Main Menu · Search ·Current Issue ·Contact ·Archives ·Centennial ·Letters to the Editor ·FAQs
|
India's decision to conduct five nuclear tests this past May, and the resulting pressure on Pakistan to do the same, can be viewed as regrettable from many standpoints. For some, these tests represent India's misplaced sense of priorities: its attempts to secure great-power status through military means rather than attention to the well-being of its citizens. For others, the decision represents a distressing break with the best moral teachings of Mohandas Gandhi and Jawaharlal Nehru, who, for all their failings, articulated an idealism worthy of admiration. For still others, these tests lock the subcontinent into a potentially destructive arms race.
Such weighty considerations ought not to be dismissed lightly. But the circumstances that led to these tests are firmly rooted in the geopolitical and strategic realities of post-Cold War Asia. To condemn the tests without due consideration of the circumstances that produced them would merely continue the kind of dialogue that has led many in South Asia to look upon the United States's protestations as an exercise in bad faith.
During the cold war, the nuclear balance between the united States and the Soviet Union served important functions throughout the world. Security commitments made by Washington and Moscow to their allies greatly reduced the incentives for lesser powers to seek their own nuclear weapons. In the aftermath of the Cold War, Washington has continued to extend security guarantees to various countries in Eastern Europe through the expansion of NATO. Erstwhile authoritarian regimes like South Africa, Argentina, and Brazil have given up their nuclear aspirations as they make their transitions to more fully democratic systems and as the apparent threats to their security have faded. Other regimes, like those of Iraq and North Korea, continue to develop nuclear weapons.
The nuclear ambitions of four states, however, were driven less by the authoritarianism of their regimes than by the inadequacy of the security arrangements they found themselves under. Israel felt its security dilemmas so acute that, despite a security relationship with the United States, it could not forgo the nuclear option. China had strained relations with both superpowers in the 1960s and developed its own independent nuclear deterrent. India has faced a formidable security situation. To the north, almost the entire length of its Himalayan border with China has been the object of a protracted dispute since 1948. The resulting war in 1962 led to a humiliating defeat for India. Although relations between the two countries have improved somewhat, the border remains a contentious issue. To the west lies Pakistan, with which India fought three wars within 25 years of both nations' gaining independence from Great Britain in 1947. China's nuclear arsenal has a commanding presence in the region, and China is widely believed to have provided substantial aid to Pakistan's nuclear and missile program. Pakistan has long regarded India as a threat, and with the breakaway of eastern Pakistan, now Bangladesh, in 1971, the smaller country's sense of vulnerability grew more acute. Neither India nor Pakistan has any security guarantee of the kind the United States has extended to Europe or Japan. Given the balance-of-power considerations in South Asia, therefore, the surprise is not that these tests occurred, but that they did not occur sooner.
Since gaining independence, India has sought to develop an autonomous foreign policy. This policy has resisted the international order that was created in the aftermath of World War II, which Indians viewed as protecting the prerogatives of the five nuclear powers, none of which displayed a credible commitment to disarmament. Moreover, this "Cold War" order seemed particularly incapable of satisfying the security aspirations of emerging powers like India. As a result, successive governments in India, whatever their other differences, have kept the country's nuclear option open by not signing the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty. The May tests, indeed, would not have been technically feasible unless previous governments had laid the groundwork.
Echoes in Islamabad: following India's nuclear tests, demonstrators in Pakistan demand that their government respond. MUZAMMIL PASHA / REUTERS |
But even though India long ago compromised the early idealism of Nehru's nonaligned movement, no previous government had been able to jettison entirely the high moral ground bequeathed by the nation's first prime minister. The Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP, literally "Indian People's Party") has historically been less shackled by any form of idealism and is not averse to playing realpolitik. But in openly declaring India a nuclear power, the BJP has simply articulated more expressly the desire for a nuclear deterrent that had guided Indian policies all along, but had never quite been owned up to.
There are many legitimate misgivings about the fact that this decision was made by the BJP. Indian Muslims, for example, have seen its brand of Hindu nationalism as perilously threatening: some of the BJP's factions were responsible for the demolition of the Babari Mosque at Ayodhya in December 1992 and the riots that followed. The party is still viewed with a good deal of suspicion, although more recently, in an attempt to broaden its electoral appeal and form alliances with other parties, the BJP has made concerted efforts to portray itself as moderate. Many in India regret the fact that the BJP was attempting to coopt India's long-term security concerns for its own political purposes. But to dismiss the tests and the long-range policy decisions from which they emerge as simply a display of the BJP's political caprice would be a mistake. The overwhelming support for these tests from the Indian public, most of whom are not otherwise allied with the BJP, suggests deeper motivations at work.
