India’s Disarmament Myths and Political Realities*
Arming the Self for Disarming Others
India’s romance with nuclear disarmament has been a long one. The fact that Pandit Nehru was an avid champion of a world free of nuclear weapons injected nuclear disarmament into the very DNA of the Indian state. Even when India faced grave security threats, it saw, even though after 1964 in an increasingly rhetorical sense, an escape from the anarchic pressures of international politics in the high ideal of nuclear disarmament. However, this great passion for nuclear disarmament has created a rather strange psychological condition when it comes to India’s politics on the issue: over a period of time, it has come to be uncritically assumed in India’s world view that the country can never do anything inimical to the cause of nuclear disarmament. Even when India explodes the bomb, it is in the cause of a global nuclear zero.
Does anyone remember George Fernandez saying after the 1998 nuclear weapons tests that “India can now pursue, with credibility and greater conviction, our long term campaign to rid the world of nuclear weapons”?1 Politicians notwithstanding, a number of strategic thinkers have also argued that India’s nuclear weapons tests were a service in the cause of nuclear disarmament. 3 By proclaiming artificial instability at the nuclear level – Pakistan’s tendency to link all levels of conflicts with the possibility of nuclear exchange between the two South Asian neighbours – Pakistan has been able to fuel sub-conventional violence – terrorism and limited infiltration across the Line of Control – without giving serious thought to possible Indian retribution. In some sense, therefore, nuclear weapons have not only created an artificial parity between India and Pakistan but they have also created circumstances that favour Pakistan’s proxy war against India. Nuclear disarmament would therefore set the situation right and India will finally be able to use its conventional superiority on its petulant neighbour. 4 So goes the argument of nuclear disarmament serving India’s strategic interests.
However, people who make such an argument do not understand strategy nor have a comprehensive understanding of what India’s real interests are. Strategy is never made in a vacuum; it is a dialectic shaped as much by the actions and interests of the other side, as it is defined by one’s own goals and resources. And if this is the nature of strategy, to think that Pakistan would accept nuclear disarmament because it serves India’s strategic interests is to engage in an exercise in self-deception. The very fact that India remains threat number-one for Pakistan is reason enough for the latter to hold on to its nuclear weapons and more dearly than ever.
Many would argue that if all causes of animosity between India and Pakistan – including and particularly Kashmir – were to be resolved, there is no reason for Pakistan not to embrace nuclear disarmament. There are two main problems with such an argument. First, identification of causes behind animosity does not make resolving those conflicts any easier. In fact, it often makes states realise the very enormity of the situation at hand and therefore restrains statesmen from any immediate action, insofar as states behave in an extremely conservative fashion when it comes to accommodating the interests of others and particularly that of their adversaries, until and unless the tyranny of circumstances demand so. Add to it the intricacies and ad-hocism of domestic politics and one can clearly see the problems in the argument. It is quite revealing that India and Pakistan, for more than 60 years now, have known well that Kashmir is the key to peace between them. This conscious acknowledgement rather than leading to a resolution of the conflict has instead led to many wars. The second problem engenders out of the very nature of international politics, which lacks any guarantee for the safety of individual states. In a self-help system, even states with perfectly benign motives constantly seek to enhance their security by accumulating economic and military power. The fact that India occupies a towering presence in the South Asian region with huge military capabilities is reason enough for Pakistan to be wary of India’s motives and intentions, not to talk about the particularly bloody history of the India-Pakistan relationship which complicates the matter further. Under these circumstances, nuclear parity has enabled Pakistan to effectively challenge India’s ability to coerce it even conventionally. 6 All that Pakistan did was to make shrewd use of the Kashmiri discontent; it cannot be called the progenitor of the Kashmiri militancy. Of course, the Indian political class has made Pakistan and the nuclear stalemate a scapegoat for its own political failings. Nuclear stalemate between the two countries has actually done more service to India than is otherwise realised; it has shifted our attention to our own political failings and the need to set right the internal political, social and economic order in troubled areas like Kashmir. Also, the lesson from the collapse of Soviet Union is there for everyone to grasp: nuclear weapons play no role in the internal politics of the state, where peace and order is essentially a function of the politics of legitimacy and not military hardware including nuclear weapons
Nuclear weapons, in a very different way, also help India’s diplomatic crusade against Pakistan’s support for terrorism in India. Today, the world, by and large, accepts that Pakistan is a hotbed of international terror and its involvement in Kashmir is deemed unacceptable by most. But the situation was not always the same. In fact, many in the West, for a considerable period of time in the 1990’s, sided with Pakistan’s version of the Kashmir story. However, nuclear weapons have an uncanny ability to alter political values: what is politically acceptable and what is not. Revisionism of all kinds gets the boot and status quo is embraced for the simple reason that revisionism of any kind might induce instability in a nuclear dyad with grave political consequences. 7 Also, since the status quo is easier to maintain than attempting a revision of existing boundaries, the former is generally preferred over the latter. The fact that the Cold War was ultimately won by a side which was considered to be a status quo power further cemented this perception among Great Powers and especially the United States. Here, the role of the United States and of the international community at large during both the Kargil War and Operation Parakram comes to mind. International pressure and especially of the US, many argue, was the real reason behind the arrest of escalation on both these occasions. 8 It is interesting to note that at the height of these crisis-situations, both Pakistan and India appealed to the world community with equal intensity but international opinion came to favour India’s position rather than Pakistan’s. Internationalisation of the conflict alone, therefore, cannot explain why the US and other major powers favoured India over Pakistan since both countries tried to internationalise the issue for their own benefit. The reason that the US sided with India and castigated Pakistan for its revisionist actions therefore emanates from what is politically acceptable and what is not under the shadow of nuclear weapons.
