Washington Report on Middle East Affairs, July/August 1998, Pages 17-18

Three Views

MUSHROOM CLOUDS OVER SOUTH ASIA

An India-Born American Muslim

Nuclear Bombs Also Exploded Myths About India

By M.M. Ali

The fabric of Ahisma (peace) that was so meticulously woven by the founders of modern India, Mohandas K. Gandhi and Jawaharlal Nehru, and their successors for more than 50 painful years was ruthlessly pushed through the shredder by Indian Prime Minister Atal Behari Vajpayee and Home Minister L.K. Advani in the hours between May 11 and 13 when India tested five atomic devices. Thus within three months of assuming power, Vajpayee’s Hindu nationalist Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) started one of the most populous regions on earth down a perilous nuclear weapons path that disregards the needs of its own teeming millions, threatens the peace of the world, and defies international opinion.

It was an extraordinarily dangerous way to consolidate the extremist BJP’s political position at home, and a seemingly high price to pay to enter the world’s nuclear club. India’s primary gain, and an extremely ephemeral one at that, was in briefly intimidating its traditional rival, Pakistan, before the latter launched a counteraction of its own.

The initial euphoria with which Vajpayee’s countrymen welcomed the tests evaporated and the egos of the Indian leaders deflated rapidly when Pakistan reacted within two weeks with six tests of its own. Declaring that “we were left with no other choices,” Pakistani Prime Minister Mian Nawaz Sharif said, “We have now settled the score with India,” and warned New Delhi of “dire consequences” should it engage in any “misadventure.”

Commenting on the May 28 retaliatory tests, U.S. President Bill Clinton said that Pakistan, in his opinion, had “missed a priceless opportunity” to gain from India’s initial mistake. Others, however, thought it was the United States and not Pakistan that had lost the opportunity. As The Washington Post put it in a May 29 editorial: “Restraint was urged on Pakistan after India conducted five nuclear tests. But those doing the urging had to know their appeal was hollow...Pakistan, feeling that nothing less than its survival was at stake, was being asked to give up a matching nuclear option in return for an uncertain set of international guarantees.”

In fact, Pakistan had already sent a team to negotiate with the U.S. government. But top Indian government officials were stepping up their jingoism against Pakistan, and by May 27 “intelligence information” in Islamabad indicated that India was poised to strike at Pakistani nuclear facilities just as Israel had done against Iraq in 1981. Pakistan Prime Minister Sharif informed the U.S. of these findings, but to no avail. Therefore, he said, he was impelled to carry out the nuclear tests to let India know what it was up against. It no longer mattered how Washington or anybody else felt. The threat of U.S. economic sanctions became a secondary consideration for Pakistan. National survival was the issue.

India’s BJP-headed government followed its saber-rattling script for two weeks, with cameo appearances by nuclear physicist Abdul Kalam, the Muslim head of India’s nuclear weapons program, and Farooq Abdullah, the Muslim apologist for India’s occupation of Kashmir.

To the consternation of the BJP leaders, however, the Pakistani reaction left Indian citizens feeling as insecure as their Pakistani neighbors. Seemingly the nuclear route the BJP leaders chose to steady their coalition government had backfired.

In fact many Indians would be the first to agree that the concept of Ahisma was a technique of civil disobedience against the British colonial rulers of the subcontinent, and not an eternal truth perfected by Gandhi, and those who have followed in his footsteps since India’s independence. Mahabharath, the edifice on which Indian culture is built is, in truth, the chronicle of a series of merciless wars between rival monarchs. In the same vein, Indian professions of secularism have become a convenient facade behind which lies the reality of Hindu chauvinism now openly espoused in the declarations of the ruling Bharatiya Janata Party that are today so joyously hailed by many, perhaps most, Indians.

