South Asia:
An Explosive Mixture?

DJ is reprinting with thanks this article from the Strategic Survey 1998/1999 of International Institute for Strategic Studies UK

The nuclear weapon tests conducted by India and Pakistan in the spring of 1998 changed their status from nuclear-threshold to declared nuclear weapons states, and sent a shiver of nuclear fear through the international community. The perennial antagonists have fought three wars since they gained independence in 1947. Their disagreements over Kashmir, in particular, have kept tensions in the region at a constant boil. The tests, which actually changed little because it has been recognised for some time that both countries had the capability, nevertheless sharpened concern that the unresolved antagonism between them could get out of hand. Since the tests, there has been a concerted effort, led by the US to minimise the effects of the development on the non-proliferation regime. Without showing the least inclination to return to non-nuclear weapons status, both countries are willing to meet this effort half-way, believing that this is the best way to exploit their new status for positive gain.

While both countries have sought to manage the international consequences of their tests, within each country, public discussion has focused primarily on domestic issues. In India, these revolved around the chronic instability of the governing coalition. The government which emerged after the February-March 1998 elections was constantly undermined by its own partners and by Hindu nationalist factions within and outside the coalition. India had already undergone two short-lived experiments in coalition rule during the previous 22 months when the left-leaning United Front (UF) was in power, but the new government had additional handicaps arising from tensions within the dominant Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP). Atal Behari Vajpayee, the new prime minister, was perceived as weak and indecisive, and in poor health. A relative moderate within the conservative, Hindu-nationalist BJP, he appeared at odds with party hard-liners, including the Home Minister L. K. Advani. The compromises necessary to keep the governing coalition together were unpopular with more extremist Hindu organisations operating outside parliamentary politics, to which the BJP owed much of its support. Vajpayee's government proved unable to control violence against the Christian community or to buoy up a flagging economy, failings which helped benefit the ailing Congress Party.

In Pakistan, the main preoccupation was concern about the economy, although there was also alarm at Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif's confrontational style, and his undermining of democratic institutions. The prime minister was seen increasingly to favour his own fellow Punjabis over the country's other ethnic groups, especially the Mohajirs - Urdu speakers who migrated to Pakistan after the partition of the subcontinent in 1947. As in 1997, when he was engaged in a series of confrontations with the supreme court and the president, Sharif moved to eliminate potential restraints on his power, confronting the army and the press, and undermining the judiciary by introducing two parallel systems: the Sharia, or Islamic legal code, and military courts. Sectarian killings by armed Shi'ite and Sunni groups continued in Punjab, while the violence worsened dramatically in Karachi, leading to the dismissal of the state government in October.

By virtue of its support for the Taleban Islamist militia in Afghanistan, and militants in the Kashmir Valley, Pakistan also came under international scrutiny for its links to Islamic extremist movements, and to international terrorism. The folly of Islamabad's support for Islamic militants like the Taleban was already apparent in Punjab, where armed Sunni extremist groups have actively targeted Pakistani Shi'ites and Iranian diplomats. But the direct influence of the Taleban - whose rigid doctrines emerged from deeni medrassas (Islamic seminaries) in Karachi and the North-West Frontier Province (NWFP) - also spread. Pakistani disciples of the Taleban took control of pockets of the NWFP, imposing their version of Islamic justice.

Pakistan's connections to extremist groups was underscored again on 20 August 1998 when US cruise missiles pounded tented camps near the town of Khost in eastern Afghanistan. Although Washington was targeting the bases of the Saudi renegade, Osama bin Laden, indicted in the US for the bombing of its embassies in East Africa, most of the 30 casualties were Pakistani. Recruited by the Sunni extremist groups active in Punjab, they were in Afghanistan to receive military training before being sent to the Kashmir Valley, a network that Pakistan has always tried to conceal. After the failed attempt to eliminate bin Laden, Pakistan faced steady pressure from Washington to persuade the Taleban to hand over the Saudi for trial.

Breaking the Taboo

India and Pakistan became the world's newest declared nuclear weapon states in May 1998. On 11 May, less than two months after the installation of the coalition government led by the avowedly pro-nuclear BJP, India carried out three underground nuclear explosions at Pokhran, in the western deserts of Rajasthan - its first since 1974. Two days later, Indian scientists conducted two more test explosions. India was motivated less by feeling threatened by Pakistan than by the perceived threat from Chinese nuclear weapons and missiles; the continuing Chinese support for Pakistan's missile (and perhaps nuclear) programme; and the pressure created by the September 1999 deadline for signing the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty (CTBT).

