POLITICS: Nuclear Threats, as India-Pakistan Spar

By IPS Correspondents Reprint | | Print |

Analysis - Praful Bidwai

NEW DELHI, Feb 7 2000 (IPS) - Indian Prime Minister Atal Bihari Vajpayee, flanked by the chief ministers of four northern states, including Jammu and Kashmir, on Sunday delivered a sinister nuclear warning to Pakistan.

While demanding that Islamabad vacates and returns to India that part of Kashmir which it “illegally occupied” 52 years ago, he said, “Pakistan is threatening a nuclear war, but do they even know what it means?

“They think that they will drop one bomb and they’ll win and we’ll lose. This won’t happen … If they think that we will wait for them to drop a bomb and face destruction, they are mistaken. We will not wait to be destroyed …”

He also said that the Pakistan establishment should fully understand the ramifications of a nuclear threat: “India is aware of Pakistan’s intention. We are fully prepared now.” Therefore, “let Pakistan announce like us that it too is committed to no-first-use … its intentions are different … (but) we are prepared for any eventuality.”

This is the most hawkish statement on the nuclear weapons issue so far by an Indian leader following the tests of May 1998. It represents a serious degradation of India’s professed nuclear posture and its doctrine of No First Use first spelt out four months after the tests. Under that doctrine, India pledged never to be the first to use a nuclear weapon against an adversary.

Vajpayee’s statement bears testimony to the low depths to which India’s “peacetime” relations with Pakistan have sunk amidst relentless sparring and exchange of hostile rhetoric.

The statement comes less than a month after Defence Minister George Fernandes’s menacing warning to Pakistan that “limited wars” are possible between two nuclear states. “Nuclear weapons do not deter all wars. Pakistan must internalise the lesson that limited (conventional) wars can still be fought and won.”

Fernandes claimed that India showed through the Kargil war last summer that it would fight and win a war “at a place and time chosen by the adversary.”

Such “peacetime” nuclear threat-mongering could herald serious dangers in a situation of actual military engagement. During the Kargil war, which claimed over 2,000 lives, Indian and Pakistan ministers and military leaders exchanged nuclear threats with each other no fewer than 13 times.

For instance, Raja Zafrul Haq, then minister for religious affairs, told the Pakistan Senate that Islamabad’s nuclear weapons are “not meant merely for display on the shelf”. In “retaliation”, similar statements followed from India.

Just last week, Pakistan announced that it has set up a nuclear command and control structure. It has also said it will soon formulate and announce its own nuclear doctrine. It rejects No First Use, citing India’s 3:1 conventional military superiority over it. Meanwhile, India is proceeding towards building an ambitious, open-ended, huge, nuclear arsenal.

If Pakistan’s nuclear posture is compatible with pre-emptive and first use of nuclear weapons, India’s No First Use signifies to its rival an arrogant self-confidence in developing a second- strike capability. Both are dangerous and destabilising.

India and Pakistan are thus locked today in unremitting, bitter, nuclear rivalry of the most frightful variety, against which General George “Lee” Butler, former U.S. Strategic Command chief, has repeatedly warned while discussing the fallibility of nuclear deterrence.

In order to operate, deterrence requires “detailed, sophisticated, understanding” of rival capabilities and moves “especially in crises”. But the tendency to “demonise each other, to reduce to caricatures each other’s motivations, intentions and beliefs” ensures that deterrence breaks down.

That very process is under way in South Asia. Those who had thought that Vajpayee, claimed by his supporters in the Hindu- extremist Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) to be “moderate”, would prevent its acceleration have been proved wrong. Vajpayee has been as hardline on the nuclear issue, and more generally, on India-Pakistan relations as any other of his party leaders.

Vajpayee and General Pervez Musharraf speak in two voices on Kashmir. Vajpayee says India will reciprocate Pakistan’s offer of talks (“we are always willing”), but Pakistan must first vacate its “occupation” of one-third of Kashmir.

Musharraf repeats his offer of talks with India, which must include the “core issue” of Kashmir. But he is also quoted in Muzaffarabad (Pakistani Kashmir) as saying on Feb. 5: “I am aiming at the struggle for liberation of Kashmir. For the right

of self-determination promised to the Kashmiris as per their desires and according to U.N. resolutions …”

Neither India nor Pakistan is open to, leave alone keen on, serious, unconditional bilateral talks on their many outstanding disputes, especially Kashmir. And yet, they, especially India, reject third-party mediation too.

Last week, New Delhi responded to U.S President Bill Clinton’s offer of mediation during his planned visit to South Asia next month. It said India’s differences with Pakistan would be resolved “bilaterally”.

Both governments are under pressure from hardliners to dismantle even the few conciliatory agreements, confidence- building measures and exchange programmes that exist between them. Vajpayee has even accused Pakistan of printing fake currency notes to “destabilise” and sabotage India’s economy.

Citing this rather incredible charge, India’s Home Ministry is pushing for cancelling the skeletal train service that runs between the two countries across the Punjab border at Wagah. But India has done nothing to check rampant corruption among the railway and custom staff. Cancelling the train would be a huge setback to trade and mutual relations.

Some of the sharpened hostility today is related to the Dec. 24 hijacking of an Indian passenger plane, which New Delhi claims had Islamabad’s support. There is also an additional edge provided by Clinton’s forthcoming visit to India. (It is not clear if he will stop over in Pakistan).

Both states are courting the United States into a close strategic partnership at each other’s expense. Their relations touch low after new low just as their nuclear and missile preparations gather momentum amidst an explosion of national chauvinism and religious bigotry. At the moment, there seems to be no barrier to their free fall into the abyss.