America’s Doubletalk

Given the public commitment of the United States to nuclear non-proliferation, it is difficult to believe that despite the scientific and technological sophistication at its disposal, the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) could have missed detecting India’s preparations for its May 11 and 13 nuclear tests. Detailing U.S. interaction with the Indian nuclear community over the past several years, during which Washington shared with New Delhi information concerning U.S. spy satellites, The New York Times reported in its May 25 issue that the “U.S. may have helped India hide its nuclear activity.”

India Abroad, a leading Indian weekly, disclosed that the May 18 issue of the U.S. publication High Performance Computing & Communications Week reported that “with permission from the U.S. Department of Commerce...IBM sold a powerful super computer to an Indian science agency that foreign intelligence sources suspect is involved in developing weapons of mass destruction.”

There also were many indications that the BJP was hell-bent on using the nuclear option, as proclaimed in its own policy statements. Not only had Vajpayee publicly proclaimed his intentions, but Pakistani Prime Minister Sharif had in a confidential letter alerted President Clinton in April to the visible developments at India’s Rajasthan nuclear site. Thus the world’s surprise and President Clinton’s public expressions of dismay concerned developments that were well known all along. What Vajpayee’s BJP government has done, therefore, is to open wide the doors of the nuclear house-of-horrors that India had not so secretly built over the past 30 years or so.

It is equally puzzling to assess the extraordinary pressures that were brought to bear on Pakistan to desist from following the Indian path. If the United States had been serious about nuclear non-proliferation, it could have held back on sharing sensitive nuclear know-how and done much more than merely offer inconsequential incentives to various countries to join the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty.

There were several effective alternatives to the option undertaken by Israel against Iraq that Washington could have used to dissuade countries like India from conducting the nuclear weapons tests.

Therefore, Washington’s expressions of surprise and anger were regarded with considerable skepticism in many circles. No wonder the European Community did not go along with President Clinton’s decision to impose economic sanctions against India. Nor is it surprising that Pakistan did not depend on U.S. assurances and promises. Learning from the past, Pakistan realized that it had to fend for itself.

Disappointment of India is Ominous

Pakistan’s follow-up nuclear tests, conducted at obvious risk to its own welfare, have frustrated BJP ambitions to consolidate its fledgling coalition government, to gain entry as a sixth member of the exclusive nuclear club of America, Russia, Britain, France and China, and to buttress its case for permanent membership in a reconstituted U.N. Security Council.

As reality dawned and two weeks of euphoria gave way to sobriety and fear in India, the Indian opposition that initially had seemed voiceless in the face of a dangerous but popular decision finally became audible. Former Indian Prime Minister I.K. Gujral charged in a scathing attack that the BJP had thrown the subcontinent into a terrible nuclear arms race that neither India nor Pakistan could afford.

Beijing criticized both Delhi and Islamabad and took an elder statesman’s reproving stance.

If anything, India’s gamble has provided Pakistan an opportunity to demonstrate its own nuclear capabilities under circumstances that can hardly be criticized, since it was not the first but the last in Asia to test its weapons.

Yet, indisputably, Pakistan is today the first Muslim state to demonstrate nuclear weapons capability. Although Pakistan has gone the extra distance to keep its nuclear capability away from the Islamic bloc, even from those members that could have lifted the financial burdens of nuclear weapons development from Pakistani shoulders, visiting Iranian Foreign Minister Kamal Kharrazi observed on his arrival in Islamabad, “Muslims from all over the world, are happy that Pakistan has this capability.”

Reports coming from various Islamic countries indicate a new pride among people on the streets. Nor can Pakistan any longer be accused of paranoia about India’s militaristic intentions. In fact, Washington, Moscow, London, Paris and Beijing would do well to monitor closely developments inside India, since it is difficult to predict what the Hindu extremist BJP government may do next to get out of the pit which it dug for itself.

Let not the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency say that it was caught napping again. The next such mistake could prove to be a very costly one to an area into which one-fifth of humanity is crowded. India’s BJP government has, unfortunately, created an extremely unstable military and political environment in the subcontinent.