World Affairs: Why India Went Nuclear

World Affairs
Vol. 2, No. 3 (Jul.–Sept.1998)

Why India Went Nuclear

By Prem Shankar Jha

Washington has refused to take India’s mounting security concerns seriously, while turning a deliberate blind eye on Pakistan’s increasing nuclear capability. China’s transfer of nuclear technology to Pakistan will have a negative effect on the balance of power in the region. It is quite clear, however, that for new geo-strategic reasons — now connected with the newly independent Central Asian states — the US will always give priority to its relations with Pakistan over India.

The nuclear tests by India and Pakistan in May 1998, are threatening to burst open the lid that the major powers are trying to put on the proliferation of nuclear weapons. This threat is very real: On the day after the first Indian tests, North Korea threatened that it would withdraw from its agreement with the US over nuclear non-proliferation, as the US had failed to live up to its commitments. Since then it has repeated this threat more than once. Pakistan’s tests were greeted by celebrations in Iran. Predictably, the reaction in Iran triggered a wave of concern in Israel. And earlier, UN weapons inspectors had found documents in Iraq that showed that Pakistan had offered to supply it with the technology for making nuclear weapons. No one knows how far a Pakistan bankrupted by economic sanctions might go to secure hard currency resources. The world therefore faces the spectre of more and more countries thrusting their way into the nuclear club.

Predictably, the first reaction of the West has been one of great anger. The G–8 and the UN security council have condemned the tests, and as the country that went nuclear first, India has attracted most of the blame. In press briefings after Pakistan’s nuclear tests, Secretary of State Albright and Defence Secretary Cohen accepted Pakistan’s explanation that it was forced to go in for the tests in order to match India. As for India’s reasons, both dismissed Indian prime minister Atal Behari Vajpayee’s explanation in his letter to President Clinton after the nuclear tests, that India was forced to test (and demonstrate) its nuclear weapons because of a sharp deterioration in its security environment. Instead, both ascribed the Indian government’s decision to that most irresponsible of motives — the desire of a Hindu nationalist Bharatiya Janata Party government to promote its ideology of a Hindu renaissance, increase its following in the country, and consolidate its hold on power. So exclusively did the US focus blame on India, that about a fortnight before President Clinton’s visit to Beijing, Albright denied categorically that China had transferred nuclear or missile technology to Pakistan “in recent years”.

This interpretation of India’s motives reflected not only the US well-grounded fear of the impact India’s action might have on non-proliferation, but a far less comprehensible refusal by Washington to take India’s mounting security concerns seriously. Not only did Washington turn a deliberate blind eye to the effect that China’s transfer of nuclear weapon and missile technology to Pakistan would have on the balance of power between two countries that the world knew to be de facto nuclear weapons states, but it also ignored the impact of its Central Asian policy on the source of the tension between the two countries — the determination of Pakistan to redraw the map of India on religious grounds by separating Kashmir from India.

The thesis of this paper is that this was not a product of benign neglect or oversight. India did not go nuclear willingly, but was forced into doing so by three, largely uncoordinated American policies launched by the Clinton administration after the cold war ended, that acted jointly to put India in grave peril. A substantial number of opinion makers in the US have taken note of two of these — that the emerging non-proliferation regime would strangle India’s nuclear option, and the growing nuclear imbalance that China’s transfer of weapons of mass destruction was creating on the sub-continent. But the third, the surreptitious rebuilding of a new strategic alliance with Pakistan focused on giving the US economic access and thereby eventual political control of the Central Asian states that were formerly a part of the Soviet Union, has gone almost unnoticed. The purpose of this paper is to highlight this neglected aspect of India’s decision to declare itself a nuclear power.

India’s nuclear tests came as a complete surprise to the world, and set off a storm of speculation about why India carried them out. The more appropriate question to have asked then was, ‘What had made India decide not to become a demonstrated overt nuclear weapons power after the Pokharan explosion of 1974? While a number of specific reasons can be cited, the short answer is that till the early nineties India simply did not feel sufficiently insecure to want to take this momentous step.

