Right-Wing Party Hardens Nuclear Stance
Praful Bidwai
InterPress Service, 4 April 1998
India's nuclear weapons policy has hardened significantly under the Hindu fundamentalist, right-wing, Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP)-led coalition government.
The coalition's post-election programme, called National Agenda for Governance (NAG), says it will "re-evaluate the country's nuclear policy, and exercise the option to induct nuclear weapons.' Although the government has left ambiguous what it means by ‘inducting' nuclear weapons, or when this will happen, there is a move to cross the nuclear Rubicon and declare India a nuclear-weapons state (NWS). This would be a decisive break with New Delhi's stated policy of keeping the nuclear weapons option open, i.e. not exercising it, while working for global nuclear disarmament.
Exercising the option is a long-held, indeed distinctive, position of the BJP, which it has now imposed on its 20-odd regional allies, most of whom are regional parties with no crystallised positions on national security issues. The BJP is dead-serious about overt nuclearisation because it compromised on several political issues, such as changing personal laws, building a temple at Ayodhya and removing Constitutional autonomy for Kashmir, but refused to budge on nuclear weapons. It further indicated its hard line by appointing a super-hawk, M.M. Joshi, to head the atomic energy department. Doctrinally, the new policy represents a paradigm shift.
Through all its vacillations and shift of emphasis over 50 years, there has been remarkable continuity in New Delhi's stand: it has never conceded legitimacy to nuclear weapons, but always said they are morally, legally and politically indefensible.
India strongly opposed the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty, but that was done on the ostensible ground that the treaty did not go far enough towards nuclear disarmament. India also pleaded before the International Court of Justice at The Hague that the use or threat of use of nuclear weapons be declared illegal under international law. The court upheld this in July 1996.
New Delhi has always termed ‘nuclear deterrence'-i.e. threatening a nuclear strike to deter an attack-an ‘abhorrent' doctrine. It holds that nuclear weapons do not promote security. Even during the heated CTBT debate, it solemnly told the UN Conference on Disarmament that nuclear weapons are ‘not essential to the security of any nation.'
The BJP-led government has substantially revised these positions, and bestowed respectability on these weapons of mass destruction. It has not elaborated its reasons. But going by its top leaders' past statements, the logic is crude: India must go nuclear to be recognised as a Great Power; the size of its population justifies nuclearisation; if THEY (the Nuclear Wepon States) need nuclear arms for security, so does India.
The BJP invests these horror weapons with prestige and mystique. Yet, ironically, its nuclear policy is likely to degrade India's own security. In the extreme event of India conducting a nuclear test explosion, she will attract isolation, opprobrium and economic sanctions from across the globe, especially the United States.
This will weaken India's economy and political-diplomatic leverage and lead to restrictions on military supplies. Even in less extreme cases, overt nuclearisation will have adverse consequences as it will justify a ‘matching' Pakistani Bomb, thus introducing a new, wild card in South Asia's already precarious security equation. Given the history of strategic miscalculation in the region, open nuclear rivalry could have disastrous consequences.
India's crossing of the threshold also could draw a hostile response from China. Beijing may treat New Delhi as a nuclear adversary and India thus will be drawn into two nuclear arms races - the second with a far more powerful state against which it lacks a credible deterrent.
Finally, a nuclear arms race will drain resources away from urgent social priorities and diminish India's internal -and hence overall-security. And nuclearisation will greatly set back the prospect for nuclear disarmament and prolong the unequal global nuclear status quo, which India wants to alter. India's real security, as its policy-makers realise, despite the 1974 explosion, ultimately lies in a nuclear weapons-free world, the prospect for which remains brighter than at any time during the Cold War. Several recent initiatives have strengthened the political norm against nuclear weapons. These include the independent experts' Canberra Commission report, co-authored by Robert MacNamara, entry-into-force of the Chemical Weapons Convention last year, and the statement last December of 61 former generals, including Lee Butler (former US Strategic Command chief) calling for nuclear abolition.
India had a choice of either strengthening the momentum for disarmament, or cynically opposing it. The BJP took the second option, its success in imposing its nuclear agenda explained by changes in elite attitudes. The CTBT debate highlighted as never before the deep incoherence in India's policy of nuclear ambiguity.
Having characterised the CTBT as worthless, India also made it out to be an instrument of NWS hegemony. Thus, it added fuel to the hawkish argument: why defy the CTBT and then not exercise the nuclear option? This was only weakly opposed by the ‘middle ground', majority, opinion.
New Delhi could not resist the temptation of nuclear elites everywhere, to paint realpolitik motivations as ‘genuine' commitment to disarmament. Hence the hype about India alone being prepared to defy hegemonism while other states were taken for aide.
Besides, India's nationalism has recently become uneasy and insecure. Having failed to overcome problems of poverty and illiteracy, India's elite is looking for military shortcuts to high stature. In two domains - cultural and military - this has produced an aggressive orientation. Thus, the growing external attraction of nuclearism for the elite is paralleled internally by the growing attraction of Hindu-sectarian politics.
The BJP combines both. Mercifully, its vote is still only 25 per cent. But it has already pushed the nuclear debate dangerously close to crossing the threshold.
Copyright 1998 InterPress Service
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