‘Hindu’ India and Nuclear Politics
On 25 April 1947, Gandhi declared: ‘I hold that he who invented the atom bomb has committed the gravest sin in the world of science. The only weapon that can save the world is non-violence.’97 On August 1948, the Atomic Energy Commission of India was set up, with Homi Bhabha, a nuclear physicist, as the first chairman. In 1974, India blasted a nuclear device at Pokhran but did not follow up. India conducted a series of five nuclear tests at Pokhran in Rajasthan on 11 and 13 May 1998. In response, on 28 and 30 May 1998, at Chagai Hills in Baluchistan, Pakistan conducted a series of nuclear tests.
There has always been a pro-bomb lobby and an anti-bomb lobby in India comprised of intellectuals, politicians, bureaucrats and scientists. The anti-bomb lobby pointed to the economic burden of becoming a nuclear power as well as to Nehruvian internationalism and the Gandhian ideology of non-violence. The pro-bomb lobby in the 1960s pointed to the threat from China. By the late 1980s, in addition to China, India also faced a nuclear threat from Pakistan. From the 1990s, the pro-bomb lobby has had two wings. The moderate wing influenced by Kenneth Waltz (proliferation results in deterrence stability) believes that a small number of nuclear weapons in the hands of India would stabilize the regional scenario.98 The extreme/radical wing demands a triad (nuclear weapons–equipped air, land and sea-based platforms) in order to achieve great power status. The two immediate factors behind the 1998 tests were Western (especially American) diplomatic pressure for signing NPT and CTBT, and the rise of the BJP to power. At present, the moderate pro-bomb lobby is pressing for a minimum deterrent, while the extreme wing of the pro-bomb lobby advocates developing a credible deterrent and overt weaponization.
Kanti P. Bajpai, in one article, analyses the Hindu roots behind the BJP’s ideology. The ideological father figure of the BJP is M. S. Golwalker. His view of inter-state relations is similar to the Hobbesian/Darwinian realist interpretation. Golwalker, following Kautilya and the Panchatantra, believed that in this world there are no permanent friends but only permanent enemies. Alliance with strong powers will result in enslavement. Hence, in order to survive, a nation must be strong and self-reliant. With Pakistan in mind, Golwalker said that it is always the Muslim who strikes first and it is the Hindu who bears the brunt.99
In Stephen P. Cohen’s analysis, the BJP’s bomb program is a product of domestic politics. Cohen writes:
One of the major reasons why the BJP and many secular Indians supported a nuclear weapons program was to destroy the image of India as a “Gandhian” or non-violent country. More practically, the BJP sought to undo Nehru’s legacy, with its emphasis on disarmament, peace talks, and its special opposition to nuclear weapons. By supporting the very weapons that the Congress party of Nehru and Gandhi had for so long opposed, the BJP was attempting to redefine India’s political identity along new lines.100
Jaswant Singh critiques the INC’s nuclear policy by saying that for thirty years (1969 to 1999) an overtly moralistic but simultaneously ambiguous nuclear policy and self-restraint have paid no measurable dividends.101 Similarly, Raja Mohan praises the BJP’s 1998 decision to go for nuclear blasts and simultaneously offers a critique of the INC’s (especially the Nehruvian) nuclear policy:
Thanks to India’s nuclear vacillations in the 1960s, India found itself outside the NPT, which by the turn of the millennium had near universal membership barring India, Israel and Pakistan. India’s refusal to sign the treaty had little to do with the in-built discrimination in the NPT, an argument that Indians would go hoarse in presenting the world and themselves…. If India had conducted a nuclear test before the treaty was drafted, it would have automatically become a nuclear weapon power like China. Having failed to test in time, India had no option but to stay out if it wanted to preserve its nuclear option…. With the nuclear tests of May 1998, Delhi ended the self-created confusion about its nuclear status.102
At present, the anti-nuclear lobby in India, influenced by Mahatma Gandhi’s ahimsa philosophy, wants India to sign the CTBT and to stop testing and weaponizing nukes.103 The Noble prize–winning Indian economist Amartya Sen notes: ‘Nuclear restraint strengthens rather than weakens India’s voice…. But making nuclear bombs, not to mention deploying them, and spending scarce resource on missiles and what is euphemistically called “delivery” can hardly be seen as sensible policy.’104
