India Brazenly Supports Bush's "Missile Defence"
Praful Bidwai
ASED, 1 May 2001
New Delhi, which abandoned its opposition to nuclear weapons three years ago by conducting test explosions, is now becoming a willing and active collaborator in the inauguration of what could be the Second Nuclear Age driven by "Star Wars".
The Indian government has enthusiastically supported President George W. Bush's "missile defence" plan. This has deeply divided the Indian political establishment. India's support is likely to exacerbate tensions in its relations with its neighbours, especially China and Pakistan. New Delhi could thus end up harming its own interests.
India extended a warm welcome to Bush's May 1 address-almost instantly. It praised his missile defence (MD) proposal as "a highly significant and far-reaching statement". India was the first major state to respond to the address positively, well in advance of the US's Western allies, and without reservations.
This violates New Delhi's own well-established past opposition to MD, reiterated any number of times over 20 years in multilateral forums such as the UN and the Conference on Disarmament. Less than a year ago, Foreign Minister Jaswant Singh had described MD as a highly "destabilising" strategy, which would lead to the "militarisation of outer space" and to a dangerous new nuclear arms race.
Today, he calls it a "new security paradigm", which "seeks to transform the strategic parameters on which the Cold War security architecture was built". To Singh, the Bush address signifies the US president's "desire... to make a clean break with the past and especially the adversarial legacy of the Cold War".
This deplorable and brazen renegation of an earlier, principled, position is linked to New Delhi's great power ambitions and the illusion that India will gain immensely in stature by genuflecting before the US.
India's reversal of stand has "exceeded the wildest expectations" of US diplomats in New Delhi. But it has evoked sharp criticism from the domestic Opposition, including the Congress Party and the Left. The ruling National Democratic Alliance, a 21-party coalition led by the Hindu right-wing Bharatiya Janata Party, has not officially responded to the Foreign Ministry's new pro-MD stance. Nor has the BJP.
There are credible reports of serious differences on MD within both the BJP and the government. The latest issue of Organiser, mouthpiece of the BJP's mentor-organisation (the Hindu-supremacist and Hitler-admiring RSS), carries an article critical of Bush's address. BJP-RSS ideologues might publicly fall in line with the government. But their resentment will probably remain.
More important, Foreign Minister Singh totally bypassed Brajesh Mishra, National Security Adviser, and a key confidant of Prime Minister Vajpayee, in deciding to back MD. Mishra is said to be extremely unhappy at this wholesale reversal of India's long-standing position.
Opposition to India's pro-MD stand is likely to be much more strong and broad-based than opposition to the government's decision exactly three years ago to cross the nuclear threshold and conduct a series of five blasts at Pokharan in Rajasthan. The opponents include many supporters of the Bomb, who regard the present stand as deplorable and abject surrender of national sovereignty on New Delhi's part.
Not to be discounted are those who oppose nuclear weapons in principle-on moral, political and security grounds. India has a small, but significant and growing peace movement, which attracts support from the liberal intelligentsia, and people's movements, trade unions and civil society organisations (CSOs). Last November, more than 120 CSOs and peoples' groups got together and formed a national-level Coalition for Nuclear Disarmament and Peace. CNDP has strongly condemned MD and India's support to it.
Even "middle ground" opinion has been put off by the turn in official policy. Many people belonging to this current had gone along with the 1998 tests in the belief that nuclearisation would expand India's room for independent manouevre in the international arena, itself marked by great inequalities and imbalances. Internally, nuclear weapons might exact a huge economic and social toll. Externally, they would set back the global disarmament agenda. But Nuclear India, many believed, would at least be able to stand up to the Great Powers, even to mighty America.
Today, that argument stands demolished. India is not standing up, but down, in supplication to the Power most responsible for making the world order unequal.
India's MD apologists advance numerous rationalisations. Some can be dismissed as frivolous or calculated to confuse-e.g. there has been no real shift in India's stand, or that Bush has replaced traditional "offensive" strategy with a new "defensive" approach. (In reality, missile "defence" is as aggressive as nuclear offence and Bush wants a combination of both "offensive and defensive forces").
The more serious argument advanced by MD supporters is that India will pay a low cost, but benefit a lot, by collaborating with the US on MD. The price is merely words (of support). The benefits could be substantial: entry into the Nuclear Club, lifting of post-Pokharan economic sanctions, removal of restrictions on dual-use technology, even American support for India's case on Kashmir.
