride roughshod over them, taking India to the brink of war in a show of nuclear muscle.

Meanwhile, several citizens’ groups and over 200 scientists have registered their sharp protest at the government’s decision to cross the nuclear Rubicon. They question its strategic rationale and say it is not a genuine “scientific achievement”. There have been a few hundreds-strong protest demonstrations in four cities. And dissent is growing.

The BJP can no longer claim that there is a strong consensus behind its adventurist nuclear posture.

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