Bharat Karnad, a hyper-realist, asserts that ahimsa is not integral to Hinduism. Rather, true Hinduism, he says, like the military officer Nehra, is aggressive and ultra-realist. He believes that nuclear weapons (brahmastra in Mahabharata) are weapons for winning a war and not merely symbolic ‘dangerous toys’ for gaining political prestige and deterring potential enemies.105 He writes:
… the Hinduism of the vedas – the ancient Sanskrit texts that are the wellsprings of the Indic religion and culture, far from inculcating passivity, is suffused with the spirit of adventure and daring, of flamboyance and vigour, and of uninhibited use of force to overcome any resistance or obstacles…. These texts also conceptualize a Hindu Machtpolitik that is at once intolerant of any opposition, driven to realize the goal of supremacy for the nation and State by means fair and foul, and is breathtaking in its amorality.106
Post-1998 India’s nuclear policy also receives praise from Raja Mohan: ‘As a nuclear power India becomes stronger economically and acquires greater confidence in pursuing its manifest destiny on the global stage, the moralpolitik that overwhelmed the public discourse for decades has given some space to realpolitik…. India has begun to rediscover the roots of realist statecraft in its own long history.’107 Raja Mohan goes on to say that for all the claims that India has always represented the idealist traditions of foreign policy, its own texts – Mahabharata, Panchatantra and Arthasastra – are steeped in an appreciation of power politics.108
Jaswant Singh believes that a nuclear-equipped China has surrounded India on all sides. In the north, nuclear-tipped ballistic missiles stationed in Tibet target India. In the west, Pakistan is China’s ally. And in the south, in the Indian Ocean, China maintains submarines equipped with ballistic missiles. And Burma (Myanmar) in India’s east is also an ally of China.109 In his eyes, China, like a vijigishu of Kautilya’s paradigm, is following mandala policy in order to contain India. The effective response for India could be to adopt a counter-mandala policy in order to break out of China’s encirclement.
Both Karnad and Raja Mohan, like Jaswant Singh, favor using the realist kutayuddha tradition when conducting nuclear diplomacy. Karnad asserts that India needs a strategic nuclear arsenal in order to deter foreign countries from intervening in its internal affairs. In his framework, the United States poses a latent threat, and China is the more immediate and principal threat. Karnad wants India to follow the Kautilyan dictum: ‘My enemy’s enemy is my friend’. He notes that just as China has armed Pakistan with conventional and nuclear weapons in order to distract and deter India, India should arm Vietnam with strategic nuclear weapons in order to threaten China’s position in Southeast Asia. An Indian presence in Southeast Asia would also neutralize China’s position in Myanmar. If necessary, India should cooperate with the United States to aid Taiwan in order to threaten Beijing.110
In a similar vein, Raja Mohan writes that Bhisma, the great grandee in the Mahabharata, preached to the victorious Pandavas at the end of a great destructive war on the essence of alliances. For Bhisma, there is no condition that permanently deserves the name of either friendship or hostility. Both friends and foes arise from considerations of interest and gain. Friendship can turn into enmity in the course of time, and a foe can become a friend. It is the force of circumstances that creates friends and foes.111
Neo-realist nuclear theorists like Karnad and Raju G. C. Thomas are wary of any intimate relationship with the United States. Somewhat influenced by Panchatantra, they accept that real friendship can occur only among the equals. However, in the changed circumstances, limited cooperation with the world’s sole superpower is necessary.112 To an extent, India seems to be following the policy of cooperating with the United States in order to balance China. For example, despite India’s traditional good relations with Iran, in 2005 India voted with the United States at the IAEA Board of Governors meeting to declare Iran to be noncompliant with the Non-Proliferation Treaty.113
