By M.R. Josse KATHMANDU: Twenty two years ago today – or, on 11 May 1998 - Indian Prime Minister Atal Bihari Vajpayee of the BJP addressed a press conference outside his official residence and made this terse announcement: “Today at 1545 hours, India conducted three underground nuclear tests in the Pokhran range. The tests conducted today were with a fission device, a low-yield device and a thermonuclear device…These were contained explosions like in the experiment conducted in May 1974.” (Strobe Talbot, Engaging India: Diplomacy, Democracy and the Bomb, Penguin, New Delhi, 2004.)” POKHRAN, 18 MAY 1974 A second set of tests followed two days later triggering an overwhelming surge of jubilant, even ecstatic, comments from the Indian media and public. Predictably, it set off a tsunami of protests from the West - and China - while spawning global speculation as to if, or when and how, Pakistan would respond. Before providing a backgrounder on Pakistan’s response, a brief note on what Vajpayee referred to in anodyne terms as “the experiment conducted in May 1974” may be in order.

COMMENTARY

As Talbot recalls, sometime following the 1971 war the Pakistan, Indian Prime Minister Indira Gandhi decided to take the first steps towards acquiring nuclear weapons capability via underground nuclear testing, as “many in the nation’s political, scientific and military elite…believed that India would never attain either full security or the full respect of the world unless it had a truly modern defense capability, and that meant a nuclear weapon capability.” Talbot - who later in 1974 accompanied Henry Kissinger, then Secretary of State in the Ford administration, to India - recalls this quote from Kissinger’s memoirs, referring to his meeting with Mrs. Gandhi wherein he told her: “Congratulations. You did it, you showed you could build nuclear weapons. Now what do we do to keep from blowing up the world?” Switching over to Pakistan, where Zulfikar Ali Bhutto - at various times, foreign minister, prime minister and president of Pakistan - proclaimed that his people were prepared to “eat grass” if that was what it took to get the bomb. As Talbot recounts: “In putting the Pakistani program into high gear, Bhutto hoped not only to give his country a way of trumping India militarily but also to give himself, a civilian leader, a way of trumping the political power of the Pakistani army. Instead, the program fell under the control of the military, which was, consequently, emboldened both against India and against Bhutto. He was overthrown in a coup in 1977, then hanged by Gen. Muhammad Zia ul-Haq, the chief of army staff who made himself president.” Notably, less than two weeks before Pokhran-1, Prime Minister Bhutto – as recounted in Stanley Wolpert’s detailed, insightful and provocative biography, Zulfi Bhutto of Pakistan: His Life and Times, (Oxford University Press, New York, 1993) – arrived in Beijing and was “soon closeted for an hour and a half with Mao Tse-tung and Chou En-lai, both of whom promised him military support, including in developing Pakistan’s nuclear capability.” “Teng Hsiao-ping”, Wolpert goes on to reveal, declared before the conclusion of his speech at a banquet in Bhutto’s honour: “Our Pakistani friends may rest assured that, come what may, the Chinese Government and people will firmly support Pakistan in defence of national independence, state sovereignty and territorial integrity and against hegemonism and expansionism, and firmly support the people of Kashmir in their struggle for their right to self-determination.” Following India’s first nuclear test in Rajasthan’s Thar desert, Bhutto detonated his own verbal explosion: “Let me make it clear that we are determined not to be intimidated by this threat…We will never let Pakistan be a victim of nuclear blackmail…In concrete terms, we will not compromise the right to self-determination of the people of Jammu and Kashmir. Nor will we accept Indian hegemony…From the day I assumed office, I have been conscious of the dire necessity of having a coherent nuclear programme.” POKHRAN-2, CHAGAI: MAY 1998 Fast forward to May-end, 1998 when all ambiguity regarding Pakistan’s response to Pokhran-2 vanished: at the Chagai test site in Balochistan, Pakistan conducted, first, a successful series of five nuclear tests on 28 May 1998, followed by another, two days later, bringing her total to six. Incidentally, six is exactly the tally for India: 3 tests on 11 May 1998 and 2 additional ones on 13 May 1998, plus the Pokhran-1 test of 18 May 1974. At the time, Muhammad Shah Nawaz of the PML-Nawaj party was Pakistan’s prime minister. Talbot’s tale is indeed engaging – detailing the complex nuclear disarmament and missile development dialogue between India and the United States, in particular. I shall however direct readers’ attention towards issues more intelligible to them, or directly impinging on Nepal’s foreign/security policy, including those having to do with China, the first acknowledged Asian nuclear weapons power since 1964. As we have seen, India’s transparent nuclear ambitions, and her interventionist role in the creation of Bangladesh out of East Pakistan in 1971, were among the twin determinants driving Pakistan’s inexorable goal of acquiring nuclear weapons power status, not to mention the key fact that possessing such a capability would greatly neutralize the overall military superiority that India enjoys, even today, over Pakistan, in conventional military terms. But, you might ask, what, specifically, motivated India on the horrendously costly nuclear weapons/missiles path – apart, that is, from her well-known, long-standing ambition to be acknowledged as a Great Power with all the bells and whistles, including a permanent seat on the United Nations Security Council? The most authoritative rationale was provided by Vajpayee himself, in a confidential letter to President Clinton (subsequently leaked) that justified the decision to go nuclear, on the basis of the threat from China. As per C. Raja Mohan, in his book, Crossing the Rubicon: the Shaping of India’s New Foreign Policy (Penguin Books, India, 2003), the missive goes as follows: “I have been deeply concerned at the deteriorating security environment, especially faced by India for some years past. We have an overt nuclear weapon