Despite intense diplomatic pressure, led by the US and Japan, which sent envoys to Pakistan to plead for restraint, Islamabad conducted its own tests on 28 and 30 May, the culmination of the covert nuclear programme it had been pursuing for two decades at heavily guarded laboratories at Kahuta, near Rawalpindi. Nawaz Sharif's government argued that national security interests obliged Pakistan to match the Indian tests. From Pakistan's point of view, once India led the way, Pakistan had no choice but to follow. But Sharif admitted that comprehensive mandatory US sanctions under the Glenn Amendment would extract a heavy toll on a treasury already struggling to meet repayments on a $ 32 billion foreign debt.

The tests were almost universally condemned by the international community, and particularly by China. (India had singled out China as the particular source of the threat it was seeking to counter with its nuclear weapons.) The Foreign Ministries of the five permanent members of the UN Security Council drew up a list of specific steps that India and Pakistan must take in the interests of international security, which were adopted and reinforced by the Security Council as a whole in UN Security Council Resolution (UNSCR) 1172. Concerns expressed by the summit of the Non-aligned Movement and the Association of South-East Asian Nations Regional Forum (ARF) demonstrated a North-South unity of approach. Some countries imposed sanctions on India and Pakistan, mainly in the field of development aid, while the US was obliged by the Glenn Amendment to take firmer action.

After the tests, both countries sunk into a state of wilful denial about the dangers of the changed security scenario, and what it was costing them. In India, politicians insisted that US and Japanese sanctions would have a minimal effect. That fiction was more difficult to maintain in Pakistan, which came close to defaulting on its foreign debt, until the international community relented and the International Monetary Fund (IMF) agreed to a bail out.

Within a month of the tests, however, the Group of Eight (G8) industrial countries recognised that humanitarian aid to both countries should be exempted from sanctions. Further relaxation of the sanction regime followed for Pakistan because of its foreign debt problem. In November, US President Bill Clinton lifted more sanctions, citing' concrete steps' taken to reduce subcontinental tensions. Domestic debate on the nuclear question in India and Pakistan then focused on the countries' success in rolling back the sanctions.

In the months following the tests, US Deputy Secretary of State Strobe Talbott opened a dialogue with India and Pakistan on moving ahead with the agenda set out in UNSCR 1172. His mission was aimed particularly at securing commitment to sign the CTBT before the September 1999 deadline and to take part in negotiations for the Fissile Material Cut-off Treaty; to cap nuclear weaponisation and missile programmes; and to enter into a meaningful dialogue on South Asian security. New Delhi had parallel discussions with Russia, France and Britain.

These encounters have been conducted quietly and, by late March 1999, had yielded few concrete commitments. However, there were some sketchy indications of what had been happening behind the scenes. India has adopted a nuclear policy which would lead it to maintain a 'minimum deterrent' force while proceeding with a missile development programme that got increased funding in the March 1999 budget. there has been considerable speculation that India planned to test-fire its intermediate range Agni missile, an extended range version of the Agni, and Dhanush, a 350-km naval missile. All were intended to be armed with nuclear weapons. Other elements of restraint have been an assurance that India would not be the first to use nuclear weapons in conflict; a volunteer moratorium on further testing; and an indication of possible signature of the CTBT.

Conscious of international pressures and no doubt recognising their own interests, Indian and Pakistani diplomats did meet in Islamabad to set out a programme for talks on the Kashmir issue and seven other, less intractable, questions, such as the Siachen Glacier and water resources. Although a further round of talks in New Delhi a month later yielded no apparent progress on any front, the two neighbours appeared committed to continuing the dialogue. The lack of substantive progress was camouflaged by a breakthrough that was almost entirely symbolic: the support by both prime ministers for a bus link between Lahore and New Delhi, the first road link between the two countries. Indian and Pakistani officials carried out trial runs of the bus route in late 1998, and on 20 February 1999 Prime Minister Vajpayee travelled the new route into Pakistan on the first bus, painted in gold. The symbolic meeting between Vajpayee and Nawaz Sharif on that occasion led to agreement in principle on a range of possible confidence building measures, but made little at all, concrete progress. It was far more important for the fact that it took place than for anything that it accomplished.

Desperation Politics

India is believed to have considered a nuclear test in 1995, and then abandoned it, after then Prime Minister P.V. Narasimha Rao was confronted with satellite pictures of preparations at Pokhran by an angry US ambassador. In 1996, the subsequent coalition government reversed India's long-held position and opposed the CTBT. When the BJP came to power, India's nuclear policy was seen as an area of consensus: New Delhi retained its right to 'exercise its nuclear option' in strategic planning against China and Pakistan. It continued to oppose the CTBT and the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT) as part of a 'nuclear apartheid' regime imposed by the declared nuclear weapon states. Vajpayee promised to set up a national security council to review nuclear and other defence issues.