In 1999, nuclear weapons–equipped India and Pakistan came very close to war at Kargil. Mohammed Ayoob claims that Pakistan’s test firing of an intermediate-range Ghauri missile (range 1,500 km) on 6 April 1998 was the immediate trigger that led to India’s second series of nuclear tests at Pokhran.114 In 1998, Pakistan got the medium-range No Dong missile from North Korea and renamed it the Ghauri. This missile was named after Muhammad Ghori, the ruler of Ghor in Afghanistan, who repeatedly invaded Rajput-dominated India during the late twelfth century. Pakistan’s other missile, the Abdali, was named after an Afghan ruler who invaded Mughal India in the first half of the eighteenth century. The nomenclature of the weaponry accumulating in Pakistan thus keeps alive, on both sides, vengeful and largely mythologized memories from earlier periods.115
Pakistan is the only Muslim state with a nuclear capability. This fact heightens the prestige of Pakistan in the anti-Western Muslim world.116 The crisis at Kargil erupted when Pakistan sent 3–4,000 soldiers of the Northern Light Infantry (henceforth NLI) across the line of control (LOC) to the Kargil-Drass region. The military planners at Islamabad thought that due to Pakistan’s possession of nuclear weapons, India would not dare to launch a massive conventional attack along the LOC, unlike the situation, in 1965. They calculated that after consolidating the Kargil heights, Pakistan would be able to internationalize the Kashmir issue and negotiate with India from a position of strength.117 Initially, Pakistan maintained the fiction that these intruders were mujahideens fighting for the liberation of Kashmir from ‘Hindu’ India’s yoke. The war was fought for two months at altitudes ranging from 12,000 to 17,000 feet.118 In 1999, unlike in 1965, India did not escalate horizontally by launching attacks elsewhere along the LOC but did initiate vertical escalation at Kargil by using artillery and airpower to evict the ‘intruders’.119 Most of the NLI personnel were armed with rifles, machine-guns and light mortars (81-mm). They were not equipped with heavy weapons suitable for major offensive operations.120 On 7 June 1999, India’s 56th Brigade, supported by Bofors howitzers counter-attacked the heights of Tololing.121 By July, due to intervention by the United States and Indian military pressure, the intruders retreated from Kargil.
As regards the future of India’s nuclear program, Cohen concludes that India went for the bomb for reasons of ‘national prestige’. India’s ‘trophy’ nuclear arsenal will not deter China, nor will it solve the conundrum vis-à-vis Pakistan regarding Kashmir. Cohen goes on to say that just as India was never entirely ‘Gandhian,’ it has not entirely rejected the Mahatma. Gandhi argued that Indians have a special obligation to resist evil by nonviolent means; the greatest sin for Gandhi was the use of violence. If the development of an Indian nuclear weapon fails to provide security against putative threats from Pakistan, China, and the United States, then enthusiasm for its development and deployment will wane. The nuclear advocates will have to continually jack up the external threat in order to win support for additions to the nuclear arsenal and argue that there is no other way to resist this ‘international evil.’ Furthermore, if non-nuclear threats continue to increase, whether in the form of international pressure or terrorism, Indians will have to examine the relevance of nuclear weapons to threats that must be ‘resisted,’ in Gandhian terms.122
Conclusion
Nehru’s grand strategy was an amalgam of realism and idealism couched in the mould of moderate Hinduism. Some Indian military officers are aware of a new necessity to reject or modify certain aspects of moderate Hinduism. Both the insurgents and the state’s elites use religion in order to legitimize their actions and policies. The Indian Army’s COIN doctrine has been shaped to a great extent by the Arthasastra. In Kashmir, the Islamic insurgency continues. The Indian army would do better to cull further lessons from the Arthasastra rather than looking at the newfangled Western COIN theories of New War. As regards the nuclear question, those Indian experts who consider themselves realists perceive a great threat to the Bharat Mata. To an extent, the rise of the BJP was a reaction to the emergence of Islamic fundamentalism in Pakistan. The BJP highlights the threat as well as magnifying it; its stated response is aggressive kutayuddha. To conclude, some American state officials overemphasize the danger of nuclear war between India and Pakistan. Despite being portrayed by the political managers of India and Pakistan as a Hindu bomb and a Muslim bomb for domestic mass consumption, the small nuclear arsenals of these two countries, as Kargil shows, have brought stability in South Asia by deterring a conventional war.
