Hiccuping On Old Wine

AFTER not having set a foot wrong throughout the Kargil crisis, to quote none other than US secretary of state Madeleine Albright, the Vajpayee government has suddenly developed two left feet. Last week’s shooting down of a Pakistani naval surveillance aircraft was regrettable, as it raised fears that the Indian armed forces had begun to suffer from a belated attack of jingoism. But the Pakistani navy at least had to bear some responsibility. It had no business sending a spy plane right to, and probably across, the international frontier, in violation of the ’91 accord, so soon after a war between the two countries. There is no such mitigation for the blunder of announcing a draft nuclear doctrine at this precise point in time.

Even a cursory look at the doctrine shows that it contains nothing that has not been said at least a dozen times in the past 14 months. It has promised that India will never use nuclear weapons first; never threaten a non-nuclear state with nuclear weapons; will create only a credible minimum deterrent, and has defined that as one which is capable of surviving a first strike. It has also promised to build arobust command and control system. All this has been said before . If India’s declaration of defensive intent carries some weight, it is because of the restraint it showed during the Kargil war.

While releasing it, principal secretary to the prime minister Brajesh Mishra stressed that it was not an official document. It had only been publicised to provoke a wider public debate in the country. That explanation does not ring true. The ‘public’ is not sufficiently conversant with the details of nuclear policy to make a useful contribution. The one person who’s truly an expert on nuclear strategy, Admiral K.R. Menon, is not even a member of the National Security Council advisory board. It’s also being suggested that government released the document to satisfy the US administration, which has been asking India to spell out its nuclear doctrine for some time. But that also doesn’t make sense. For, as US state department spokesman James Rubin pointed out, what the Americans wanted was a dialogue on the outlines of India’s future nuclear strategy, especially on its concept of a minimum deterrent. What they got instead was a public announcement.

It is difficult not to conclude, then, that the announcement is meant primarily as a vote-getter. Its purpose is not so much to involve the public as to remind it that it was the BJP which took the plunge, turned India nuclear and prevented Pakistan from blackmailing India into accepting a stalemate in Kargil. The claim is justified. Had India’s demonstrated capability been the single crude device of ’74, the army would not have had sufficient confidence in the country’s nuclear capability to threaten Pakistan with all-out war, as it did, in order to pin its forces down and prevent reinforcement of the Kargil sector. But there was no need to remind the Indian electorate of all this.

Thus, while the government may have gained very little politically from the declaration, it has created fresh complications for itself in the global arena. It has forced the US and China to reiterate their public stands on India’s nuclear ambitions. This has again put India at loggerheads with the two just when, for completely diff e rent reasons, an oppor-tunity had arisen for constructing a new relationship with them. China has been seriously disturbed, first by the implications of the N AT O attack on Kosovo, and then by the Taiwan president Lee Teng -Hui’s attempt to take one more step towards complete independence while it is pre-occupied with its economic problems. Beijing is thus more convinced than ever that the world needs to be multi-polar if it is to remain stable. And it is looking once again towards India to support its stand.

SO far as the US and G-8 are concerned, India’s restraint in Kargil has been more reassuring than a score of declarations. In a sense, India has almost won for itself a place in the big league that it has so long sought. But that place entails not just rights but also responsibilities. Chief of these is the willingness to discuss all issues, to explain one’s fears and aspirations freely and to listen to what others have to say without feeling that every disagreement or admonition is an infringement of India’s sovereignty. 

A public declaration might still have served some purpose if it had re flected lessons India learned from and since Kargil. To begin with, this was an excellent opportunity to remind the world of the fact that nuclear weapons are ultimately a safeguard only against insanity. No rational nuclear power has been able to use nuclear weapons against a non-nuclear country, despite the severest provocation. Sadly, Pakistan does not fall into the category of rational nuclear powers. Not only is it explicitly committed to first use, in support of a deliberate attempt to change the status quo in South Asia, but the fact that it took only 17 days after Pokhran to explode not five but six bombs shows that it had these ready for use. Thus demonstrating a credible nuclear deterrent had, by ’98, become imperative for India.

But this has two corollaries which, had India spelt them out, would have been vastly reassuring to the world. The first is that since China is a rational state, India explicitly does not apprehend a nuclear threat from it. Second, since it also considers the US and the rest of G-8 to be rational states, it also does not entertain fears on their account. As a result, while it will continue its technological development of delivery systems, it will not arm those that can threaten either China or the rest of the world. Such a declaration would have left a large number of potential scenarios to be examined, but it would have opened the way to doing it in tacit cooperation with the major powers instead of in isolation from, and possibly in confrontation with, them.