India's Nuclear Mistake

...The subsequent posturing of the two countries, ranging from belligerent pronouncements to judicious statements about deterrence, seems certain to produce an arms escalation on both sides...

...I can recall pointing out, at a meeting of journalists at the International Atomic Energy Agency in Vienna some years ago, how the IAEA possessed information on India's nuclear industry that the Indian public was denied...

...The sentiment that India has finally taken its proper place in the world as a major force in Asia is very strong here...

...Years ago the Brandt Commission singled out this region as one of the "poverty bowls" of the world, along with subSaharan Africa...

...INDIAN intelligence has claimed that it conducted a series of deceptive maneuvers at Pokharan to foil American spy satellites...

...DANGEROUS CHANGES India's Nuclear Mistake By Darryl D'monte Bombay India's chattering classes collectively appeared to take leave of their senses after learning of the new Hindu-led coalition government's testing five nuclear devices on May 11 and 13...

...Pakistan, although strongly urged by the West not to follow Delhi's lead, nevertheless felt compelled to respond in kind...

...Americans, he asserts, know from experience that the disintegration of the Soviet Union was at least partly due to the heavy defense spending necessary for it to maintain some semblance of parity with NATO...

...As Delhi would be the first to declare, India possesses far superior missile technology, not to mention aircraft, warships, conventional weapons and soldiers...

...Pakistan will suffer more than India, but certainly neither country has cause to cheer...

...During his short-lived regime India reopened its dialogue with Pakistan in an effort to resolve their protracted dispute over the northwest state of Kashmir, made friendly overtures toward China, and signed a Ganges water-sharing agreement with Bangladesh...

...There were four times as many soldiers as doctors in India in 1995, as against nine times as many in Pakistan...

...On the domestic scene, the BJP is similarly seeking to bring about a fundamental change...

...In sum, on almost every level the decision to test nuclear weapons will cost India and Pakistan heavily...

...Islamabad believes Delhi's developing its nuclear weapons capability is the initial move in a two-step BJP strategy, with the second being to resolve the Kashmir issue "by force...

...According to Aijaz, after some minor irritants posed by the sanctions, they will be lifted and the likelihood is that relations between the two "democracies" will be solidified...

...The "people"—in whose name the government and media have sought legitimacy—were not consulted...

...President Clinton's not speaking all that harshly against New Delhi strengthens his contention...

...From both a geopolitical and an economic standpoint, the new government's attempt to make itself the sixth member of the nuclear club is indefensible...

...Pakistan, it must be said, does not enjoy the same degree of democratic freedoms that India does, and there is always the long shadow of the generals looming over civil society there...

...Anyone unfamiliar with the Indian intellectual scene could be forgiven for imagining that there was not asingle citizen who opposed the subterranean detonations at Pokharan, in the Rajasthan desert, 24 years after India's first nuclear explosion...

...Under the quiet diplomatic offensive launched by Gujral, Pakistan was becoming isolated in the world community and was particularly being pressured by the U.S...

...It is no surprise that most of the objections raised in Parliament to the tests came from ex-ministers in the Gujral government...

...In December 1992, it drove a wedge in the Hindu-Muslim coexistence that was the hallmark of India by demolishing the Babri Masjid mosque in Ayodhya, thus setting off waves of riots throughout the country...

...For all the talk of India becoming a nuclear "have," by humanitarian criteria it still ranks toward the bottom of the list of nations...

...As for China, the BJP has merely succeeded in rousing a sleeping dragon: Pakistan is no match for India's forces, but India can hardly stand up to the might of the Chinese...

...Pakistan spends 125 per cent more on defense than it does on health and education combined, as against India's 65 per cent...

...It is hardly any consolation that Pakistan in 1995, the last year for which figures are available, spent over twice as much, as a proportion of its Gross National Product, on defense as India did...

...Noris it really possible to do quick polls of almost a billion citizens, as some claimed to have done, when half of them lack the education or information necessary to fully appreciate the implications of so cataclysmic an event...

