A core issue that escaped analytical attention in the first hundred days is the rather disquieting formulation in the Bharatiya Janata Party’s manifesto on India’s strategic programme. The construct reads as follows: “BJP believes that the strategic gains acquired by India during the Atal Behari Vajpayee regime on the nuclear programme have been frittered away by the Congress. Our emphasis was, and remains on, beginning of a new thrust on framing policies that would serve India’s national interest in the 21st century. We will follow a two-pronged independent nuclear programme, unencumbered by foreign pressure and influence, for civilian and military purposes, especially as nuclear power is a major contributor to India’s energy sector. BJP will: study in detail India’s nuclear doctrine, and revise it and update it, to make it relevant to challenges of current times. Maintain a credible minimum deterrent in tune with changing geostatic realities. Invest in India’s indigenous Thorium security programme”.
Before coming to the more profound issues, note the characterisation of the Vajpayee government as a “regime”. The Oxford English Dictionary defines regime as “a government, especially an authoritarian one”. A search for the meaning of the word “geostatic” did not produce any strategic or tactical definition. Perhaps, they meant geostrategic. Rather sloppy when you are dealing with the “N” word in a nuclearised neighbourhood.
The portentous implications of this rather cavalier phraseology set alarm bells ringing across the world. The New York Times in an incisive editorial on April 9, 2014, contrasted the approach of the two political dispensations. Articulating the distinction, it stated, “The lack of clarity about the party’s (read BJP) intentions on this issue introduces more uncertainty in an already unstable region”, and went on to add that “in fact last week, Prime Minister Manmohan Singh proposed a global framework to promote a ‘no first use’ doctrine among nuclear weapon states, a laudable goal.” There was naturally consternation not only among the ayatollahs of non-proliferation, but also in responsible policy-making circles. That must have compelled the BJP’s prime ministerial candidate to clarify that “no first use was a great initiative of Atal Behari Vajpayee — there is no compromise on that. We are very clear. No first use is a reflection of our cultural inheritance.” Quixotic that a strategic doctrine can be a cultural inheritance and that too in a nation that lacks a strategic culture.
Notwithstanding the clarification, the fact remains that the formulation stays as it is in the BJP manifesto without any amendment. Does the clarification of a prime ministerial candidate override the manifesto commitment of his party? The jury is out on that.
It, therefore, becomes imperative that the phraseology is deconstructed sentence by sentence to understand its true import. What were those strategic gains acquired during the Vajpayee regime which were frittered away in the UPA era? The facts, unfortunately, are contrary to this rather hackneyed assertion. Despite the nuclear tests of May 1998 that Pakistan soon followed up with its own set of explosions, the Kargil intrusion did take place in May 1999.
During the next few years Pakistan not only intensified its proxy war against India, but its instrumentalities attacked the Indian Parliament. This resulted in the largest ever mobilisation of the Indian armed forces in recent times — Operation Parakram in January 2001 that ended 10 months later in a whimper. It blunted the most useful instrument of coercive diplomacy almost permanently. The nuclear tests actually froze the power balance in South Asia into perpetuity, thereby providing Pakistan the nuclear shield to carry on with its policy of bleeding India with a thousand cuts. Were there really any strategic gains that accrued to India in that torrid summer of 1998?
In fact, the opposite is true. It was the adroit diplomacy of the UPA government which, through the Indo-US civil nuclear agreement, was able to demolish the sanction and denial regimes — colloquially referred to as “nuclear apartheid” — institutionalised by the Nuclear Suppliers Group, also called the Club de Londres. This gave India access to much needed sensitive dual-use technologies among other things, and is perhaps the most vital strategic gain made by India in recent times.
Coming to the second sentence of the formulation, we are yet to hear or know what “new thrust” the BJP intends on giving to framing policies in the strategic arena that would serve India’s national interest in the 21st century. The third sentence invokes the omniscient though invisible foreign hand guiding our nuclear theology — a conspiracy theory that has no empirical basis to back it. But hilariously, after opposing the Indian civil nuclear agreement, even to the extent of bringing a no-confidence motion on the matter in July 2008, the BJP has suddenly woken up to the virtues of nuclear power.
Is the BJP suggesting that India’s strategic force posture is not relevant to contemporary challenges? Rather perilous an admission given the parts that we live in. The last, but not the least, sentence maintains a credible deterrent in tune with changing “geostatic” realities. Is it an allusion or an implicit admission that our deterrent is not credible?
Ironically, the then NDA government in August 1999 had conceptualised the draft nuclear doctrine after the second round of nuclear tests. It was eventually approved by the Cabinet Committee on Security and officially promulgated in January 2003. It is profane that an issue of such import was not even brought to a meeting of the full Cabinet for discussion much less a decision or at the least a ratification. The doctrine held the field throughout the UPA years, from 2004 to 2014, ostensibly without any change or amendment that was enunciated in the public domain.
While strategic ambivalence if properly leveraged may be an asset, strategic ambiguity is a lethal liability as it broadcasts portentous and diverging pointers about the very foundations of your nuclear theology that ostensibly bolsters your strategic posture.
Given the equivocality, opacity and ineptly worded postulation that the BJP has adopted to deal with India’s most sensitive governance paradigm, coupled with the fact that the manifesto commitment remains inviolable, one can only wonder whether the government is up to something that “India does not know”.
The writer is a lawyer and a former Union minister. The views expressed are personal. Twitter handle @manishtewari