When that ambiguous posture was destroyed by the tests, the small minority opposed to India's nuclear programme accused Vajpayee of exploiting nationalist sentiment to boost support for his rackety coalition from the urban middle classes. Conducting the tests was the only aspect of the Hindutva, or Hindu nationalism, policies, promised by the BJP before the election, which might find wide acceptance. All the others had already been dropped. Affluent Indians, who have gravitated increasingly towards the BJP during the last decade, have seen the nuclear weapons programme as a means of gaining more influence for India on the global stage. In the days immediately following the Pokhran tests, public approval for them was 80% according to some opinion polls, and the dancing crowds that gathered daily outside the prime minister's home in New Delhi gave a temporary boost to a government that had been seen as weak, ineffectual and extremely unlikely to last its full five-year term.

The euphoria which followed the explosions soon vanished, however, and the first months of the first BJP-led government since independence - barring a 13-day attempt by Vajpayee in 1996 - were marked by unremitting pressure from its coalition partners. The BJP-led coalition was even more disparate than the UF coalition governments that preceded it. The largest coalition partner, the All India Anna Dravida Munnetra Kazhagan (AIADMK) of Tamil Nadu, was driven by the priorities of its leader, M.J. Jayalalitha, who openly linked support for the coalition to her campaign to extricate herself from a series of corruption cases. Building on pre- and post-election agreements, regional parties used their leverage within the fragile coalition to push for concessions for their own states.

Such machinations contributed to the paralysis that prevented the government from responding to early warning signals of an unexpected monsoon and poor harvests. Food prices soared, propelled by the government's failure to check hoarding by the merchant class, which is the BJP's traditional support base and source of funds. The price rises - particularly of such staples as onions and potatoes which rose eight-fold - proved ruinous for the BJP in elections to four state assemblies on 25 November 1998.

The party lost the western state of Rajasthan, where there was a 10% swing against it, and its stronghold, New Delhi, where there was a 17% swing. Meanwhile, the opposing Congress Party also defied earlier poll predictions to hang on to the central state of Madhya Pradesh. The debacle left the BJP even more exposed to the wiles of its allies, who sought to disassociate themselves from the price rises by being seen to put pressure on the coalition leader.

The elections were an important rite of passage for the Congress leader, Italian-born Sonia Gandhi. Her campaign appearances had helped stave off disaster for Congress during the February-March 1998 elections, and she had become the Congress Party's president in March. She was able to claim the state election victories as evidence of the enduring popularity of the Nehru-Gandhi dynasty, and of her successful efforts to breathe new life into the party. With its regional party satraps becoming weaker, Congress is turning its attention to state elections due in southern Andhra Pradesh and Karnataka in the autumn of 1999. Those polls, which, early in the year, Congress appeared well-positioned to win, will influence Gandhi's decision on whether to seek early national elections. Although she has faced pressure from within her own party and the remnants of the UF coalition to replace the BJP-led coalition with a differently structured grouping, she appeared disinclined to seek power other than through elections. While support from regional groups would still be needed, Gandhi appeared to believe she could return the Congress to its status as a national party.

Apart from prices, there was growing concern about the attempts of the BJP's extremist allies, within and outside the coalition, to replace India's official ideology of secularism with Hindutva - a notion of Indian character, with roots in Hinduism, that is purposely left vague. Such a programme would have to be enacted by stealth. The BJP dropped the most contentious aspects of the creed to attract voters in the 1998 election and to win over regional parties during the process of coalition building. These were:

• a pledge to build a temple on the site of the Babri Masjid, the medieval mosque at Ayodhya, Uttar Pradesh, that was destroyed by Hindu extremists in December 1992;
• revocation of special constitutional status for Kashmir;
• abolition of 'personal laws' on marriage, divorce and property for India's 120 million Muslims.

The 'national agenda for governance' adopted by the coalition made no mention of the BJP's defining issue, an omission that reassured Indian Muslims that the party's rise to power would have a moderating effect. Since 1993, when thousands were killed in violence that followed the destruction of the Babri Masjid, there has been no significant Hindu-Muslim violence, and the first months of the BJP government brought no change in that regard. However, a series of running battles over education, cultural events and the activities of the Christian churches were to expose the tensions between the BJP and more extremist forces, and even within competing factions of the ruling party itself. In June, the Vishwa Hindu Parishad (VHP) - world council of Hindus - threatened to revive the passions that had been unleashed at Ayodhya by announcing it would build a temple on the ruins of the mosque. Vajpayee was forced to offer public reassurances that the government would block such a move. Such episodes were repeatedly to embarrass the prime minister.