...Today," he concludes, "the U.S...

...for instigating terrorism in Indianoccupied Kashmir...

...Given that India is home to the largest number of illiterates in the world (barely half of the population can read and write, and only 37 per cent of Pakistan's roughly 150 million people can do so), to brandish nuclear bombs smacks of self-delusion of the very worst kind...

...In addition, a visit by top officials of the Clinton Administration, some of them from the Pentagon, shortly after the BJPled coalition came to power in effect amounted to an endorsement of the regime...

...Pakistan's late Prime Minister, Zulfikar Bhutto, vowed to "eat grass" if it would help his country build a nuclear device...

...Writing to outgoing President Fidel Ramos of the Philippines, Pakistan's Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif observed that the nuclear tests had raised regional tensions to a "dangerous threshold...

...Perhaps the most telling statistic Haq provides is the "opportunity cost" of increasing arms expenditure as opposed to using that money for social programs...

...Islamabad's test-launching of its Gnauli missile in April could by no stretch of the imagination be impartially construed as a provocative act...

...Quite rightly, too, when Fernandes raised the bogey of China being the number one threat India faces a fortnight before the blasts, he was dismissed by defense experts as an embarrassment...

...has identified China as the new power to be worried about...

...There can be no other explanation for their euphoria...

...Or that over the preceding decade it increased the number of its defense personnel by more than a fifth, while India reduced its by a tenth...

...The Chinese Army could have marched into Calcutta without resistance...

...According to the Brookings Institution, the U.S...

...The electronic media, glorying in their newfound ability to beam news all over the country using foreign satellites, went further, depicting crowds setting off firecrackers in the streets without showing one dissenting voice...

...Indians ought to remember the bloody nose they received at the hands of their vast neighbor in 1962, when Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru mistakenly ordered troops to launch an offensive on the northeast border...

...Or that in per capita terms, it spent $21 per head on arms that year as against $10 per Indian...

...Sharif's letter continued: "One has been accomplished, the other is now being actualized...

...The exultation expressed by an overwhelming majority of middle-class Indians is difficult to comprehend...

...Then it saw red when Vajpayee's letter to President Bill Clinton, justifying the detonations as a counter to the security threat in the region, was leaked to the New York Times...

...But India has more reason to be concerned about the immediate fallout among its neighbors...

...Vain blustering has been customary in both camps on this question...

...Because those treaties benefit the nuclear "haves," they lack any moral justification...

...Darryl D'Monte frequently writes in these pages on Indian and Asian affairs...

...As Haq says, if this level of defense spending in both countries were cut by a mere 5 per cent a year over the next five years, it could release enough funds to make universal primary education a reality within this same period...

...When it comes to the comparison between the two countries in numbers of teachers, India has a larger proportion as a percentage of its population...

...Now, painstaking diplomatic attempts to solve border disputes dating back to the 1962 Indian-Chinese war have been derailed, and Beijing is again claiming 10,000 square kilometers of mountainous territory—a demand that appeared to have been buried beneath the year-round snows covering the inhospitable terrain...

...The curbs on Western funds will hurt India's efforts to attract foreign investment, renewed in 1991 by the last Congress Party Prime Minister, P.V Narasimha Rao...

...Writing in a New Delhi newsmagazine, an Indian economist based in England came closer to the mark: He likened the government's action to the obscene gestures resorted to by old men in dirty raincoats to revive their flagging virility...

...wanted India to flex its muscles to signal that it could act as a bulwark in Asia against China...

...Aijaz believes the U.S...

...The United States, despite its criticism of the India-Pakistan nuclear arms race, spends almost half again as much on defense as it does on health and education—and at 3.8 per cent a higher percentage of its Gross Domestic Product than India...

...The 1997 UNDP report listed India 138 among 175 countries, and Pakistan one notch lower...

...The previous Prime Minister, Inder Kumar Gujral, who briefly presided over a Center-Left coalition, sought to make concessions to neighboring countries...

