India has tested its 15th Prithvi missile, and the chief of its programme says it was on the dot. Very soon, the Indian Army will be handed over the first batch of 15 or 20 Prithvis to deploy on the Indo-Pak border in Rajasthan. Meanwhile, Indian rockets have landed on a mosque in Azad Kashmir killing 20 innocent citizens. India’s incredible answer is that it doesn’t possess rockets with a 60 km range, and that the mosque was actually hit by Pakistan’s own rockets.
A fool can see that New Delhi is quaking at the prospect of elections this year and wants to preempt some of the Hindu chauvinist agenda of the BJP which has been clamouring for “teaching Pakistan a lesson” through the policy of hot pursuit. The rockets fired on the mosque has upped the ante. The two armies are eyeball-to-eyeball on the cease-fire line, and there has been exchange of fire on the LoC, with casualties, because Pakistan will not allow India to fence it illegally. After the Prithvi test and the rocketing of the mosque in Azad Kashmir, Pakistan is in the grip of war hysteria, our leaders are daring India to attack and asking the government in Islamabad to test the bomb, and if the polls are to be believed, 85 percent Pakistanis agree with them.
The United States and its Western allies have made it known that nuclear tests and development of missiles in South Asia would run counter to their strategic aims. India was recently warned against nuclear testing by the United States; but India went ahead and testes its 250km missile instead. At Geneva, it refused to sign the anti-test CTBT coming up for signatures later this year on a pretext that no one takes seriously. Now it is organising a campaign to sabotage an agreement that is pivotal to Western interests in the new global order.
The West cannot go on ignoring India’s defiant march towards weapons of mass destruction. It is enriching while Pakistan’s programme is capped, it refused to accept a ban on testing, it is testing its delivery system, and promises to graduate from short-range to intermediate-range missiles targetting areas which the West says are of crucial strategic importance to it. In Washington, expressions of regret are so far the only answer to India’s contemptuous flouting of “principles” that the US applies so stringently to Pakistan.
It is Washington’s mild-reproach policy towards India that sends the wrong message to Pakistan. Most people in Pakistan are convinced that India’s escalation of threat can’t be realiably countered through the West. During the Afghan war, when Western assurances were credible, Pakistanis hunkered down to Scud missiles fired from Kabul. Today, a less capable Prithvi is arousing dangerous passions. A weak a giddy government in Islamabad is under pressure from popular opinion to “respond” to the India threat.
Unless the US is willing to take a firm stand against India’s defiance, the policy of non-proliferation so far pursued in Pakistan may be overturned. India would like to see that happen. A nuclear test will isolate Pakistan from the West because the latter will apply unfair sanctions to it while leaving India free to proliferate. Taht would eventually mean a swathe of territory stretching unbroken from Iraq to Pakistan furiously preparing for war with a nuclear component as an anti-West regional deterrent.
India defied the NPT but failed to block its permanent extension, it will defy the CTBT and will probably fail to get many states to refuse to sign it. Pakistan sees this process not so much as India’s failure as its steadily rising immunity from the big powers’ promised retaliatory action. After a one-time immunity, the Pressler amendment is still intact as a country-specific instrument of retaliation against Pakistan while it keeps its nuclear programme capped and abstains from testing.
If the Western agenda is to prevent nuclear proliferation and eliminate weapons for mass destruction deliverable over long distances, it isnot affectively pursued in South Asia. And it is ineffective because of India, not because of Pakistan. In other words, letting India off the hook again and again means pushing Pakistan into a posture of defiance it doesn’t want to adopt.
Sanctions have been applied to Iran for lesser reasons. Why can’t they be applied to a state where the response will be more predictably positve, given India’s democratic set-up and an increasingly open economy? India’s economy is now more dependent than ever on foreign trade which is mostly with the West or states under its influence. Its external debt is over a hundred billion dollars and its internal debt is almost equal to this figure, while its state sector continues to make big losses, pushing up its deficit.
The leaders in New Delhi are weak and helpless in the face of a xenophobic nationalism that will not only hurt India’s neighbours but also threaten the security of the region as a while. Allowed a free rein, it will not only dictate terms to its smaller neighbours as an illegal nuclear power, it will also arm-twist the West into making it a permanent member of the UN Security Council. The irony of this blackmail will reside in the fact that instead of collective security, it will perpetuate hegemony without obviating conflict.