This seems to be the main calculus behind the Foreign Ministry's decision to welcome MD as a break with conventional "nuclear orthodoxies" (which it is certainly not). New Delhi gambles that Bush's partial questioning of the Cold War notion of nuclear deterrence can be turned around to push for a wholly "new global security order", free of what India regards as the greatest "orthodoxy" of all: the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty of 1970, which New Delhi refuses to sign.
However, Bush has no intention of jettisoning the NPT. Nor is he against nuclear deterrence as such. Indeed, in his address, he underlined "new concepts of deterrence" based on MD. The "new security order" is wishful thinking by Singh, not by Bush.
Even within a practical power calculus, India risks a great deal by supporting MD. It will be seen by states with reservations about MD-i.e. by most countries of the world-as a "collaborator" of a dangerous plan. India's retreat from the disarmament agenda will rob it further of global leverage-and of credibility within the Global South. That credibility once derived from moral opposition to nuclear weapons and to hegemonism or Big Power politics.
But India's new rulers imagine their country is already a quasi-Superpower, or as the joke goes, a "postdated" or wannabe Superpower.
By collaborating with the US on MD, India will court the hostility of China which rightly sees itself as MD's principal short-term target. Beijing is already wary of India's nuclear weapons programme and the growing Indo-US "strategic partnership". New Delhi's support for MD will make matters worse.
In all probability, the US will not stop at India's support for MD alone. It will emphatically try to recruit India as a general and faithful ally or vassal. That would mark the end of India's formal non-alignment and its special position in the Group of 77 developing countries. India may even modify, or give up, its opposition to a major amendment of the Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty of 1972.
Even worse, India risks sharpened rivalry-not just with China, but also with Pakistan. Islamabad cannot be pleased with Bush's reference to "states for whom terror and blackmailing are a way of life"-in which New Delhi includes Pakistan. More generally, Pakistan is worried at what it sees as US indulgence of India and the growing proximity between the two, which is marginalising Islamabad.
Pakistan is likely to try to "match" India by courting the US with greater vigour than before. This could further erode Islamabad's sovereignty. Already, it has made big concessions to receive bailouts for its troubled economy. This can only result in greater resentment towards India and more embittered mutual relations.
India-Pakistan relations continue to be tense after the Kargil war two years ago and Gen Pervez Musharraf's takeover in October 1999. The two countries are already in an overt missile race. Increased India-Pakistan rivalry can spell grave trouble in volatile South Asia, the world's most disaster-prone region. The two governments exchanged 13 nuclear threats during the Kargil conflict.
India's MD collaboration will generate terrible suspicions in the neighbourhood of joint India-US "hegemonic" designs. Ironically, India itself used to campaign against "hegemonism" in the past. Already, there are serious misgivings about India's crossing of the nuclear threshold in violation of its half-century-long "principled" policy opposing nuclear weapons possession. New Delhi's classic stand castigated nuclear deterrence as an "abhorrent" doctrine and demanded that the manufacture and possession, not just use, of nuclear weapons be declared "a crime against humanity".
By buying into Bush's rhetorical rationalisation of MD, India could spoil its relations with what the US calls "rogue states": North Korea, Iran, Iraq and Libya. India has always rejected this categorisation. It has normal diplomatic relations with these countries and has just upgraded its ties with Iran.
India's likely benefits from supporting America's MD will be meagre, intangible, or insubstantial. More than 90 percent of post-Pokharan sanctions have already been lifted. Even if the rest are relaxed, and India is somehow recognised as a de facto nuclear power, this will only undo the self-inflicted damage from Pokharan-II. In other words, India will have run a lot to remain in the same place. This is no "benefit", only damage limitation.
As for the hoped-for "decisive" anti-Pakistan tilt on Kashmir, the US cannot be expected to go beyond general principles such as non-violation of the Line of Control, halt to cross-border militancy, etc. It is unlikely to give up insisting on a mediated Kashmir solution involving Pakistan, which sharply differs from the Indian stand.
Washington would be loath to wantonly losing Pakistan as a friendly power in South Asia, which has a special disposition and location vis-à-vis West and Central Asia.
India cannot technologically benefit much from MD either. It has no place in America's "theatre missile defence". The US plans to build TMDs in East Asia, the Middle East and Europe, not in South Asia. Its present demonology doesn't merit such "defences" in India's neighbourhood.
New Delhi's support to MD, then, could seriously compromise its interests and shrink its room for manoeuvre in the world arena. Above all, it will deliver a blow to the cause of global nuclear disarmament-in which, India itself recognises, its long-term security lies.
Copyright 2001 ASED
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