...For far from acting threateningly, China had recently discontinued development of its Dong Feng missile, which has the capacity to hit targets anywhere in India...

...We have now shown that India is no longer a land of eunuchs," they crowed...

...India had sought to maintain a balance between the American and Soviet blocs, though it leaned heavily to one or the other side at different times for different purposes...

...At any rate, the nuclear tests mark a basic shift by the BJP away from the foreign policy crafted by Nehru...

...India has in the past been a proponent of the doctrine of nuclear disarmament and owes it to the rest of the world—not to mention the immediate neighbor with whom it has fought two wars in the last 33 years—to exhibit self-restraint and refrain from continuing to escalate the nuclear arms race...

...Such considerations aside, can impoverished countries like India and Pakistan afford nuclear weapons...

...Politically, the exercise was an act of sheer folly...

...would like nothing as much as a similar diversion of Chinese resources toward military expenditures in an Asian arms race...

...Currently it is redefining Indian society as predominantly Hindu...

...In terms of geopolitics, there was absolutely no provocation for the testing, in spite of all the doubletalk by Prime Minister Atal Bihari Vajpayee of the Hindu chauvinist Indian People's Party (BJP) and his henchmen—including the former Socialist firebrand and now Defense Minister, George Fernandes...

...After the tests, however, the very same experts, many from the government-funded Institute of Defense Studies and Analyses in Delhi, found new merit in his arguments...

...In his view, the U.S...

...has spent $5 trillion on nuclear weapons between 1940 and 1995...

...Even a freeze on military expenditures could free the resources necessary to achieve this goal...

...Despite some sobering up and criticism from the opposition in Parliament even before Pakistan predictably responded on May 28 and 31 by holding nuclear tests as well, the prevailing attitude has remained one of near-unanimous approval—but this, of course, refers to the business elite and some sections of the intelligentsia...

...Together, the two spend as much as $ 12 billion on defense, almost all of it on conventional, nonnuclear armaments and military personnel...

...Aijaz Ahmed, a perceptive Senior Fellow of the Center for Contemporary Studies at the Nehru Memorial Museum in Delhi, dismisses the boast...

...In this year's report on Asia, Haq turns his inquisitorial gaze on how military spending in the two countries diverts funds from social sectors...

...The one person who has systematically documented what it costs both India and Pakistan to arm themselves—largely against each other—is Mahbub ul Haq, the former Pakistani Finance Minister who has authored several United Nations Development Program (UNDP) reports...

...In fact, tensions had been on the wane...

...At present he operates from a similar Human Development Center in Karachi that restricts itself to following armaments trends in South Asia...

...Other events supporting this scenario include the stepping up of the international campaign for Tibetan freedom (with Richard Gere providing a high-profile presence in India not long ago...

...That the United States was hypocritical in imposing economic sanctions, since it turned a blind eye to nuclear saber-rattling by China in earlier years, doesn't matter...

...To give the impression of occupying the moral high ground, the BJP is playing the underdog by insisting that the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty and the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty are discriminatory...

...Moreover, it would do far more than a few explosions in the bowels of the earth, however sophisticated, to make Indians walk with their heads held high...

...Nor does he buy the CIA's admission that it had pictures of the test preparations but somehow neglected to look at them...

...It is important to note, though, that the Indian Atomic Energy Act specifically permits the nuclear establishment to withhold information from Parliament and answer only to the Cabinet...

...China greeted India's act with some bemusement—as if surprised that Delhi had tried to enter the nuclear club without an invitation...

...But the government's strategy has less to do with morality than with striking an anti-imperialist stance that will go down well with the Indian masses, long accustomed to the Congress Party's stressing its freeing the country from British rule...

...The press, practically without exception, endorsed the notion in adulatory headlines and ringing editorials...

...Indeed, the sexual parallel has also been alluded to by the hard-core Hindus of the National SelfReliance Organization, one of whose cadres assassinated Mahatma Gandhi in 1948...