(This article is a republished version of chapter 7 from the author’s work titled ‘Hinduism and the ethics of warfare in south Asia‘)
Bibliography
97 EWMG, p. 268.
98 Stephen P. Cohen, India: Emerging Power (2001; reprint, New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2003), p. 189.
99 Kanti Bajpai, ‘Hinduism and Weapons of Mass Destruction: Pacifist, Prudential, and Political’, in Sohail H. Hashmi and Steven P. Lee (eds.), Ethics and Weapons of Mass Destruction: Religious and Secular Perspectives (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004), pp. 313–15.
100 Cohen, India, p. 195.
101 Singh, A Call to Honour, p. 113.
102 Raja Mohan, Impossible Allies, pp. 219–20.
103 Karnad, Nuclear Weapons and Indian Security, p. xxii.
104 Amartya Sen, ‘India and the Bomb’, in M. V. Ramanna and C. Rammanohar Reddy (eds.), Prisoners of the Nuclear Dream (New Delhi: Orient Longman, 2003), p. 187.
105 Cohen, India, p. 183.
106 Karnad, Nuclear Weapons and Indian Security, p. xxvi.
107 Raja Mohan, Impossible Allies, p. 282.
108 Ibid., pp. 282–3.
109 Singh, Defending India, p. 251.
110 Karnad, Nuclear Weapons and Indian Security, pp. xiv–xviii.
111 Raja Mohan, Impossible Allies, p. 283.
112 Raju G. C. Thomas, ‘India’s Nuclear and Missile Programmes: Strategy, Intentions, Capabilities’, in Thomas and Amit Gupta (eds.), India’s Nuclear Security (New Delhi: Vistaar, 2000), pp. 100–1.
113 Breena E. Coates, ‘Modern India’s Strategic Advantage to the United States: Her Twin Strengths in Himsa and Ahimsa’, Comparative Strategy, vol. 27, no. 2 (2008), p. 143.
114 Mohammed Ayoob, ‘India’s Nuclear Decision: Implications for Indian-US Relations’, in Thomas and Gupta (eds.), India’s Nuclear Security, pp. 131–2.
115 Strobe Talbott, Engaging India: Diplomacy, Democracy and the Bomb (New Delhi: Penguin, 2004), pp. 21–2.
116 Sanjay Badri-Maharaj, The Armageddon Factor: Nuclear Weapons in the India-Pakistan Context (New Delhi: Lancer, 2000), pp. 45–6.
117 John H. Gill, ‘Military Operations in the Kargil Conflict’, in Peter R. Lavoy (ed.), Asymmetric Warfare in South Asia: The Causes and Consequences of the Kargil Conflict (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009), pp. 94–5.
118 Peter R. Lavoy, ‘Introduction: The Importance of the Kargil Conflict’, and C. Christine Fair, ‘Militants in the Kargil Conflict: Myths, Realities, and Impacts’, in Lavoy (ed.), Asymmetric Warfare in South Asia, pp. 1, 6, 231, 235.
119 Feroz Hassan Khan, Peter R. Lavoy and Christopher Clary, ‘Pakistan’s Motivations and Calculations for the Kargil Conflict’, in Lavoy (ed.), Asymmetric Warfare in South Asia, p. 72.
120 Gill, ‘Military Operations in the Kargil Conflict’, p. 97.
121 Praveen Swami, ‘The Impact of the Kargil Conflict and Kashmir on Indian Politics and Society’, in Lavoy (ed.), Asymmetric Warfare in South Asia, p. 258.
122 Cohen, India, pp. 196–7
