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चैत्र कृष्ण पक्ष, शुक्रवार, चर्तुथी

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Chances of an India-Pak nuke war are remote-The social context of the tensions between the neighbours has meant that hostilities are more in the form of ‘riots’


Date:- 19 Apr 2018


The latest edition of the Carnegie Nuclear Policy Conference in Washington that just ended featured American and foreign nuclear specialists chasing, as usual, theelusive nuclear catastrophe they are convinced is round the corner. There was also the oblig­atory alarm raised about South Asia. This year, the India-Pakistan "nuclear flash­point" thesis was tweaked to claim that India has abandoned its No First Use (NFU) com­mitment and adopted a strategy, in case of an "imminent" launch, of a pre-emptive "com­prehensive strike "against Pakistan. Such a course is being contemplated, it was argued, to spare the country the "iterative tit-for-tat exchanges" and prevent the "destruction" of Indian cities.

This hair-raising conclusion was not supported by other than extremely flimsy evi­dence—three unrelated statements by sepa­rate persons. Let's examine and contextualise these statements in turn. The erstwhile defence minister Manohar Parrikar stated not long after taking office that India would "not declare one way or another" if it would use or not use nuclear weapons first. This was said expressly to inject ambiguity of response that is crucial for the credibility of the Indian nuclear posture. This credibility was lost in 1999 when the previous B JP gov­ernment of Atal Bihari Vajpayee mindlessly made the draft-nuclear doctrine public, and later compounded the problem by replacing "proportional response" in the draft with "massive retaliation". Incidentally, Parri­kar's avowal wag in light of Prime Minister Narendra Modi's political decision to not ini­tiate a formal revision of the doctrine prom­ised by the ruling party in its 2014 election manifesto.

The second reference is to the former national security adviser (NSA) Shivshankar Menon's observation in his recent book that the Indian nuclear strategy has "far greater flexibility than it gets credit for". The doctrine drafters in the first National Security Advisory Board (NS AB) intended and so shaped the doctrine, especially Sec­tion 4, to make it "elastic", to enable escaping the limitations of "minimum" deterrence imposed by the prime minister in his suomoto statement to Parliament on May 28, 1998, before the constitution of the NSAB. The NFU declaration makes for fine rhe­toric, distancing India from the hair-trigger situation Pakistan strives for the world to believe exists in the subcontinent. It is in Pakistan's interest to talk up Hindu animus and predatory India, because it justifies not just its nuclear arsenal but its emphasis on first use of tactical nuclear weapons. In the event, treating NFU as a conditional con­straint is what Menon hints at.

The third piece of proof trotted out is the views of retired Lieutenant General BS Nagal, a former strategic forces command (SFC) commander, particularly his view that a democratically-elected government can­not morally risk the decimation of the Indian people by sticking literally to the NFU pledge. It was during Nagal's tenure at the SFC, it may be recalled, when the then NSA MK Narayanan publicly revealed that the military was not in the know of nuclear arse­nal details and, by implication, that the SFC was not in the nuclear loop. It may therefore be safely deduced that the views Nagal has developed was outside the SFC ambit.

However, certain developments in the nuclear weapons sphere do indeed make possible an Indian first strike. Such as the ongoing process of canisterising Agni mis­siles, including presumably the 700-km range Agni I meant for the Pakistan and Tibet-Chengdu contingencies. It, in fact, pro­vides the country not only with a capability for launch-on-warning but also for striking preemptively should reliable intelligence reveal an adversary's decision to mount a surprise attack. Nuclear missiles in hermetically sealed can isters are ready-to-fire weapons and signal an instantaneous retaliatory punch to strongly deter nuclear adventurism. Thus, all nuclear weapon states keep a part of their strategic forces in ready state, there being no guarantees that a confrontation or conflict with another nuclear power will keep to a sub-nuclear script. Having the wherewithal for preemptive action and launch-on-warn-ing then is only a reasonable precaution. Whatever their capabilities to fight nuclear wars, the chances of either India or Pakistan initiating a nuclear exchange for any reason are remote for the very good reason that western governments and analysts rarely acknowledge, because most of them are una­ware or wilfully ignore the social context of India-Pakistan tensions, namely, the fact, whether anybody likes it or not, of these South Asian countries being organically linked.

 

Divided communities, continuing kith and kinship relations, shared religion and culture, mean that the so-called India-Paki­stan "wars" are less wars, more "riots" — short periods of hostilities in geographically constrained spaces, hence the famously apt description of these by the late Major General DK Palit, originally of the Baloch Regi­ment, as "communal riots with tanks".

Courtesy: Times of India, 31, March, 2017.