For a quarter century after its 1974 nuclear test, India followed a policy of careful and deliberate restraint. Following a huge outcry by Canada that India had used technology supplied by it for power generation and other peaceful purposes to make a bomb, and a change of government in 1977 that brought Morarji Desai, a staunch opponent of nuclear weapons to the premiership of the country, India suspended its nuclear weapons programme for more than a decade. Despite a deliberate leak to an Indian journalist in April 1987, by the head of Pakistan’s nuclear weapons research programme, Dr A Q Khan, that Pakistan now had the bomb, work on nuclear weapons was resumed only in 1989, two years after India had designed and built its own 200 MW reactor in 1987. In the next six years Indian scientists mastered the technology required to develop a variety of nuclear weapons, but the government deliberately refrained from testing any of it. This restraint did not break down despite a spate of CIA reports that China was passing nuclear weapons technology to Pakistan, and that Pakistan was setting up the required production facilities through a worldwide operation of fraud, theft and deceit. Nor was this restraint broken when the US President continued to certify that Pakistan was not developing a bomb, despite Khan’s boast to the contrary in 1987.

In retrospect, the reasons why India did not feel sufficiently threatened to forsake its long-standing policy of not developing nuclear weapons, are obvious. Its relations with China had improved sharply after Rajiv Gandhi’s visit to Beijing in December 1988. Its dispute with Pakistan over Kashmir had been dormant for 15 years after the two countries signed the Simla agreement, and relations between the two countries had improved steadily between 1977 and 1987. Finally, the Soviet Union with whom India had a Treaty of Friendship, was still intact.

The Erosion of Restraint

India’s security environment began to deteriorate only in 1990. Between 1990 and 1992 an insurgency broke out in Kashmir; the Soviet Union imploded, and the government received definite information that Pakistan had, or could put together, a handful of nuclear bombs. On the surface, India and Pakistan had established a balance of terror based on nuclear ambiguity. But unlike the US–Soviet stand-off, this led to an increase instead of a decrease of insecurity. For neither country knew for sure whether the other really had a deliverable bomb, or was bluffing. Both were therefore capable, if a conventional war began to go against them, of convincing themselves that the other was bluffing and unleashing their nukes. Some Indian analysts therefore urged the government to go overtly nuclear as this would at least eliminate the risks that inhered in ambiguity. But none of the three Indian governments that were privy to the knowledge of Pakistan’s nuclear capability, were prepared to resume nuclear testing.

The restraint, however, was beginning to erode. By the mid nineties there were only a handful of scientists left in the Department of Atomic Energy, who had even been in the organisation in 1974. All the knowledge the DAE had of the Pokharan bomb was from blueprints, and all the new research was still only research. Moreover, what was exploded in 1974 was, strictly speaking, a device, and not a bomb. None of the engineering work needed to convert it into a bomb that could be delivered by an aircraft, much less by a missile, had ever been tested. In 1994, therefore, India’s nuclear weapons existed only on paper. This was not sufficient to reassure the armed forces that the nuclear threat from Pakistan had been neutralised. Nuclear ambiguity had also put the armed forces in a quandary. Should they make operational plans and carry out exercises on the assumption that India had the capacity to checkmate a nuclear threat, or not? As Pakistan steadily escalated its involvement in Kashmir, they began to ask this question with greater and greater insistence.

In July 1995, India’s alarm took a quantum leap when US intelligence found out that a number of M–11 missiles sold by China to Pakistan had been moved, in their crates, to Sargodha, Pakistan’s main armed forces base close to the Punjab border. The alarm was not generated by Pakistan’s acquisition of missiles, so much as by the evidence of the lengths to which China was prepared to go to support its ambitions. This was one of the two reasons why Prime Minister Narasimha Rao finally sanctioned a new round of tests. Rao’s other reason was his government’s sudden realisation after the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty was extended indefinitely in May 1995, that the US, backed by the G–7 was creating a network of treaties and domestic laws that would soon make the price prohibitive, India would have to pay to upgrade its nuclear capability and maintain a credible deterrent against nuclear attack or blackmail. This invisible prison consisted of the Glenn Amendment, passed by the US Congress in 1994, that imposed mandatory economic sanctions on any (non-nuclear) country that tested nuclear weapons; the indefinite extension of the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty in 1995, and the impending Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty that Clinton promised to push through in 1996.