In recent years, India's strategic concerns have converged with its psychological anxieties. The last two decades have been trying. A spate of secessionist movements, a widespread sense of its declining importance in world affairs, and a realization that many of its highest hopes remain substantially unredeemed have underscored India's vulnerabilities. With two pillars of its self-image since independence--its state-led mixed economy and its central role in the nonaligned movement--appearing increasingly irrelevant in today's geopolitics, India has been struggling to redefine itself. Reforms carried out in the early nineties have brought a new vibrancy to certain sectors of the economy, but these have yet to be translated into enduring gains for all. Despite the fact that its democracy remains the repository of immense hopes, India's institutions often appear overburdened and ineffective in the face of the huge tasks that confront them. The uncertainties of the nation's emerging economic and political landscape, and its sense of being marginalized, have contributed to a palpable, if quiet, crisis of confidence.
These anxieties make the current politics of the traditional nuclear powers appear to many Indians to be as much about cultural authority as about strategic interests. The ability of the five nuclear powers to publicly define India's concerns as they see fit is considered inextricably linked to their own technological superiority; the powers are also viewed as discriminatory for not allowing India to act upon the kind of strategic considerations that they have acted upon themselves. But there is also a perception in South Asia that the furor over India's nuclear capacities rests on a series of unstated cultural assumptions: that the subcontinent is full of unstable people with deep historical resentments, incapable of acting rationally or of managing a technologically sophisticated arsenal. Both the stridency of some Western responses, and India's sense of being treated with indifference and contempt, stem from this politics of cultural misrepresentation.
The refrain frequently heard in India during the recent tests--about why the West trusts China more than India, given the character of its regime and its record on Tibet and on nuclear proliferation--was as much a question about the West's cultural perceptions of the two countries as about anything else. Apart from an occasional voice of dissent, Indians overwhelmingly supported the tests because they seemed to show that, despite the fragmentation of its politics, the country was still capable of carrying out a national project of some technological sophistication. Any talk of a new nuclear order that does not address this issue of cultural perception seriously and openly is bound to generate its own pathologies.
It has been quite clear for some time that india regards china as its primary strategic worry. But the West has insisted that the relationship between India and Pakistan is the only significant variable in any strategic scenarios for South Asia. To be sure, there are elements in both India and Pakistan that are obsessed with each other. But from the Indian standpoint, China's emergence as the second most important power in the world looms large. India's humiliation in 1962 has been made more ignominious by the belief that any emerging Sino-U.S. relationship would forever marginalize India in Asian and global geopolitics. It is not entirely an accident that India's first nuclear tests, in 1974, came after a thaw in Sino-U.S. relations, and that the recent tests have been conducted amid perceptions that Washington will do little to stand up to Beijing.
Relations between the states of the subcontinent are no matter for complacency: the disputed province of Kashmir will continue to generate tensions between India and Pakistan. But the two countries have not gone to war over Kashmir since 1965. (Even the most prestigious American news media continue to misreport that India and Pakistan have fought three wars over Kashmir, a "fact" that is then woven seamlessly into a narrative of a subcontinent waiting to explode. The 1971 war, in fact, was caused by the secession of Bangladesh.)
Moreover, there are other grounds for optimism. Many observers feel that the existence since the early 1980s of deployable nuclear weapons may have done much to prevent war on the subcontinent. One of the disadvantages of "nuclear ambiguity" was that it prevented both India and Pakistan from developing confidence-building measures that the possession of nuclear arsenals requires. Clarifying their status should now push them toward a more explicit set of rules to govern their bilateral military relationships. The irony of these tests is that India and Pakistan will now have to trust each other more than the world seems to trust them.
And, paradoxical as it may sound, without these tests, India would have found it politically difficult to reconsider its past opposition to the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty. It has already signaled some flexibility in this direction. It can now claim that it is entering negotiations after attending to its technological needs. In this respect it will emulate France and China; both those countries conducted tests just before signing the CTBT. Much will depend upon the negotiations between the United States and India. There is little chance that India will be accorded formal recognition as a nuclear power, but its government may settle for less. Principally the BJP or its successors will look for credible restraints on Chinese nuclear assistance to Pakistan, and the lifting of restrictions on its access to dual-use technologies (certain supercomputers and rocket technology capable of being used for military as well as scientific purposes). A government that achieves this much can present signing the CTBT as a political victory.
The strategic drama in South Asia is far from over. Both Pakistan and India need to attend assiduously to their domestic challenges and to the surer foundation on which power rests: economic well-being. But Pakistan and India are not alone in putting guns before butter. In the short run, the price of economic sanctions has been considerable for Pakistan and much less for India. But if the spring's nuclear tests can lay to rest some of the politics of self-esteem that has inevitably characterized the subcontinent, they may in the long run help both countries be more confident in their dealings with the rest of the world. The presence of weapons of mass destruction ought not to be a matter of celebration under any circumstances. But somewhere in the space between complacency and alarmism may lie the beginnings of hope.
Celebration in India: supporters cheer India's nuclear prowess in a rally at the prime minister's residence in New Delhi. AFP PHOTO / JOHN MACDOUGALL