Washington Report on Middle East Affairs, September 1998, pages 50, 94

The Subcontinent

Measured U.S. Reaction to Nuclear Tests Prompts Positive Asian Responses

By M.M. Ali

A high-level U.S. delegation led by Deputy Secretary of State Strobe Talbott visited India and Pakistan in mid-July. The visit could not have been more timely, since hardly a day passes without India and Pakistan exchanging fire across the Line of Control in Kashmir, further heightening tensions between the two countries. And already, although U.S. economic sanctions have not yet taken hold, economic strains are visible in both countries, particularly Pakistan.

Since Prime Ministers Behari Vajpayee of India and Nawaz Sharif of Pakistan were scheduled to meet at a regional conference on July 27 and 28th in Colombo, Sri Lanka, Talbott reportedly counseled them on the wisdom of signing the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty (CTBT), however, which both have resisted until now. He also emphasized the need for starting bilateral talks between India and Pakistan to resolve outstanding issues, including the Kashmir dispute. Nothing was expected, and nothing came out of the Columbia meeting.

The United States has offered to provide “whatever assistance” may be needed to usher in a climate of peace in the subcontinent. Other friendly signals also have gone out from Washington. The U.S. Congress has authorized President Clinton to waive the economic sanctions for at least a year. The United States also has told the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank that it would not be opposed to the resumption of assistance to India and Pakistan.

There is already a discernible, however subtle, change in the attitudes of Delhi and Islamabad. India may be willing to review its policy of not signing the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty and the CTBT and may no longer insist on universal nuclear disarmament as a prior condition. For its part, Pakistan may decide not to wait for India to sign the CTBT if Pakistan’s security interests are protected.

The foreign secretaries of the two countries are to meet with Secretary Talbott in mid-August in Washington to pick up on trends set in motion in July. It is heartening to see that the Clinton administration has not overreacted to nuclear tests in the subcontinent by dismissing India and Pakistan as pariah states, but is willing to do business with them. There is too much at stake in the subcontinent for the U.S. to indulge in political posturing for domestic electoral purposes.

India: BJP Support Uncertain

India’s right-wing Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP)-led coalition government is still not out of the woods. Its partner, Jayalalita, leader of the AIDMK of Tamilnadu, continues to threaten to leave the government if her local demands are not adequately met. Should she walk out with her 18 Lokh Sabha votes, the BJP government falls.

Meanwhile India’s Congress Party, led by Sonia Gandhi, the Italian-born widow of assassinated Prime Minister Rajiv Gandhi, is busy chasing down corruption and bringing younger blood into the organization. United Front leaders are looking more toward Congress than toward the BJP. The time is yet not ripe for toppling the BJP government, but it is approaching. The process could be expedited if BJP makes any major blunders.

The Smearing of Gandhi

The Indian nation conferred the title “Mahatama” (the Great One) on Mohandas K. Gandhi, who was at the forefront of the Indian independence movement and who had among his disciples men like Jawaharlal Nehru, India’s first prime minister, whose daughter and grandson both were serving as prime ministers when they were assassinated.

Both Gandhi and Jawaharlal Nehru from time to time espoused secularist views, and both were sometimes concerned about the plight of minority Muslims. Gandhi at one point said: “The claim of the Hindus that India has become a land of the Hindus is totally incorrect. This land belongs to all who live here.”

Whether this was sheer political expediency or the voicing of real conviction, it apparently did not sit well with the right-wing Hindus who now make up the rank-and-file of the ruling BJP. In fact it was a BJP leader, Nathuram Godse, who assassinated Gandhi for such utterances soon after partition of the subcontinent into India and Pakistan in 1947.

Today, however, Godse is being eulogized as a hero. In Bombay, the state government, led by the Vishwa Hindu Parishad (VHP) and the Rashtriya Sewak Sangh (RSS), approved a stage play to this effect.

There was an immediate negative reaction from Congress circles and other non-BJP groups, which attacked the move as an attempt to smear the image of the Mahatama. The national BJP then grudgingly intervened to stop further performance of the play.

However, the message was clear. The majority of the Hindus who have put the BJP into office remain supportive of Hindutva, land of the Hindus. The sentiment is widespread and simmers underneath Indian political life. The play is just a bad omen for the shape of things to come in Bharath (India).

Post-Nuclear Syndrome

It was a classical case of self-deception for the United States to believe that while it secretly tolerated one country, Israel, stockpiling nuclear weapons in its basement in a highly unstable region of the world, other countries would just ignore the danger and line up to sign nuclear non-proliferation treaties and abide by them.

The reality is that more than 50 years after the U.S. dropped atom bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, nuclear technology has become commonplace. It has to be acknowledged, however grudgingly, that the nuclear tests carried out by India and Pakistan in May 1998 are not going to be the end of the story. With thousands of nuclear weapons stashed in their closets, the United States, Russia, Britain, France and China are hardly in a moral position to counsel restraint on the issue to others.

Superpowers would do well to stop selectively applying the despicable term “rogue states” to some countries while ignoring the transgressions of others. Guilt of one kind or another is shared by many states around the globe, and crisis management cannot be conducted by playing favorites. The U.S. would do well to engage and cultivate new and future entrants into the field and not isolate them through belligerent policies, thereby giving them legitimate grudges to nurse.

The shortest and most direct route to the control of weapons of mass destruction is to help remove the areas of friction between countries, and not just ask them to give up their weapons before threats to their security are ameliorated.

The post-Cold War analyses of the New World Order stemmed from a distorted vision of things to come. The thesis that, with the collapse of the Soviet Union, the world had been secured from a global nuclear catastrophe and that from then on only localized or, at worst, regional conflicts would have to be addressed missed the fact that technology has no religion. It is equally usable by Christians, Hindus, Jews, Muslims, and adherents of all other religions and ethnicities, large or small.

Confronted with that fact of life, nuclear tests in South Asia or missile tests by Iran should shock or surprise no one. Dangers cause countries as well as individuals to seek shelter under all kinds of blankets. Extended sanctions and prolonged embargoes are not substitutes for addressing and alleviating the causes of real insecurities.

U.S. Expels Indian Scientists

The expulsion of seven Indian scientists from a U.S. government facility in Gaithersburg, Maryland, engaged in the manufacture of semiconductors (chips) and in ceramics processing critical to instrumentation and control mechanisms for missiles, avionics, atomic power and supercomputers was one aspect of U.S. reaction to India’s recent nuclear tests. Indian Minister for Science and Technology Murli Manohar Joshi responded by observing: “India did not want U.S. technology for making potato chips [but] it could do with technology for semiconductor chips.”