Together with the impending Fissile Material Cap Treaty, these would lock India into a permanent and growing military inferiority to China. As a nuclear power, China would be free not only to add to its nuclear arsenal but to acquire the advanced technology it needed for continually upgrading its weapons and missile capability. Forever more, therefore, India’s safety would depend on its keeping on China’s good side. Yet this was a country with which India had fought a war, and had a standing border dispute over 90,000 sq kms of territory. What is more, as it had already shown, China had few qualms about passing some of this technology to Pakistan. With this wild card in the pack, no Indian strategic planner could therefore predict how the nuclear and missile balance would evolve on the subcontinent, in the coming years. Worst of all, this intolerable situation was being brokered by the world’s only super power, the US. In December 1995, therefore, Narasimha Rao ordered the scientific establishment to prepare for the resumption of nuclear tests at Pokharan.

Even then, however, India’s perception of threat was not high enough to make him go through with it. The US was still putting a great deal of pressure on China to stop supplying missile technology to Pakistan and Saudi Arabia, and it was also trying to prevent China from supplying nuclear reactors to Iran. The confrontation over the Taiwan straits was only weeks behind the two states. The Indian government believed that America would do its level best to check the supply of missiles and nuclear technology to China. Rao was also worried that the economic sanctions that would follow a test, would hurt his party’s chances in the elections scheduled for April 1996. As a result, when preparations for the test were spotted by a US spy satellite, and the American government asked India not to hold them, Narasimha Rao agreed.

India has been equally restrained in its missile development programme. During Rajiv Gandhi’s premiership, India launched a programme to develop an entire family of short and medium range, battlefield and tactical surface to air, surface to surface, and air to air missiles. Only two, the 300 km range Prithvi (Sanskrit for the earth, and not the name of a Hindu ruler of the twelfth century who fought the Muslims, as Pakistan has claimed), and the 1500 km range Agni (fire) were capable of carrying nuclear warheads. Both, therefore, aroused Washington’s anxiety. India had made it clear that the Prithvi was intended to carry only a conventional warhead and that the Agni was only being developed as a “technology demonstrator”. But the Clinton administration was not entirely reassured. As a result, in response to a direct request from President Clinton, Prime Minister Narasimha Rao agreed, during his visit to Washington in 1994, not to deploy the Prithvi (which had by then gone into production) and to stop further development of the Agni. Both promises were, by and large, kept. However, in June 1997, India began shipping Prithvi missiles to the army cantonments, on the somewhat specious grounds that they could not be stored indefinitely at the factories. Pakistan raised an alarm, but this too may have been disingenuous, for barely two months later Pakistan unveiled its 600 km Hatf III missile. The Hatf III was a thinly dressed up version of the Chinese M–9.

Pakistan’s nuclear strategy has throughout been in stark contrast to that of India. Contrary to the common perception, Zulfiqar Ali Bhutto took the decision to develop nuclear weapons in 1972, within weeks of becoming Pakistan’s president, and well before the Pokharan blast. He was reacting to the dismemberment of Pakistan and his awareness that the new Pakistan would be no match for India in a conventional war. The Pokharan blast lent a new urgency to his quest, but he realised that Pakistan could only obtain the necessary technology and equipment by taking “short cuts”. In the ensuing years successive governments in Pakistan built an extraordinarily effective network of shell companies abroad to circumvent laws against the sale to third countries of equipment needed to produce fissile uranium. The US was unable to express its displeasure till 1990, when it refused to certify that Pakistan was building nuclear weapons, because Pakistan had become indispensable for funnelling aid to the Afghan mujahideen. The architect of this monumental effort was Abdul Qader Khan, once employed by a firm in Holland, who returned to Pakistan with the stolen designs of the Gas centrifuge, the critical requirement for separating fissile Uranium 235 from the inert Uranium 238.

China and Pakistan’s Nuclear Programme

Pakistan also carefully built a long-term military relationship with China. Capitalising on its border dispute with India, it succeeded in persuading China to transfer the design for the all-important trigger mechanism of the atom bomb, probably in exchange for the Gas centrifuge technology that Khan had spirited away from Holland. All Pakistan had to do was buy, or steal, the designs and components needed to manufacture it.

Pakistan has steadfastly maintained that its nuclear weapons programme is a response to India’s, and this has been accepted uncritically by the US. So, in a sense it is. If one believes the old maxim that diplomacy can be based on an assessment of the adversary’s intentions, but defence policy must be based on its capabilities, then Pakistan’s reasons for acquiring nuclear capability by hook or by crook cannot be challenged. But in the globally interdependent world that has now emerged, this maxim, like nineteenth century doctrines of national sovereignty, is increasingly coming into contention. The view is gaining ground that in the information age intentions have to be taken into account for, as the Gulf war showed, a nation’s best defence against unprovoked assault by a rogue nation is the combined weight of public opinion, backed by international sanction.

