India/Pakistan
India happy to be under US missile umbrella
By Sultan Shahin
NEW DELHI - India's uncharacteristically swift and effusive response to US President George W Bush's national missile defense (NMD) plans has taken the country's political class, security experts and strategic analysts by surprise.
All the more so because until a few months ago External Affairs Minister Jaswant Singh was saying that NMD would surely add to India's security worries. It would "degrade" China's nuclear arsenal and missiles, and the Chinese would react by building more and more effective weapons. He had said categorically in an earlier interview: "We have consistently held a view that opposes the militarization of outer space. The NMD will adversely influence the larger movement towards disarmament of which India is a staunch advocate. We believe that technological superiority will result in a reaction in other parts of the world, thus reviving the possibility of yet another and newer arms race. We cannot support this development."
But the government of India's statement of May 2 amounts to an unqualified and enthusiastic endorsement of the Bush plan. In a clear departure from its erstwhile position, that several newspaper editorials have called an irrational volte-face, India has decided to jump on the US bandwagon even before a clear outline of the missile defense system has emerged and its feasibility is yet to be fully demonstrated. New Delhi has decided to ignore the deep division on this issue in the US itself, varying degrees of skepticism among most of the US allies and the strong reservations of both Russia and China.
Former foreign secretary and minister of state for external affairs, and now head of the foreign affairs committee in the main opposition Congress Party, K Natwar Singh cautioned against lending uncritical support to the NMD as it may amount to antagonizing China. He pointed to the long-term implications of India drawing too close to the US on NMD and the negative impact of Sino-US tensions on India's security environment. Describing India's stand as "dangerously immature and irresponsible," the Congress leader said that India endorsed Bush's new nuclear policy "within hours of its announcement without consulting the opposition leaders or studying its implications".
"It was a considered statement," an external affairs ministry spokesperson, however, countered in response to a query on why New Delhi seemed in such a hurry to laud Bush's announcement. In a carefully worded statement, India focused on the positive aspects of the Bush initiative - the moving away from the doctrine of MAD (mutually assured destruction) and the unilateral reduction of nuclear arsenals. India welcomed Bush's proposal in the context of its belief that there is a "strategic and technological inevitability" in stepping away from a world that was held hostage by the doctrine of MAD to a cooperative, defensive transition that was underpinned by further cuts and de-alert of nuclear forces.
A considerable section of the Indian strategic community is uneasy at the development. The Congress believes India must strive to improve its relations with the US; but the party insists the government should do nothing to sour Sino-Indian relations, which have been normalized with some difficulty after overcoming the chill of May 1998 when India conducted nuclear tests. If India begins to align itself with the US on global security issues, China may embrace Pakistan even more tightly than before and this would be detrimental to India's interests.
Some commentators have justified India's support for the proposed NMD plans on the ground that it will protect India from countries such as Pakistan. They are delighted to find India already in the rank of friends of the US. And they read Pakistan in the phrase "states for whom terror and blackmailing are a way of life" used by Bush to describe "rogue states". This makes them euphoric. They, however, do not realize, according to former foreign secretary Muchkund Dubey that "rogue states" and "friends" are flexible categories and the inclusion in and exclusion from these categories will depend upon how far a particular country is subservient to US interests. His conclusion, "Our independence and sovereignty may have to be seriously compromised for the purpose of remaining in the category of friends."
Another set of strategic analysts has reacted differently. According to them, much of the dismay is misdirected and comes from a mindset still caught in the Cold War time warp that persists even a full decade after that era ended. An editorial in the online newspaper The Newspaper Today claims that the knee-jerk reaction among many Indian strategists is to be suspicious of any US initiative, and be ready with denunciations against the sole global "policeman". It credits the government for its ability to see beyond the technicalities of NMD and grasp the opportunity of an enhanced strategic partnership with the United States that can be tailored to India's benefit. The ostensible shift in India's foreign policy, according to this view, signals the firming up of a still nascent partnership with the United States that took its first faltering steps in the immediate aftermath of the Cold War, got a fillip during the last days of the Clinton era, and a sense of continuity in the first days of the Bush regime.
The fact that Bush has decided to dispatch a key aide - Deputy Secretary of State Richard Armitage - to explain the NMD implications to the Indian establishment is being cited as an indication that the desire for a new India-US partnership does not stem from New Delhi alone. Armitage will be visiting Japan and South Korea - long-standing allies of the United States. The inclusion of India in his itinerary is said to indicate that the Bush administration is willing to deal with India as a major power in its own right and not continue equating, and balancing it, with Pakistan. And this has naturally caused elation in the ranks of observers who have long been dreaming of such a scenario.
One of India's foremost strategic thinkers, K Subrahmanyam, sees the proposed NMD as a proof of the failure of the Non Proliferation Treaty (NPT) regime and a total vindication of India's stand, including the nuclear tests it conducted at Pokhran in 1998. President Bush is right in his argument, he points out, that treaties which outlive their utility and which do not meet the imperatives of current strategic requirements should be discarded.
