(Nuclear) testing times in India and Pakistan
South Asia on a short fuse
Terry Conway for Socialist Outlook interviewed leading Indian anti-nuclear campaigers Achin Vanaik and Praful Bidwal during their recent visit to London.
Their book New Nukes: India, Pakistan and Global Disarmament is newly published by Signal Books at £12.99.
SO: It seemed at the end of the cold war that the nuclear question was not so important any more. What happened?
PB: There were positive developments: a new kind of movement emerged on nuclear disarmament, not just around arms control. Nuclear weapons were reduced from 70,000-100,000 at the peak around 30,000.
Tactical nuclear weapons were removed from warships, even though this was not formalised by treaty. Three countries abandoned nuclear weapons; Byelorussia, Kazakhstan and Ukraine, while South Africa, Brazil and Argentina pulled back from threshold status. Two nuclear weapons free zones were set up: through the Bangkok treaty of South East Asia and the treaty of Pelindaba in Africa.
These were positive developments but in the last two or three years things have almost ground to a halt.
You had a series of negative developments: in 1995 there was an indefinite extension of the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty, then there was the expansion of NATO, then of course the India/Pakistan tests.
If there was to be one simple one line answer as to why this has happened it is that after the end of the cold war, in the game of nations, the United States has emerged as the unrivalled dominant power.
What you now have in the US is the emergence of a strong, aggressive unilateralist, isolationist approach which says : "we're the top dog and nobody else can rival us. To justify the retention of nuclear weapons they invent all sorts of rogue states.
Now the crucial issue, apart from the US senate non-ratification of the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty (CTBT) is the whole question of the National Ballistic Missile Defence . This is justified with rhetoric- we want to make the United States of America safe in this particular way and we're going to go ahead - we don't care what other countries want whether its Russia or the Chinese or anybody else. Behind this is a deeper ambition of trying to control space - the United States is now dominant and pretty sure of dominance for the future - and space is also a domain that it wants to move towards. That's the kind of political perspective I think is driving the situation.
SO: There is some debate about how much the Indian/Pakistan tests came out of a continuity of Indian policy and how much they represented a rupture. Your book details the slow evolution of a build up of pressure in the context of which the rupture eventually took place. Could the tests as only have happened under a BJP government? Are the two things intrinsically linked?
AV : Its hard to speculate about what might have been - I think its more productive to say that there was both continuity and a rupture.
There was continuity in the preparations. From the 60s onwards India started to acquire a nuclear weapons capability and then to upgrade. Capability was established and demonstrated in May 1974 when India conducted its first nuclear test. However they claimed, disingenuously , that this was "a peaceful explosion".
Way back in the 50s, India built a nuclear reactor called Sirus - the Canada/India research reactor. This was funded partly by the US who donated the heavy water - and the Canadians designed it. The Indian government signed an agreement with Canada and the US which said that the products of Sirus would only be used for peaceful purposes.
But then, against this agreement, they used the product in the 1974 tests which is why they claimed it was a "peaceful" test. However having acquired this capability they didn't peruse further testing, nor did they say they were going to make the bomb.
In part the continuity can be explained by the very logic of acquiring a nuclear weapons capability. But it is also due to the temptation of successive Indian governments to seek a better bargain within the global nuclear order. This was accompanied by the growing hold of a certain type of nationalism on India society, especially on the Indian elite , through much of the 80s and certainly the 90s.
In this period you saw a marked right ward shift in Indian society and politics under the neo-liberal economic policies and structural adjustment programmes dictated by the World Bank and the IMF which was gladly accepted by the Indian bourgeoisie as its own agenda. The elite in India began to see itself more and more through a northern prism. It wanted to join the club of major powers and saw nuclear weapons as a short cut.
The rupture lies of 1998 in two things.
First a clear break at the level of policy - for 50 years before 1998, India rejected the idea that any nation, any state could acquire security through nuclear weapons. It made a powerful plea before the International Court of Justice as late as 1995 and again before the conference on disarmament in 1996 saying that India is opposed to nuclear weapons because they don't give security - ever. Nuclear deterrence was described as an abhorrent doctrine that is strategically irrational.