If intentions are taken into account, Pakistan’s decision to acquire nuclear weapons becomes a lot less easy to understand. In 1974, India and Pakistan had admittedly fought three wars, but the issues over which these were fought had been all but resolved. Bangladesh, the cause of the 1971 war, had seceded from Pakistan with India’s help. This had caused a great deal of anger in Pakistan, but no one in Pakistan wanted to re-conquer it. The dispute over Kashmir had not been resolved, but the Simla agreement had given formal recognition to a de facto line of division of the old princely state that had already existed for 25 years, and both countries had bound themselves not to try and change it unilaterally, ie, by force. India therefore had no disputes with Pakistan, and coveted none of its territory.

A part of the reason why Pakistan still felt it had to maintain parity with India is buried in the bloodstained circumstances of its birth. But to the extent that there was a rational purpose, it was Pakistan’s determination not to allow its claim to Kashmir to lapse by virtue of its inability to wage war for want of a nuclear deterrent. Pakistan, in short, never had any intention of giving up the struggle to annex the whole of Kashmir. Thus from 1972, the balance upon which peace has rested in the subcontinent has been asymmetrical: India has lacked the desire to change the status quo on the subcontinent, while Pakistan has lacked the capacity. This is the balance that was eventually disturbed by the continued supply of nuclear weapons and missile technology by China, and by the Nelson’s eye turned on the transgression by the US.

During the 31 years that Sino–Indian relations remained in a deep freeze after the 1962 war, China’s support of Pakistan’s military and nuclear weapons programmes caused little surprise in India. But India’s anxiety began to mount when technology and missile sales and transfers continued after China and India signed the Agreement on Peace and Tranquillity in the Border Regions in 1993. This agreement virtually buried the four decades’ old border dispute in a tacit acceptance of the de facto line of demarcation between the two countries in the Himalayas. India and China had no other disputes. In fact, during Narasimha Rao’s visit to Beijing in 1993, Premier Li Peng made a special effort to enrol India in a resistance of the US global hegemonism. The very next year China joined India to frustrate an attempt at the UN conference on human rights in Geneva to condemn India for the violation of human rights in Kashmir. As trade grew rapidly between the two countries and a spate of high-level visits were exchanged, China’s continued supply of nuclear weapons technology to Pakistan became more and more inexplicable. In 1993 and 1994 the Indian public became aware that China had sold ring magnets for Pakistan’s Gas centrifuges. In 1995 M–11 missiles were discovered at Sargodha. Then came Pakistan’s launch of the Hatf III in August 1997, and finally of the intermediate range Ghauri missile on April 6, 1998. China’s help was closing the gap between Pakistan’s aspirations and its capabilities. For India, the potential cost of continued inaction was becoming insupportable. But even all this was only the tip of a much larger iceberg. A spate of CIA reports showed that Pakistan had in fact signed two separate agreements with China in 1992 for a sum of 1.2 billion dollars, one for a virtually complete transfer of nuclear weapons research and development capabilities, and the other for the rapid transfer of missile technology along with a large number of M–11s and launchers.

The timing of these transfers could not have been worse, for they were taking place at a time when Pakistan had reached a crossroads in its relation with India. Insurgency in Kashmir had been on the wane since 1994. The pro-independence Jammu and Kashmir Liberation Front had become dormant, and the pro-Pakistan Hizbul Mujahideen had fallen apart, and its feuding wings had suffered large-scale desertions from their ranks. In September 1996 Kashmir had its first state assembly election in 11 years. As many as 49.9 per cent voters turned out and voted a pro-India government to power. A year later, when President Clinton met Pakistan’s prime minister Nawaz Sharif and India’s prime minister Inder Gujral in New York, he made it plain that the US wanted the two countries to settle the Kashmir dispute between themselves and did not want to get embroiled in it. Clinton also remarked pointedly to Nawaz Sharif that the two countries needed to cut the shackles of the past and look to the future. For the hawks in Pakistan’s security and State apparatus, the goal of acquiring Kashmir was all but lost.