Bush feels the Anti-Ballistic Missile (ABM) treaty and the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty (CTBT) fall into this category. But he does not seem to realize that the NPT also falls into this category. It is the double failure of the NPT that has led to the present situation that calls for the US to go beyond the ABM treaty. A nuclear power such as China did not observe Article I of the treaty, and proliferated. European powers, members of the NPT, discarded their obligations and assisted, tacitly or otherwise, the proliferation efforts of yet another member of the NPT, Iraq. Therefore, Bush and the US administration have to carry their logic to its full conclusion, demands Subrahmanyam, and start examining whether the NPT, in its present form, serves its stated purpose.
India's hopes and aspirations over the NMD can also explain its enthusiasm. Another strategic analyst, Brahma Chellaney, feels New Delhi has to exploit its NMD support to its advantage by pushing the Bush team to take a fresh look at the decades-old technology and military sanctions against India. The impending visits of Armitage and the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Henry H Shelton, can help lay the groundwork for building strategic ties. If Washington were to interpret its export-control laws more broadly in relation to India, it would throw open for sale many high-tech commercial items. It also makes no strategic sense for Washington to continue to keep India out of its arms market. Further, there is no reason why Washington should still keep India as a key target of the punitive restrictions of the Nuclear Suppliers' Group.
India faces a difficult situation in Asia that demands, according to Chellaney, strategic engagement with Washington. Its largest neighbor, China, will use NMD to justify its already expanding nuclear and missile arsenals. With or without NMD, India's security will be adversely affected by the increasing trans-Himalayan missile threat and Beijing's continued nuclear and missile transfers to Pakistan. But with NMD, China is likely to more openly flout international norms and conventions and seek new ways to deliver lethal missile blows. If India does not wish to abandon its plans for maintaining a nuclear-deterrent force at very modest levels, it will have to look at other options. It seems inevitable that it will develop an Intercontinental Ballistic Missile (ICBM) capability in order to provide adequate reach to its small nuclear arsenal. It will also have to arm its missiles with decoys and other penetration aids. But one can already foresee that it will be attracted to missile defenses and potential collaboration with the US.
According to this view, NMD is likely to strengthen and expand US-led security arrangements. If it is seen to work, the US could extend a "missile umbrella" to its allies the way it presently holds out a nuclear umbrella. An India strategically aligned with the US could avail itself of such benefits in a manner to reduce its own security burden. In a world marked by rapid change, Chellaney imagines a future India with its own nuclear force but deriving certain benefits from US missile defenses. As a concept, strategic defense can be expanded to involve technology and cooperation in fields beyond the missile domain. India can partner the US, he thinks, on strategic defense against theater and long-range missiles and also against international terrorism and to safeguard borders and share intelligence. The action-reaction cycle triggered by missile defenses is bound to drive India closer to the US.
One of the main incentives for New Delhi has certainly been the recent statements of key members of the Bush administration that the remaining sanctions against India, imposed after the nuclear tests of 1998, will shortly be removed. Secretary of State Colin Powell made it clear during his testimony before Congress that he did not think sanctions were serving as a useful instrument of American policy. Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld and Treasury Secretary Paul O'Neill, too, echoed this view more recently. But analyst Praful Bidwai believes that given the fact that 90 percent of the sanctions have already been removed, this should not have mattered so much with the government. What India liked most, however, was being treated for the first time by an American administration, in the words of Stephen Cohen of the Washington-based think tank Brookings Institution, "like a mature adult, not like some kind of problem child that needs to be instructed".
The ideologues of the ruling Hindutva (the philosophy of Hindu domination of the sub-continent), however, have a different theory. As articulated in her column in the daily Pioneer by Sandhya Jain, threatened as they both are from Muslim fundamentalism, India and the US are civilizational allies. She has high hopes from the NMD: "A defensive umbrella in which a tracking satellite can find and neutralize enemy missiles in mid-air is no small protection for a country physically surrounded by civilizationally hostile forces. The Opposition assertion that this would reduce India to a US satellite is jejune, and merits contempt. India would no more be a satellite than France or Germany was under Nato. But she would be allied to the most powerful country of the free world, a country that is fiercely loyal towards its friends, as witnessed by its abiding relationship with Israel."
The government's reasons for its lightning-fast response, however, go beyond all these considerations. As Pramit Pal Choudhary explains in The Hindustan Times, India saw in Bush's speech not a call for a new crop of whiz-bang missiles but the makings of a new nuclear order. An external affairs ministry official points out the Indian response nowhere endorses NMD. Indeed, India's statement doesn't even mention the phrase. What New Delhi liked was Bush's promise "to transform the strategic parameters on which the Cold War security architecture was built". As another official explained, "This is not about something as trivial as missile defense, this is about a new security paradigm."
((c)2001 Asia Times Online Co, Ltd. All rights reserved. Please contact content@atimes.com for information on our sales and syndication policies.) |