Second, some hyper-nationalists would claim that unlike India, Pakistan and China remain in illegal occupation of Indian territory and therefore, to be contented with the territorial status quo is against India’s fundamental interests. But then it has always been very difficult to set right the wrongs done by history. Further, if one goes by that logic, why stop at the boundaries which the British bequeathed to independent India and not seek the territorial integrity of Akhand Bharat, an expansive depiction of India’s true territorial extent encompassing some parts of Myanmar and Iran as well? 9 The material reality of nuclear weapons and the enormous destructive potential any territorial conflict going nuclear carries with itself, gives enough incentives for all states to at least accept the existing territorial equations, de facto if not de jure. This realisation over a period of time may also help in cementing this de facto status into juridically defined boundaries in South Asia. Even without use, nuclear weapons can create their own reality.
Hard Power Rendered Soft
Raymond Aron once said: ‘In the present world, every great power is identified with a great idea’. Churchill meant the same thing when he said that ‘Empires of the future’ are ‘the empires of the minds’. 10 The second reason for India’s constant support for nuclear disarmament engenders from this ideological grandeur associated with the proselytizing nature of great powers. In some sense, given the historicity of India’s involvement with nuclear disarmament, India has the right credentials to champion the cause of a world free of nuclear weapons. And with the rise of India on the global power scene, it not only has the moral authority but also the material power to drive the idea home. It also adds to India’s soft power, an element of national power so much in vogue nowadays. However, these arguments, like is the case with all sorts of propaganda, hide much more than they reveal.
First, no great power in the history of international politics pursued an idea that did not serve its interests. If Britain fought for open seas, it was because its trade and indeed its economic existence were dependent upon it. 11 And if for the United States the liberal economic order is a priority, it is clearly because it helps it to maintain its superpower status in the world. 12 And since all great ideas are under-girded by both selfish interests and military power, they have engendered both awe and ridicule in equal proportion. Given the fact that nuclear disarmament neither corresponds with India’s true strategic interests (as has been argued above) nor does India possess the necessary hard power to convince others about its necessity, championing the cause is at best a futile enterprise.
What about soft power or what E. H. Carr earlier called the ‘power of propaganda’? 13 May be, nuclear disarmament could help in augmenting India’s soft power and its receptivity as a great power in the eyes of the global audience. However, we should note here that when India advocated nuclear disarmament for the first 50 years of its independence, it remained confined to the backwaters of global politics. And when it actually began to pursue overt weaponisation after 1998, it has received unprecedented attention from the major powers so much so that within a decade of the 1998 tests it has even been accommodated in the international nuclear order. 14 Even though the real reasons behind the nuclear deal were geopolitical – the long term balancing of China – the nuclear tests were the political indicator of the fact that India is ready to play serious geopolitics based on realpolitik considerations and has shed its high idealism which always made the West and especially the United States shy away from even thinking about any kind of strategic cooperation with India. Nuclear weapons tests therefore signalled seriousness of purpose on India’s part and conveyed the same to the hegemon. Clearly then, influence increases with hard actions and not pronouncements about soft intentions.
However, there is another issue in associating soft power with the idea of nuclear disarmament. If nuclear disarmament is purely a propaganda tactic because it is impossible to achieve it in the first place, it is quite understandable and may be clever thinking on the part of those advocating it. However, when such subterfuge becomes the basis for India’s activist moralpolitik, the subtle difference between policy and propaganda would dissipate rather quickly. The import of this is not lost on those who belong to the non-nuclear world, which was quite evident at the 2010 Nuclear Non-proliferation Treaty (NPT) review conference when many countries, even from the non-aligned movement, reserved especial criticism for the India-US civilian nuclear cooperation agreement.
To put it simply, India’s quest for nuclear weapons engenders from a very different kind of logic: to rid the world of nuclear weapons. And it is because of this logic of aggressive benevolence that nuclear disarmament, even in the present times, claims an extraordinary place in the hearts and minds of the Indian foreign policy and security community. Clearly, if there is a proverbial ostrich in international politics with its head buried in the sand when it comes to the issue of nuclear disarmament, it is India. Rather than accepting that the imperative of security and the aspiration for great power status have driven India’s nuclear weapons programme, it instead attaches unnecessary virtues to it: recall the flutter in media and policy circles when the National Security Advisor defended the need for nuclear weapons on the pretext of national security at a recent conference in Vigyan Bhawan.
