Author: Shekhar Gupta
Publication: The Indian Express
Date: June 8, 2002
URL: http://www.indian-express.com/archive_full_story.php?content_id=3974
Introduction: Calling Pak's bluff
could be first step towards nuclear-free future
On ABC 'Nightline', one of America's
most watched news programmes last Sunday, Pervez Hoodbhoy, the reputed
Pakistani nuclear expert and peace activist, and I, were asked a chilling
question: how come there is so little fear over a nuclear war in the subcontinent?
Are the people of India and Pakistan trapped in self-denial?
The answer, for now, was simple.
It isn't just denial that makes our people so nonchalant. It is a more
dangerous cocktail of denial, anger and ignorance laced with a selective
understanding of a bitter history. But, on second thoughts, is that all
there is to it? Or is there more to nuclear denial in our region than these
simplicisms? I would plead it is so.
That, particularly in the case of
India until not so long ago, there was a political edge to this nuclear
denial. We did not want to believe our nuclear status was for real and
had mentally resigned ourselves to the inevitability of a Pakistani nuclear
blackmail.
The logic was: yes, we also have
the nukes. But we can never be so mad as to use them. At the same time,
the Pakistanis are so mad they would use them as soon as a new war begins.
So it was best to avoid catastrophe. It was because of this touching belief
that we let Pakistan bleed us through terrorism under the umbrella of nuclear
blackmail for more than a decade.
Now, so suddenly and so decisively,
we have blasted out that mental block. One does need to sound a note of
caution on the perils of thinking nuclear dangers lightly, but it is quite
dramatic how, at the popular level, the fear of the nukes has disappeared.
It is also possible that the dawning of this new wisdom, a sort of nuclear
nirvana, will now actually help us avoid the prospect of nuclear war, not
just for now but for a long time to come. And, who knows, if everybody
plays their cards right, forever?
The past six months have seen a
decisive unravelling of Pakistani's strategy of nuclear blackmail. I will
bleed you through a thousand cuts and, if you hit back, I shall nuke you.
Then you may nuke me back in return, but I'm so mad I don't care.
Now General Musharraf is going around
announcing to the whole world that even the thought of using nuclear weapons
is an insanity. Earlier the Pakistani line was more like: what is the point
of having the bomb if you are not going to use it? And now? Please rewind
Musharraf's statements last Friday onwards.
To understand what has brought about
this transformation and how significant it is, not only for India but for
the people of the subcontinent, you need to flash back to the summer of
1990. This is when Pakistan first employed nuclear blackmail seriously
and India's establishment responded, first, with weak knees and confusion
and, later, with denial.
I got caught up in this in unusual
circumstances. While working on a very complex story on the increasingly
jehadi and pan-Islamic turn in the Kashmir insurgency, I was picking the
brains of Steve Coll, then heading the Washington Post's investigative
bureau in London. Coll, now the managing editor of the Post and one of
the finest foreign correspondents to have ever been posted in India (in
the early nineties), had just finished a remarkable Page 1 series on the
network of pan-Islamic funding. But, as he passed on some of the wisdom
of his research, he also pulled out a manuscript of Critical Mass, a soon-to-be
published book by NBC reporter Robert Windrem and William E. Burrows.
It had a whole chapter on South
Asia with a stunning revelation that in the summer of 1990, as the two
armies stood muzzle-to-muzzle and Benazir upped the rhetoric, Robert Gates
(later CIA head), on a peace mission to South Asia for George Bush Sr,
had been told by the Pakistanis to warn India that should a war begin they
will open it with a pre-emptive nuclear strike.
This apparently sent the V.P. Singh
government into a tizzy. The authors described South Asia as the most dangerous
place on earth and even though they had blamed it entirely on Pakistani
nuclear adventurism, publication of extracts from the book sent the Indian
establishment into a blue funk.
Even before the Pakistanis, we denied
the story, the kingpins of the 'security and political' establishment condemned
me as gullible, India Today, where I then worked, as 'immature', and the
authors of the book as idiots. The book was roundly condemned by so many
luminaries of our security establishment in so many publications that it
nearly sent Windrem into depression.
It is just that each time I met
him in New York subsequently, he had more material to back his facts.
It was much later that some of the
players of 1990 opened up to me. Yes, the Pakistanis had sent out a nuclear
threat. Yes, the V.P. Singh government did not know what to do and while
Gujral did defiantly rant to Sahibzada Yakub Khan, warning him of the perils
of this blackmail, the fact is that our establishment had failed to show
the resolve to counter it.
The result was a decade's proxy
war because this validated General Mirza Aslam Beg's doctrine of offensive
defence: take the war into Indian territory through terrorism and defend
yourself against Indian armed strength with the threat of nukes.
For Pakistan, therefore, the nukes
were not a final deterrent. They were the cutting-edge of an aggressive
doctrine.
Because we had never sat down seriously
to think these possibilities through and develop a doctrine, we responded
with the classical Indian waffle. And, later, when the revelations came,
we were too shy to admit this and lapsed into denial. This never happened,
we said. This is American non-proliferation propaganda. India and Pakistan
are every bit as capable of being responsible nuclear weapon states as
the US and Russia. And so on.
The shift that began in May 1998
with Pokharan II, has now acquired doctrinal maturity. The upshot is, Pakistani
nuclear bluff has been well and truly called.
The subcontinental strategic paradigm
of the nineties has been turned inside out. India has not once, but twice,
threatened a conventional military response. Only a week back Pakistan
waved its nuclear threat, but that was more a trial balloon, lacking in
the old conviction. Just three missile launches and one indiscreet statement
from a diplomat were enough to bring so much international pressure on
Pakistan that Musharraf has now had to do the damage control himself in
an unprecedented manner and in repudiation of the country's own nuclear
doctrine.
Today, not only is he underlining
the ''insanity'' of anybody contemplating the use of nuclear weapons, he
is even denying all western allegations that Pakistan even thought of deploying
them in the past.
At his Almaty press conference,
he even named former National Security Council official Bruce Riedel and
rubbished accounts of how US intelligence had picked evidence of Pakistan
deploying its nuclear weapons during the Kargil conflict.
If these revelations had come in
the nineties, the Pakistanis would have kept quiet, letting uncertainty
build while India would have gone on to the rooftops to deny it. If the
equation has now reversed entirely, it is something that people of both
countries should savour.
This phase of diplomacy has delivered
a strong blow against nuclear adventurism. It has also pulled the Indian
establishment out of the nuclear denial of the nineties.
The challenge now is to build on
this toehold in coming months along with the US and other powers, to further
reduce the risk of nuclear irresponsibility in the region.
This would be the real prize of
this phase of our diplomatic campaign powered by the military posture.
In comparison, the near-term objective of a Kashmir election is a mere
consolation prize.
If the objective is durable peace,
nuclear stability and eventual settlement of the Kashmir problem, the route
now will have to be more politics, more diplomacy and more networking with
world powers who fear nuclear irresponsibility much more than routine terrorism.