In theory, they could wait in the hope that another insurgency would break out in the valley on some future date. But in practice, Pakistan’s capacity to do so had run out. Forty years of trying to maintain military parity with a much larger neighbour had made the country bankrupt. In 1997, interest on the national debt absorbed 71 per cent of federal revenues, and almost the entire balance was needed to meet the cost of the bureaucracy and the police. Social and economic spending had been reduced to almost nothing, which, along with the whole of the defence budget, amounting to just under 30 per cent of federal spending, was being met by borrowing from the public. Such massive borrowing was pushing up the national debt faster than the GDP and therefore increasing the ratio of interest to revenue. Barring some unforeseen change, Pakistan faced bankruptcy and hyperinflation in, at most, a decade. Its foreign exchange balances had shrunk to a mere 1.3 billion dollars and the country had been forced to go to the IMF for help. The IMF insisted that it cut its fiscal deficit, which in effect meant its military spending. In response to this pressure in 1977 the military budget actually fell by a little over one per cent for the first time since the country was born. The military establishment therefore knew that its days of matching India were drawing to a close. Very soon, therefore, Pakistan would have to choose between making one final bid to capture Kashmir by force before the money ran out, or accepting the status quo. The first sign that Pakistan was accepting the status quo in Kashmir would have been a decline in the infiltration of foreign mercenaries into Indian Kashmir. But in the two years since the Kashmir elections, Pakistan had not shown the slightest sign of doing the latter. Instead it had stepped up the infiltration of Afghan, Pakistani, and other mercenaries into Kashmir and Jammu. The launch of the Ghauri came at this critical moment.

The Ghauri changed the power equation on the subcontinent. But what disturbed Indians even more was the overtly hostile intent behind the launch. Pakistani spokesmen explained that Ghauri was the name of the Afghan invader who captured Delhi in AD 1193 and established Muslim rule in northern India. They went on to say that with the development of the Ghauri, no Indian city was safe any longer from a Pakistani attack. The creator of Pakistan’s nuclear bomb, A Q Khan, proclaimed that Pakistan now had the capacity to hit 26 Indian cities. A few days later Pakistan announced that it would soon test a 2,000 km missile, named the “Ghaznavi” (of Ghazni). The first Afghan raider to invade western India in search of plunder no less than 18 times in 25 years between 997 AD and 1022 AD was named Mahmud of Ghazni. The overt aggression revealed by the naming of the missiles sent shivers of apprehension throughout India. Pakistan’s constant harping on being able to hit cities, and the fact that this particular threat was being made by the messianic head of Pakistan’s nuclear weapons programme, made people fear the worst.

The Role of the USA

If any country could have stopped the slow drift towards an overt nuclearisation of the subcontinent and possible war, it was the US. But the US had its own irons in the fire. In the immediate aftermath of the cold war many Indians had hoped that the two countries would rediscover the warmth that had marked the Kennedy and Roosevelt years (when the US had consistently championed India’s freedom). But that was not to be. Deprived of its central focus, American foreign policy splintered into a series of uncoordinated initiatives pushed by the territorial and functional bureaus of the State Department, which as often as not, saw themselves in competition with each other. At the Indian end, political instability conspired with the persistence in the foreign office of suspicions inherited from the cold war, to make new Delhi incapable of grasping the opportunities that arose for establishing a co-operative relationship.

Immediately after the cold war ended, India found itself at the receiving end of four American initiatives. These were nuclear non-proliferation, human rights, the thrust for constructive engagement with China and the thrust for economic and political influence in Central Asia. Checking the proliferation of nuclear weapons and reducing existing stockpiles, especially in the former Soviet Union, clearly ranked first in the US priorities. The Congress government under Narasimha Rao was aware of this, and was prepared to meet the US halfway if the US showed a matching sensitivity to India’s security concerns. Since India’s immediate concern was not China, with whom relations were steadily improving, but Pakistan, whose desire to annex Kashmir remained undiminished, Rao in effect offered to exercise restraint on the development of weapons of mass destruction and delivery systems in exchange for US disengagement from the Kashmir issue. India therefore avoided testing any nuclear weapons, and halted the development and the deployment of the Agni and the Prithvi. On its part, after an uncertain start in 1993, the Clinton administration took the position that the Kashmir dispute had to be settled by India and Pakistan bilaterally, although it would like both countries to keep in mind the wishes of the people of the state.