Between 74-98, the policy followed was that of nuclear ambiguity - along with active preparations. To move from that ambiguity to exercise of the nuclear option was a rupture. India announced that was developing a fully fledged weapons programme - that it was proceeding to acquire a minimal nuclear deterrent - a small nuclear arsenal with all the command and control systems and all the paraphernalia that goes with it .
The BJP was eager to conduct tests as soon as it acquired power. In the book we point out that in 1996 the BJP came to power for 13 days. It was in a hopeless minority in Parliament and no single party was willing to support it - it was quite clear that the government would collapse.
And yet the BJP's own leadership confirmed later that it had ordered nuclear tests even within that short period - in fact the tests were meant to coincide with the vote of confidence in the government in the lower house. This just shows the utter cynicism of that party. In fact these tests didn't take place because the Department of Atomic Energy wasn't ready with all the preparations.
The second time around that the BJP came to power and within a few days of Vajpayee forming the government he ordered the tests, again before he won a vote of confidence. Again it was not a forgone conclusion that he would win because in 1998 there was a minority government which fell within a year or so. We know that the tests were conducted without any consultation with the foreign policy or defence establishments - there was no question of any strategic defence review. The army and the services chiefs were not even told about the tests until two days before they took place. The Home Minister and the Defence Minister were kept in the dark until May 11 - the day of the first round of tests.
The BJP have a peculiar obsession with nuclear weapons. The party and its predeccessor - the Jan Sangh have demanded the bomb ever since the early 50s. The Jan Sangh in its very first manifesto demanded that India crossed the nuclear threshold. Of course this had nothing to do with the security environment because Chinas nuclear tests didn't take place till 1964 .
So you have both a continuity of preparation but also a rupture at the doctrinal and political level.
SO: When the tests took place, the only images we saw in the British media, was of the small minority of the elite celebrating. What was the response on the ground? Were people shocked that the BJP moved so quickly?
PB: The initial image that that was broadcast all over the world of people dancing in the streets of New Dehli and Lahore was profoundly misleading - a CNN-driven image which is sensationalist. That same week many more people protested against the test than celebrated.
People shouldn't have been shocked but many were. After all the BJP promised that if they ever came to power they would go ahead and do it. I suppose people have still not got a handle on the nature of the BJP and if you live outside it even more difficult to understand. Perhaps one way for an audience in the West to understand what is happening in India is to try to understand that what we are taking about with the BJP and the forces behind it, is that this party we have in power is worse than Jorge Haider's Freedom Party.
What you saw in the media represented a minority of the urban elite but for most people in India nuclear weapons is not an issue that touches them directly in their every day life. Not long after the tests there was a poll that showed that 45% had not even heard about them.
In so far as there was support for the tests, apart from this minority, it was passive support. If you don't have a clear idea of what you think then you take a lead from those you have some respect for. Given that all the parties apart from sections of Congress and the left said the tests were good then this is bound to have a major impact.
But opposition has been growing. There were demonstrations in 35-40 cities in protest. Last year you had the development of a major mass movement called the National Alliance of Peoples Movement (NAPM): an alliance of all kinds of groups some of which have a truly mass base. These include the movement against the Narmada damn and the National Union of Fishworkers with around 8 million members.
In the parliamentary debates that followed the tests in 1998 more than 2/3 of those that spoke opposed the tests - criticised the BJP for imposing its own minority sectarian agenda on the nation. And the BJP had only 23% of the vote so it doesn't represent anything like a large consensus of a broad cross section of public opinion. Its base is confined largely to the North of the country and mainly to the upper and middles castes of Indian society not to the plebeian masses where it has no particular appeal. Its a very elitist and hierarchically minded religious sectarian right-wing party which has never come anywhere near the Tories for example in terms of its voting base in relatively large chunk of the population.
There were elections for 4 state legislatures soon after the tests and the BJP made those elections into a referendum. It lost those elections very badly with unprecendentrdly high margins - so if it was a referendum the verdict was clear.
SO: I don't want to get into a detailed discussion either about the nature of the BJP or of Haider's Freedom Party, but the comparison is telling. Certainly if people in Europe though that Haider had his finger on the nuclear button they would see that as far more central to their political agenda. People need to understand that the BJP is precisely in that position.
