Nuclear dimension of India-Pakistan rivalry

According to a school of thought, only a madman is a match for another madman, and the antidote to nuclear blackmail is calling the bluff.

In his May 12 address to the nation on Operation Sindoor, Prime Minister Narendra Modi, while outlining the terms under which India will engage with Pakistan in the future, said it will not tolerate any “nuclear blackmail” from Islamabad.

“India will not be intimidated by nuclear threats. Any terrorist safe haven operating under this pretext will face precise and decisive strikes,” Modi said. If we train our focus elsewhere, we might see that during the course of the raging Russia-Ukraine war, nuclear threats have been a standard tactic for the Russian leadership under Vladimir Putin.

The ‘N’ word gathered currency after US President Donald Trump, in one of his cryptic claims made recently, said that the US didn’t just ‘broker’ the ceasefire between India and Pakistan; it averted a ‘nuclear conflict’, suggesting that the nuclear-armed countries were “very close” to plunging into a nuclear crisis. Trump added a rider that he had threatened to stop trade with both countries unless they agreed to end hostilities.

What remained unclear was whether Trump’s reference to a possible nuclear conflict was connected to widespread speculation about the impact of India’s airstrikes on May 10 on a suspected nuclear site called Kirana Hills, near PAF’s Mushaf base, in Sargodha. This was denied subsequently by Air Marshal A K Bharti (“We did not hit Kirana Hills, whatever is there,” he said), though Pakistan PM Shehbaz Sharif admitted India’s missiles hit Nur Khan airbase.

Whether Trump is entitled to any credit for averting a nuclear conflict is a mystery, but as an American, he needs to face up to his country’s reliance on nuclear intimidation—the US made more than 20 threats of nuclear attack during the Cold War—against Russia, China, Vietnam and the Middle East.

Trump has repeatedly declined, in MSNBC’s “Morning Joe” show in 2016, to rule out the use of nuclear weapons, saying he reserves the option to use them in Europe and the Middle East.

During the Indo-Pakistan War of 1971, the then US President Richard Nixon dispatched the aircraft carrier ‘Enterprise’ to the Bay of Bengal. The move was intended to be brandished as a nuclear signal to India, and not aimed at either of the principal adversaries, the Soviet Union or China, with whom confrontations have potentially raised the possibility of a major war.

The possibility that tensions might get to a point where the next phase would probably be ‘nuclear’ has provided leverage to Pakistan so far.

Foreign Secretary Vikram Misri told the House’s Standing Committee on External Affairs that the conflict remained “conventional” and that Islamabad’s use of Chinese-made weapons—including the HQ-9 missile defence system—was irrelevant because “what matters is we hit their air bases hard”.

More importantly, he confirmed that there was no ‘nuclear signalling’ by Islamabad during the military conflict.

The point to ponder is that while pre-nuclear states generally manage serious crises through full-scale wars, nuclear adversaries tend to use violent clashes or low-intensity or medium-intensity violence as crisis management tools.

Many consider that India would have fared better in the 1962 Indo-China war, if it had chosen to go nuclear years earlier than in 1974 and not continued to adhere to the peaceful uses of nuclear energy.

This is because India’s nuclear research was far ahead of China in 1964, the year China tested a nuclear weapon, the first by a “less developed country”, triggering South Asian interest in nuclear weaponry.

In late 1964, Prime Minister Lal Bahadur Shastri is reported to have authorised the Atomic Energy Commission to proceed with designing a nuclear device, even though India’s nuclear programme began in 1948 with the establishment of the Atomic Energy Commission (AEC) and the subsequent creation of the Department of Atomic Energy (DAE).

Way back in 1955, Home Bhaba suggested Jawaharlal Nehru that India should unilaterally renounce the production of atom bombs, to which the then Prime Minister replied that India should first have the ability to make a bomb, or else the “renunciation” would not be very convincing.

Peace initiatives such as the Lahore Peace Process of 1999 and the Agra Summit of 2001 notwithstanding, nuclear weapons, by themselves, did not guarantee peace.

The 1986-87, 1990, 1999 and 2001 crises gave hope that a serious incident may not escalate to an all-out war. The expectation that nuclear weapons would prevent Indo-Pakistani disputes from escalating into full-scale war and that nuclearisation would stabilise South Asia by making conflict prohibitively risky may not work in view of the power asymmetry in conventional warfare between the two nations.

Pakistan, smug in the belief that there would be no major war due to nuclear ‘deterrence’, resorted to every possible mischief, including nuclear blackmail.

This is evident from the speech of its Russian ambassador Muhammad Khalid Jamali, who on May 4 stated that Islamabad “would use nuclear weapons” if India launched military action. That the statement was in contravention of the 1988 nuclear non-attack agreement mandating India-Pakistan to desist from attacking each other’s nuclear facilities is beside the point.

The Indian security establishment is aware of the post-nuclear implications of a recurring Indo-Pak rivalry. Operation Brasstacks was a combined military exercise of the Indian armed forces in Rajasthan from November 1986 to January 1987. The aim was to determine tactical nuclear strategy, which Islamabad regarded as a threatening exhibition of overwhelming conventional force, perhaps even as a rehearsal for nuclear war. 

According to the Subrahmanyam Committee that examined the Kargil debacle, since 1991, Indian intelligence agencies were pointing out the implications of Pakistan’s growing nuclearisation for managing the situation in Kashmir. Somehow, in India, this failed to become part of the nuclear debate.

Pakistan’s single-minded policy of bleeding India from a thousand cuts, such as fomenting insurgencies, involving ‘non-state’ actors, sowing communal discord, has run its course and has begun to boomerang on itself.

Husain Haqqani, in his book ‘Reimagining Pakistan: Transforming a Dysfunctional Nuclear State’, rightly identifies the need for Pakistan to find a national purpose greater than its rivalry with India, and its need to recalibrate and reinvent itself. 

(The writer is a Kolkata-based commentator on geopolitics, development, and culture)