India-Pakistan 'Flashpoint' Has Not Faded Away
By J. Sri Raman
t r u t h o u t | Perspective
Tuesday 21 December 2004
South Asians may now relax and rejoice. South Asia has ceased to be a nuclear flashpoint. Declarations to this effect by the rulers of both India and Pakistan should leave no one in doubt in the matter.
Or, should they? Must not the pious proclamations, on the contrary, provoke suspicions about the motives behind them?
The first declaration came from India. On December 4, addressing a group of Indian businessmen, Prime Minister Manmohan Singh said: "No one now talks of South Asia as a nuclear flashpoint." He explained: "Our political and diplomatic initiatives have begun to improve the regional security environment - and no travel advisories are being issued, apprehending war."
The last reference was to the India-Pakistan standoff of early 2002, which created worldwide fears of an imminent nuclear war in South Asia. True, unlike then, foreign governments are not today asking their nationals to take the first flight out of the country. Has the much-hyped India-Pakistan "peace process," however, turned the fears into mere fantasies?
An emphatic endorsement of Singh's statement followed - from Pakistan. It came at the end of yet another round of official-level India-Pakistan talks held in Islamabad. On December 15, Tariq Osman Hyder, head of the Pakistani delegation, told a joint media conference: "South Asia is no longer a nuclear flashpoint." According to him, the flashpoint had faded away because India and Pakistan had entered "a dialogue mode" and made "progress on important issues related to nuclear CBMs" (confidence-building measures). Has the "progress" made the peril that South Asia survived in 2002 a thing of the dim, distant past?
The questions, really, are rhetorical. Hyder was talking after the failure of the two-day Islamabad talks. The main item on the agenda of the meeting was the draft of an agreement on prior notification of missile tests. The agreement remained unsigned at the end of the talks. And no advance on the subject is expected until the next round on nuclear CBMs, for which the date is to be decided by December's end.
The non-progress is the more remarkable because of the fact that the agreement was only supposed to formalize an already established practice and procedure. Since 1999, India and Pakistan have been notifying each other ahead of their missile tests. A formal agreement once seemed the simplest of CBMs for the two countries to produce as proof of their nuclear "responsibility" without cutting back or compromising on their nuclear weapons programs. The agreement has still not been arrived at because of insuperable differences over details like information on the missile's trajectory as part of a prescribed notification.
An agreement, in any case, would not have meant fewer missile tests, or any slowing down of the nuclear-capable missile race. It would only have represented an attempt by both to tell the world that their missile race posed no serious risk to South Asia. It would, in other words, have been yet another attempt by both India and Pakistan to legitimize the Bomb-driven race.
The only CBM on which the two nuke-rattling neighbors have agreed since the start of the "process" is the establishment of a 'hotline" between Directors-General of Military Operations (DGMOs) of the two countries. This step, too, has only served as an argument in support of the sense of "responsibility" of the two nuclear states and their resolve to minimize the chances of nuclear conflicts and accidents. It has thus been yet another unconvincing attempt by both to sanitize and legitimize their nuclear weapons and programs.
In the course of their talks on CBMs and Nuclear Risk Reduction Measures or NRRMs (the "process" having produced more fashionable acronyms than the faintest advances towards "peace"), the rulers of India and Pakistan have agreed to undertake yet another initiative. New Delhi and Islamabad have agreed to seek "parity" with nuclear powers (P5), "consultations" with them "on matters of common concern," and development of a "common nuclear doctrine." They have agreed, in other words, to knock on the door of the "nuclear club."
An improvement on this proposal (worryingly, with the support of some hitherto anti-nuclear activists) calls for an India-convened conference of nuclear powers and "nuclear-capable states" for the same objectives.
All this may make strange allies of the implacable adversaries that India and Pakistan stay despite their intermittent "dialogue process." Just as their uneasy coexistence in the U.S.-headed "alliance against global terror" does. None of this, however, makes the "nuclear flashpoint" a fading memory.
The flashpoint will not fade away so long as nuclear-capable missiles of India and Pakistan remain deployed against each other. It will not, so long as missiles of the two countries stay on hair-trigger alert. It will not, so long as nuclear warheads are not separated from delivery systems.
South Asia stays a flashpoint when Pakistan's President General Pervez Musharraf sneers that "only a madman" can expect his country's nuclear weapons program to be weakened under him. The danger remains dire, when India's Prime Minister talks, in characteristically soft tones but unexpectedly undemocratic terms, of the need for "continuity and consensus" in the country's nuclear policy. The flashpoint cannot fade away while his government thus affirms its commitment to the policy of nuclear militarism that his far-right predecessors imposed on India.
A freelance journalist and a peace activist of India, J. Sri Raman is the author of Flashpoint (Common Courage Press, USA). He is a regular contributor to t r u t h o u t.
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