This mutual sensitivity and accommodation led to a rapid warming of relations between the two countries. Unfortunately, there were other foreign policy initiatives being pursued simultaneously by the US which negated this trend and progressively increased India’s sense of isolation. The first was the policy, pushed aggressively by the Clinton administration in 1996, shortly after the confrontation in the Taiwan straits, of engaging China “constructively” in global trade and investment. One side effect of this engagement was a rush of American companies to China. These transferred not only capital but, frequently at China’s insistence, a host of sophisticated technologies to that country. Indian policy-makers watched the turnabout with mild apprehension. They had no immediate reason to fear China, but the contrast between the freedom with which the US was allowing its companies to sell or transfer supercomputers, nuclear power plants and satellite launch and guidance technology to China, while routinely denying such sales to India, became more and more galling by the month.

This was not a product of affronted national pride. Indians know that technology is the source of power in the globalised world of today. Thus its free sale to China and denial to India was increasing the imbalance in power between the two countries almost week by week. With the Sino–Indian border dispute still not resolved, Clinton’s policy was having the unintended effect of making India more and more subordinate to China’s whims and fancies.

One can only speculate on how India would have tried to rectify this growing imbalance. But by itself it would not have sufficed to push India over the brink. The core group formed by the prime minister, which took the decision to carry out the nuclear tests, knew perfectly well that under US law, the nuclear tests would cut off even the limited flow of technology that existed till then. This meant that without a direct and immediate threat from China, India stood to lose far more than it gained from the tests. The final straw, for India, was not therefore Clinton’s ‘engagement’ with China, but its realisation that his administration had developed ambitions in Central Asia that were an echo of those the British had entertained in the nineteenth century. The Great Game was being resumed, and India would be its unintended victim. For as India had learned to its cost over fifty years, ever since it took the Pakistani invasion of Kashmir to the UN in October 1947, this would mean sacrificing India’s interests to those of a Pakistan now being nuclearised at full speed by China.

Unlike the Administration’s engagement with China, the resumption of the Great Game took place surreptitiously, in the bowels of the state and defence departments. The Bush administration virtually lost interest in Afghanistan once the Russians withdrew from the country. It was keen to see a return of peace and to ensure that the new regime in Afghanistan would be a democratic one, but was willing to leave the task of brokering an agreement between the Mujahideen groups that had fought the war, and creating the conditions for a general election, to the United Nations. It was the Democrats who found a new justification for getting involved in Afghanistan once more. The overt reasons of the Clinton State Department were its anxiety to stem the flow of drugs out of Afghanistan and to help American companies like UNOCAL find a way into the CIS states, particularly oil-rich Turkmenistan and Kazakhstan. But there was another, largely unstated, purpose. This was to establish western control over a large part of what Sir Halford Mackinder, the Edwardian pioneer of geopolitical theory, regarded as the “pivot of history”.

With the end of the cold war and the disintegration of the Soviet Union, the CIS states had literally lost their economic moorings. Under the Soviet planning system, their economies had been intermeshed with that of Russia to an extent that is hard to imagine in any market-driven economy. The breakup of the Soviet Union and the delinking of currencies and Central Banks of the CIS states from Moscow in the autumn of 1992, snapped these economic links with a brutal suddenness. Consumers in these countries found themselves without products they used to take for granted, and raw materials and intermediate goods producers found themselves without buyers. All turned in desperation to the world market. The result was hyperinflation, which fed into a collapse of the exchange rate, which fed back into hyperinflation. Central Asia thus reverted more or less to what it used to be in the nineteenth century — a volatile region of inestimable strategic importance. Control of Muslim CIS states would not only deny control of this region to the only other potential contenders for global dominance, China and Russia, but would in effect drive a wedge between them. The spectre of a single hostile land mass, stretching from the Baltic to the Sea of Japan, which had haunted British strategists in the nineteenth century, and the US during the early years of the cold war, would be banished, possibly forever.

One school of thought in the US policy establishment therefore urged that the CIS states should be weaned away from Russia by providing them the economic links with world markets that they so desperately needed. But that would only be possible if these countries were guaranteed a cheap and safe access to the sea. If access through Iran were ruled out, the only alternative route was through Afghanistan and Pakistan. But this required the restoration of peace in the former. Once the UN-brokered, moderate Rabbani government failed to establish peace (in part because of the support given by Pakistan to attempts by the fundamentalist Gulbadin Hekmatyar to seize power by force) the Clinton administration very quietly jettisoned the requirement of democracy in favour of peace at any cost. The Taliban, hard-core Wahaby fundamentalists schooled in madrassas established in Pakistan with Saudi Arabian money, and armed and officered by Pakistan army regulars, emerged as the formation most likely to deliver it. Pakistan therefore emerged as a key ally both for the restoration of peace in Afghanistan and the provision of access to the Indian Ocean.