state on our borders, a state that committed armed aggression against India in 1962. Although our relations with that country have improved in the last decade or so, an atmosphere of distrust persists mainly due to the unresolved border problem. To add to the distrust that country has materially helped another armed neighbour of ours to become a covert nuclear weapons state. At the hands of this bitter neighbor we have suffered three aggressions in the last 50 years.” Another revealing insight is provided by Talbot, in the following paragraphs. “In 1964, the year that Nehru died, China conducted its first test of a nuclear weapon. India sought security guarantees from the United States, the United Kingdom and the Soviet Union. The idea went nowhere. Washington regarded India as a country that was, if not playing for the Soviet side, then at least rooting for Moscow from the sidelines. In any event, the United States was not about to commit itself to going to war with China if there was another Sino-Indian conflict.” No less compelling is Mohan’s drumbeat of support, post-Pokhran-2, for India shedding its stress on idealism in foreign policy, replacing it with a more assertive and geopolitically-oriented thrust or purpose. Of particular interest to readers may be his admission that “contradictions between India’s global policy and its regional approach were real.” “At the international level, India rejected the notions of balance of power and exclusive spheres of influence; within the region it clung to them. India was strongly opposed to intervention by major powers in the internal affairs of weaker ones, but within the subcontinent it had to perform the function of provider of security to smaller nations and their regimes…India’s tough stance of imposing a trade embargo against Nepal and its interventions in Sri Lanka and the Maldives in the late 1980s contributed to India’s image as a regional hegemon.” A “provider of security to smaller nations”, Mr. Mohan? You must be joking! It does, however, brilliantly illuminate the real rationale of India’s implacable rejection of Nepal’s Zone of Peace (ZOP) initiative, first formally proposed by King Birendra on 25 February 1975. Indeed, an aspiring Great Power’s determination to flex its muscles in the South Asian neighbourhood and beyond can now be credibly explained as a post-Pokhran-2 manifestation. Yet, such reflexive muscle-showcasing by India - or Pakistan - can all too easily hurl South Asia into the abyss of nuclear confrontation, as Talbot avers, could easily have happened during the Kargil crisis of 1999. The fallout would not be limited to India and Pakistan. POLICY SHAMBLES IN NEPAL Allow me now to present a Nepali perspective on the overt nuclearisation of South Asia, après May 1998. Before venturing further, I first wish to recall an interesting Nepali footnote to the May 1998 saga of multiple exploding nuclear bombs in our periphery. Pakistan’s nuclear tests of 28 and 30 May 1998 coincided respectively with the arrival and departure of Indian President K.R. Narayan and spouse on a state visit to Nepal, as guests of King Birendra and Queen Aishwarya. Now, coming back to the mainstream of this exposition, let me remind readers of the following excerpt from a seminar paper I presented in Kathmandu in 2003: “The jettisoning of ZOP apart, the post-1990 era has unfortunately witnessed a seemingly willful neglect of all matters having a bearing on strategic issues. This includes conducting detailed studies on the impact of South Asia’s overt nuclearisation and the unresolved dispute between India and Pakistan over Kashmir, a political flashpoint that could trigger Armageddon in South Asia and beyond.” [Vide p. 59, M.R. Josse, Nepal’s Quest for Survival (NEFAS, Kathmandu, 2020).] That seismic development sent shock tremors reverberating around the world and caused Kashmir – the most important unresolved dispute between the new nuclear weapons powers India and Pakistan – to be described by many world leaders as the most dangerous place on earth. In contrast, no notice, in policy terms, was taken in Kathmandu of its manifold geopolitical and foreign/security policy implications. Official Nepali equanimity was not disturbed a jot even against the backdrop of Nepali nationals serving in Indian Army infantry units along the Sino-Indian border and the Indo-Pakistan Line of Control (LOC) in Kashmir. That bizarre unruffled calm doesn’t seem to have been disturbed, to date. At the non-official and media level, considerable concern was manifest, possibly since Nepal is located in close proximity of the three acknowledged nuclear weapon states of Asia two of whom have long-lasting, unresolved territorial disputes - and have gone to war multiple times - with India. Another worrisome aspect is that even if Nepal is not directly targeted by nuclear missiles, radioactive fallout from a nuclear conflict, or even a nuclear accident in the India-Pakistan-China theatre, might very well rain down on her territory. Extremely disturbing is the palpable absence of any overarching national security awareness at the policy levels of government, in the immediate post-1990 era and since. As I pointed out in a paper presented at a Kathmandu seminar in 2009: “A striking lack of security-consciousness among policy planners was manifest following India and Pakistan conducting successful nuclear tests in May 1998 – with there being no visible official cognizance of the significance of such a strategic transformation of the region. “Similarly, there does not seem to have been any official analysis of the impact on small states of the demise of the Cold War: after all, Cold War politics had checked the might and propensity of regional powers to pursue an interventionist policy vis-à-vis their weaker neighbours.” In examining the nexus between the official tendency to look the other way with regard to strategic issues affecting Nepal’s interests, it is a matter of concern that our ‘Indo-pendent’ politicos – and I mean of all divergent political stripes – are almost obsessively and exclusively concerned about power and pelf. No wonder, then, India has brazenly gotten away with even inaugurating a road right through sovereign Nepali territory! More on that - next time. The writer can be reached at: manajosse@gmail.com