WHY did India, a
nation born on the principle of non-violence, decide to build and equip itself
with the atom bomb, the world’s most destructive weapon? Shivshankar Menon, the
erudite National Security Adviser, speaking at a global nuclear conference in
New Delhi last week, gave two reasons: The first “is the contribution that it
makes to our (India’s) security in an uncertain and anarchic world.” And the
second, he said, was that “on at least three occasions before 1998 other powers
used the explicit or implicit threat of nuclear weapons to try and change
India’s behaviour.”
In
his speech Menon did not reveal the details of the three occasions on which
India was threatened. When I called to check, he preferred to direct me to an
analysis given in a lecture delivered in 2000 by India’s renowned defence
strategist, the late K. Subrahmanyam. In that lecture Subrahmanyam had pointed
out that three senior Pakistani strategists had gone on record to state that
Pakistan’s threat of a nuclear counter had deterred India from attacking it on
three occasions.
According
to Subrahmanyam, the Pakistan analysts claimed that in 1984, India and Israel
planned to combine forces and launch an attack on Pakistan’s Kahuta nuclear
installation but abandoned it when Islamabad sent out signals that it would
retaliate with a nuclear strike. Then in 1987 they claimed that during the
Indian military exercise “Operation Brasstacks”, India had contemplated
invading Pakistan but was again deterred when Islamabad flashed its nuclear
card. It was the same year that veteran Indian journalist Kuldip Nayar interviewed
Pakistan’s top nuclear scientist AQ Khan, who revealed that Islamabad did have
the bomb.
The
third time was in 1990, when Kashmir was on the boil and war clouds loomed over
the sub-continent. Pakistan threatened India with a nuclear strike. I can confirm
that episode because along with a colleague I interviewed the late former Army
Chief Krishnaswami Sundarji in April 1990. Though retired, Sundarji told us
that Islamabad would be living “in a fool’s paradise” if they thought that
India would not hesitate to use its atomic weapons if Pakistan decided to
launch a nuclear attack. The US was so perturbed that it sent one of its
envoys, Robert Gates, to Pakistan and India to bring down the temperatures.
There
was actually a fourth time too that India was threatened with implicit use of
nuclear weapons, something Subrahmanyam also pointed out. That was in 1971,
towards the end of the Bangladesh war, when the US sent its nuclear armed
aircraft carrier USS Enterprise into the Bay of Bengal to warn India against launching
a full-scale invasion of Pakistan.
Menon
also cited the Enterprise incident to me as did Brajesh Mishra, the former
National Security Adviser, when I called him up to check on his list of nuclear
threats to India. So the logic given by Indian strategic experts is sound: that
given the nuclear sabre-rattling being done by our neighbours and the US, there
was enough justification for India to develop nuclear weapons as a credible
deterrent, though not as an offensive weapon.
My
own research on the subject, which I published in my book Weapons of Peace
(it’s out of print, so this is not a plug!), pointed to India deciding to go
nuclear much before these events. If anything, the threats of attack only
speeded up the decision-making. Though India’s first Prime Minister Jawaharlal
Nehru championed the cause of a nuclear-free world, he did give tacit support
to Homi Bhabha, the then chairman of the Atomic Energy Commission, to go ahead
with developing the technology to build the bomb around 1955.
Before
the 1962 Chinese invasion, when India had evidence that China was preparing to
explode a nuclear weapon, Bhabha apparently told Nehru that India should “take
precautionary measures” and optimistically estimated that if given clearance
the nation’s atomic scientists could make a bomb in two years. Nehru is said to
have brushed aside Bhabha’s offer. It was only after Nehru’s death in 1964 and
after China exploded its first nuclear device, that Indian scientists were
cleared by the then Indian Prime Minister, Lal Bahadur Shastri, to develop a
device for a Peaceful Nuclear Explosion (PNE) in 1965.
After
Shastri’s death in 1966, India’s nuclear bomb plans were put on hold for a
while, till his successor Indira Gandhi gained in confidence and stature. In
1970, Indira Gandhi ordered a reluctant Vikram Sarabhai, the then Atomic Energy
Commission chairman, to begin preparations for a PNE. This was almost a year
before the Bangladesh war. But the threat by the USS Enterprise did firm up
Indira Gandhi’s decision to go ahead with testing a nuclear device. The formal
order was given in 1972 and India conducted its first nuclear test in May 1974.
I
beg to differ with Menon on one point though. In his speech last week the
National Security Adviser asserted: “Since we became a declared nuclear weapons
state in 1998 we have not faced such threats. So the possession of nuclear
weapons has, empirically speaking, deterred others from attempting nuclear
coercion or blackmail against India.”
My
research indicates this statement is not quite correct. During the 1999 Kargil,
when Indian threatened to invade Pakistan, Islamabad did send out signals that
they may resort to the use of nuclear weapons. Brajesh Mishra confirms that
India did keep its nuclear weapons ready during the Kargil War but states that
Delhi had no evidence that Pakistan was preparing to carry out a first strike.
The
US, though, seemed most concerned that the Kargil War would end in a nuclear
conflagration. The then Pakistan Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif confirmed this to me
in an interview in 2004, when he was in exile in Jeddah, stating that it was
the first question Bill Clinton asked him when he met the US President in
Washington DC in the midst of the Kargil crisis in 1999. It may not suit the
argument put forward by some of India’s strategic analysts, but the danger of
India and Pakistan going nuclear in the event of a major war between them does
remain.
Send
your comments to raj@tribunemail.com
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