AV: What I have been saying for the last couple of years is that while Haider only speaks, the BJP does. And in some ways that's even worse because while Haider might apologise for Nazism the BJP are practising in its own way an agenda for ethnic cleansing and communal polarisation in Indian politics and that's what its attacks on religious minorities including Christians are all about.
If Haider decided to do that I think he would face more than the sort of boycott he faces today.
SO: Can you give a flavour of how the movement has developed on the ground?
PB: The NAPM, together with many other organisations, organised a three month march from Pokharan - the village near where the test site was- to a place of Buddhist pilgrimage more than 1000 miles away in the east of India.
Every day there were people marching - sometimes 20 sometimes 200 - for three months - and that gives you an indication of the kind of movement. This autumn we will have a national convention at which 80-100 groups will be represented - a more organised opposition is beginning to stir.
There are two different types of groups involved in the Indian movement. Firstly there are those that have a specific focus against nuclear weapons and also against nuclear energy - many of the groups which are against nuclear energy are grass roots organisations concerned with the victims of radiation exposure to uranium mining in central India .
Like everywhere else all over the world when you are talking about uranium mining it's always the indigenous people whether its Australia with the Aborigines, whether it's the United States of America and native Americans or whether it's the tribals in India - they are the ones that are affected. It's their areas where the mining takes place - these are the areas where the reactor leakages happen so this in one type of group.
Then you have a whole other series of groups focused on different issues ; women's issues, civil liberties issues, development issues which also see the importance of taking up the nuclear issue.
What we are trying to do is move towards a national network of all types of different groups - and this is a significant development. We should be realistic and realise that at this stage we will be cant alter government policies on the nuclear question - instead we are attacking the legitimisation of those policies by the government. When we become bigger and stronger then we hope to be able to move on and challenge the basis of the policies themselves.
Since then we've seen much more opposition and I would say that a very large proportion of people in the liberal intellegensia are opposed to the tests. So Arundhati Roy, the Booker prize winner, wrote a very good powerful peace on "The Bomb and I".
Behind the BJP's nuclear nationalism and nuclear obsession is the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS) which is an organisation going back to the 20s with a totally and overtly fascist makeup. Its leaders are self confessed admirers of Hitler and Mussolini and of authoritarianism as a political ideology. The RSS controls the BJP ideologically, organisationally and in terms of its political agenda. The RSS's slogan has been " unite the Hindus and militarise Hindu society" and what better way of militarisation than the bomb.
The bomb is the most adequate, the most developed, symbol of a particular kind of macho, aggressive, bellicose, Hindu communal anti Muslim nationalism .There is a broad consitituency of opinion in India that opposes that kind of nationalism as well the significant current of opinion that opposes nuclear weapons so there is a potential for much larger scale mobilisations than we have seen so far.
SO: I was surprised that the Indian government used China as an excuse for the tests. I expected them to use the Pakistan/Kashmir card.. So what was the China card about - does this say something about how India is trying to position itself in particular in relation to the US?
AV: You have to understand the motivation for crossing of the nuclear threshold. In the book we argue that this lacked any strategic rationale. India's strategic environment had not deteriorated - it faced no threat which needed a radical change in its defence posture leave alone the embrace of nuclear deterrence.
It was essentially a search for glory and prestige - however false and flimsy that prestige might be -at the international level with the acquisition of the capacity to kill millions of people at one time.
India's leaders see nuclear weapons as a major currency of power - in fact they are not very effective. Because there was no real security rationale the Indian government tried to rationalise its nuclear weapons acquisition by creating a threat and that is why it had to name China and Pakistan.
The first public rationale given by the Prime Minister of India of the tests was not given to the Indian people but to Clinton. On the first day of the tests he wrote a letter naming China and Pakistan and so-called nuclear collaboration between the two which is of a very limited, episodic kind - it does not involve a relationship of a close alliance.
By naming China, India courted hostility from a neighbour with whom its relations had improved very significantly. India and China signed two agreements in 1993 and 1996 for peace and tranquillity on their disputed border which would have allowed the demobilisation of 100,000 troops.
Improvement in relations with China was almost the break through of the 90s: so wantonly naming and chiding China as a threat India invited Chinese hostility.
