Cecil Victor
Suddenly Diego Garcia is in the news again. Indian Defence Minister George Fernandes recently listed it as one of the reasons why the BJP-led coalition government exploded the nuclear weapons at Pokhran in May.
Situated about 1250 miles (1800 km) from the southern tip of India in the middle of the Indian Ocean, it is being used as the hub of the US Central Command (CENTCOM) Rapid Deployment Force logistical support network for power projection against nations in the Indian Ocean-Arabian Sea-Bay of Bengal littoral that do not subscribe to the American scheme of things.
The island, part of the Chagos group of the former British Indian Ocean Territories (BIOT), should have reverted to Mauritius when Britain withdrew from the “East of Suez” but through a sleight of hand, the island was handed over to the USA after its inhabitants were removed in violation of UN decolonisation laws.
It has since been converted into a major air and naval base stocked with war material on roll-on, roll-off ships and nuclear warheads on aircraft and warships. Its facilities were improved after the Indo-Pak war of 1971 when America discovered that the Seventh Fleet task force stationed in the Pacific Ocean could not reach the erstwhile eastern wing of Pakistan on time to prevent it from becoming independent Bangladesh with Indian assistance.
In the 1980s at the height of the occupation of Afghanistan by Soviet troops, the Rapid Deployment Force was constituted and it is a measure of American hegemonistic designs that its “area of concern” includes the Indian State of Jammu and Kashmir which means that its mandate includes military intervention there.
It can be said that there is nothing immediately new in Diego Garcia for the Defence Minister to include it among the reasons for the Pokhran tests. The fact is that it is the failure of Indian “constructive engagement” with the USA to ameliorate the nature of the American presence in Diego Garcia that has forced India to list it among the threats to its sovereignty and territorial integrity.
Now that it has been officially listed as a threat, it is to be assessed how India can counter its baleful influence. It can, of course, be reached with the recently-acquired Su-30s but the rate of attrition will be high. The Prithvi missile cannot reach it but Agni can. An Agni missile with a range of 2000-2500 km can take care of Diego Garcia as well as any concentration of naval forces (like the Coalition Force arrayed against Iraq), particularly one which includes aircraft carriers and cruise-missile dispenser which must come within the range of Agni to launch their aircraft and cruisemissiles.
It is not necessary that the Agni missile be tipped with nuclear warheads (except perhaps to ensure the pulverisation of Diego Garcia in the very first strike). To be able to take care of a widely dispersed “Coalition Force”, India can use fuel-air warheads with which it has been experimenting for a few years now.
These warheads have a yield just a little short of nuclear volume for volume of warhead size. All this in the realm of “keeping one’s powder dry”.
In the realm of diplomacy, having learned that trying to find a slot in the American scheme of things can be counterproductive, the Government of India has the option of resurrecting the issue of the Indian Ocean being declared a zone of peace (which is enshrined in a UN resolution), which would render Diego Garcia an unwanted appendage in the region on the basis of the logic that if the USA wanted to hold up a nuclear umbrella over its client-states it should do it either from its own territory (and Diego Garcia should be returned to Mauritius) or from the territories of its client-states.
It would then have to face the political consequences from populations that are discernible enough to understand that if nuclear weapons are bad for India, and if President Clinton must beg China not to target American cities with its nuclear weapons, the logic should be applicable to every nation of the globe.

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Courtesy: The Tribune: July 28, 1998