Pakistan’s strategists had been harping on their country’s capacity to act as a bridge to Central Asia for the West ever since the cold war ended and it began to look as if the US had no more use for their country. But the first actual overtures for forging a new relationship seem to have come from the Clinton administration. Only that can explain why Pakistan was able to talk from what seemed to be a position of strength, and insist that it would do no business with the US until it either released the arms that Pakistan had already paid for before 1990, or returned the money.

After the Taliban captured Kabul and virtually the whole of Afghanistan south of the Hindu Kush mountains, the vision of a peaceful Afghanistan as a highway to Central Asia became irresistible. The US goal was to broker an agreement between the various Afghan factions to form a de facto confederation, with some kind of power sharing arrangement for Kabul. In 1996 and early 1997 the US assistant secretary of state for South Asia, Robin Raphel, visited Afghanistan several times and met not only the leaders of the Taliban but also Ahmad Shah Massoud and Rachid Dostam. She even got the Taliban leaders to agree to withdraw 12 kms south of Kabul as a gesture of their support for a confederal arrangement, but the arrangement proved unattainable. Two years later, the US Ambassador to the UN, Bill Richardson, visited Afghanistan and Pakistan with the same mission. This time the US came closer to success. Richardson managed to broker a series of meetings in Islamabad, the first of which lasted for five hours and ended with a short-lived agreement to honour terms for a ceasefire.

Had India and Pakistan been two ordinary countries, the rapid development of a new US–Pakistan axis would not have affected Washington’s ties with New Delhi. But the Kashmir dispute made that impossible. The Clinton administration was forced to choose, and gradually came down in favour of Pakistan once more. The reason was that while it sought to build its post-cold war ties with India on the base of shared ideals, such as a commitment to democracy and the creation of an open market-friendly economy, it was building its relations with Pakistan on realpolitik. Slowly but surely realpolitik won out.

US Tilt towards Pakistan

India received its first overt intimation of the change in the US policies in 1993, when the Clinton administration removed Pakistan from the watch list of countries sponsoring terrorism on which it had been put by the Bush administration a year earlier. To Indians the reason it gave was suspiciously familiar: the evidence did not meet the standard of proof that had been set down in the relevant Congressional Act. This was precisely what the Reagan and Bush administrations had used, to continue supplying military and economic aid to Pakistan in the face of mounting evidence collected by the CIA of the crucial nuclear weapons technology received by Pakistan from China as far back as 1986, of the theft of gas centrifuge technology from a Dutch firm by a Pakistani employee later identified as Dr A Q Khan himself, and the interception of dozens of clandestine nuclear weapons related equipment and materials destined for Pakistan.

The Indian government received another jolt when, only months later, the newly appointed assistant secretary of state for South Asia, Robin Raphel, made remarks during a background briefing to Indian journalists in Washington that seemed to reject the legal validity of the Instrument of Accession signed by the ruler of Kashmir in 1947, and also belittled the importance of the Simla agreement, signed by India and Pakistan in 1972.

India received its third and most severe shock when, in the midst of the kidnapping of five American, British, German and Norwegian hostages by a newly formed terrorist group in Kashmir, called the Al Faran, Senator Hank Brown moved a State Department-sponsored resolution in the senate in August 1995, for a one-time waiver of the Pressler amendment, to permit the supply of arms to Pakistan equivalent to the money it had earlier paid.

The Last Straw

For the Indian decision-makers the last straw in this ongoing process of US–Pakistan–China entente was the launch of the Ghauri. Pakistan had cleverly timed it to take place only days before Bill Richardson was to visit Afghanistan, where he needed its mediation to bring peace and open the gateway to Central Asia. When the US responded by expressing the mildest of possible regret at Pakistan’s action, India realised that the end of the cold war had not really changed anything. For geo-strategic reasons, the US would always give priority to its relations with Pakistan over those with India. For the foreseeable future, therefore, India was truly alone. Five days after receiving news of the Ghauri, Prime Minister Vajpayee signed the order to go ahead with the tests.