There is an essential contradiction. By getting into an arms race with China India will actually be degrading its own security and bringing renewed economic ruin upon itself. China is 30 years ahead as a nuclear missile power - its economy is three times bigger than India's and growing faster. It would be economically disastrous for India to get into a nuclear arms race with China.
But India had very few choices but to cloak its nuclear ambition in this whole threat from China bogey. This is because Pakistan, which India also cited, made 7 proposals for defusing the nuclear tension between itself and India during the 80s and 90s and India rejected each of these as dishonest, insincere and inadequate.
It was only prepared to talk nuclear weapons restraint and elimination within a global framework. It refused to discuss "regional" questions - though of course it was regional questions and supposed threats that they then cited when conducting the tests.
Now India and Pakistan have both become much more insecure because of nuclearisation. Far from promoting sobriety and maturity as some apologists of nuclear weapons have argued, the effect has been the opposite.
India and Pakistan went to war last year over Kashmir- one year after the tests. It was the fourth undeclared war between them. 40,000 troops were involved and 2000 combatants were killed.
India and Pakistan exchanged 13 nuclear threats and counter threats during this conflict- it was a very close call. This shows that it would be suicidal for them to cross the threshold through the deployment of nuclear weapons.
India has got into this relationship of strategic rivalry with China which is the now the country most upset by India's nuclear weapons acquisition.
France and Russia have more or less dropped their opposition although they are signatories to a strong Security Council Resolution 1172 passed in June 1998. The US has accommodated India and Pakistan into the nuclear club as de facto junior members and Britain of course has followed this line.
But China remains unreconciled - so you have the dangerous scenario not just of nuclear rivalry across the sub continent but within the Asian region as a whole.
If the US goes ahead with Ballistic Missile Defence this would have a serious knock on effect on China. China has 20 nuclear weapons that are capable of reaching the USA and these could be neutralised with a very primitive version of the missile defence system that the United States is unfortunately planning - these 20 missiles can be intercepted so China feels extremely vulnerable.
If this happens China is expected to build up its own nuclear arsenal. Then India could get sucked into an arms race with China which is absolutely ruinous and that could be a huge set back for Indian society as well as for the cause of International nuclear disarmament.
After the end of the cold war people high up in both the US and India began talking about the importance of moving towards a strategic partnership between the two countries. The problem is not that these views are insincere but of there is asymmetry of power between the two countries.
The Indians are arguing that the US should worry about is China as its main opponent and that India could be an important of counterweight.
Over Pakistan, they complain that the US gives Pakistan too much attention and pleads that India is more important - its a bigger market - a bigger power.
After all Pakistan is an Islamic country and we are not - so you should pay the minimum price for a better relationship with us by dropping your close collaboration with Pakistan.
But the US won't decide their perspectives because of what the Indians. All the lip service they pay to India is just rhetoric. India is not a significant world power - its not even the major power in the region - in fact nuclearisation has provided some sort of equalisation between itself and Pakistan.
And despite the pressure of the right wing Republicans, the US is engaged in an existing relationship of great complexity with the Chinese, which it is not about to sacrifice simply because India says - look we can be a counterweight. The Trade bill and what just happened with that is an indication of this - after all the Chinese market is far more important than the Indian.
Whether the Americans decide to jettison Pakistan will be determined by their views on Pakistan's continued relevance vis a vis central Asia and the strategically crucial Middle East. Any reassessment will be brought about by a change in the US's needs not by the spin of the Indian elite. India still has to prove itself -it still has to make the grade. It is true that Clinton's recent visit suggested a shift in terms of both these countries but we need to recognise the open ended character of this.
There is a possibility of a shift in US policy but it depends on a whole series of factors. At this stage you can't make a clear assessment of the overall trend.
If US/China relations significantly deteriorated then it's a different situation. If the Taiwanese demanded independence and this was backed by the US this would have an impact.
If the US felt that Pakistan was becoming too Talibanised, too Islamiscised - and this jeopardises its role in the Middle East - then there is some chance that what the Indian elite want could happen. But none of it is certain.
What is clear is that the US will decide whether there is a reassessment - and India is obviously not the most important factor that they have to take into account.