One regularly visited battleground was education, a traditional area of concern for the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS), the secretive and quasimilitary organisation that has been the self-appointed guardian of Hinduism since 1925. The RSS is a militant wing of the BJP, as well as of the VHP. When the Vajpayee government took office, the RSS adopted a more public posture than ever before. Most senior BJP leaders, including Vajpayee, are members of both organisations, and the organised workers of the RSS are crucial to the BJP during elections, so it is difficult to gauge the sincerity or feasibility of the BJP's claim to have temporarily abandoned Hindutva.

The Education Ministry was entrusted to a BJP hard-liner, Murli Manohar Joshi, and there were moves early on to install BJP loyalists in the civil service, police, diplomatic corps, universities and cultural institutions. The Indian Council of Historical Research, which had been instrumental in creating a secular nationalist and Marxist orthodoxy among scholars during the past 25 years, was the first casualty in June 1998. In October, Joshi called on state education ministers to introduce the teaching of Hindu scriptures and to devote more time to Sanskrit. The BJP government in the state of Uttar Pradesh moved to introduce compulsory school prayer, and the recital of a hymn Vande Mataram (Hail to the Mother) which has become a symbol of cultural tyranny for India's Muslims.

The BJP faced an even more extreme brand of militancy from the Shiv Sena, the creation of charismatic Maharashtrain leader from outside the RSS tradition. In December, the group attacked cinemas screening a film which contained lesbian love scenes. Shiv Sena activists also threatened the first Pakistani cricket test tour of India in more than a decade, which proved very unpopular with the general public.

Of more immediate concern was the government's inaction in the face of rising violence against India's 23m Christians. Church leaders registered more than 100 incidents in 1998 - burning of churches, raping of nuns and attacks on schools. Hindu extremists claimed that the attacks were spontaneous reactions to aggressive conversions by Christian missionaries. This claim was unfortunately lent some credence when Vajpayee called for a national debate on conversions. Although the violence was initially concentrated in the western state of Gujarat, a stronghold of the VHP and Bajrang Dal, the government's inaction was seen as acquiescence. Amid protests from Advani that the attacks on Christians were isolated incidents, they spread to Uttar Pradesh, Haryana and Karnataka and in January 1999 claimed their first victims when an Australian missionary and his two young sons were burnt to death in eastern Orissa. Again, Advani publicly absolved the Bajrang Dal of the killings, which did little to discourage continued violence. However, the situation led to the resignation of one BJP cabinet minister, and threats from at least four allies to leave the coalition. The violence against the Christians threatened to become the breaking point for Vajpayee's government.

Unhappy Economic News

While the anti-Christian attacks showed up the vulnerabilities of the Vajpayee government, the prime minister did succeed in pushing through one key measure in the series of economic reforms underway since 1991: the qualified opening of the insurance industry to foreign firms. Elsewhere on the economic front, however, he did little to reduce the food and other subsidies that had helped drive the fiscal deficit up to 6.1% of gross domestic product (GDP).

The sanctions which followed the nuclear tests affected some $ 2.8 bn in World Bank and Asian Development Bank loans for infrastructure, but, even before then, economic growth had been declining for several years. Growth slipped below 5% in 1998, approaching the levels prevailing before the economic reforms began. Agricultural and industrial production fell, as did exports and foreign investment. Within days of the nuclear tests, India's currency dropped below 40 rupees to the dollar - symbolic new low. Its slide continued throughout the year, with some recovery following the announcement of the budget.

Pakistan: Moving to the Right

A deepening debt crisis, compounded by the international sanctions imposed after the nuclear tests, continued to preoccupy Pakistan's government. At the time of the tests, debt servicing accounted for 37% of public spending. With defence expenditure absorbing another 26%, the government was crippled when it contemplated spending on development. The immediate effect of the tests, and the anticipated sanctions, was capital flight, and a 30% devaluation of the rupee. In late July, when foreign exchange reserves fell to $ 450m - less than three weeks' worth of imports - Islamabad stopped repayment on commercial and institutional debt.

Although it won a reprieve at the end of the year, when the IMF agreed to reschedule some $3bn of debt, it was uncertain whether Sharif had the political strength to take the tough measures demanded by lenders. The fall of the rupee, and a 25% rise in petrol prices and utility tariffs, already threatened further social discontent. The country has so far proved unwilling to cut government spending, or to impose a tax on agricultural income. Instead, Sharif has revived a $ 9bn project to build a dam on the Indus river. Though directed by lenders to settle a row with independent power producers, Sharif scrapped agreements reached under former Prime Minister Benazir Bhutto, and charged foreign electricity company executives with corruption.

Amid looming economic disaster, Sharif, who had come to power in February 1997 with a nearly two-thirds majority, was determined to neutralise any potential checks on his authority. On 28 August 1998, he unveiled a proposal to make Sharia the supreme law of Pakistan. The country has had a version of Islamic law in the federal Sharia courts since the military dictatorship of the 1980s. Sharif, however, claimed his Islamisation project would lead to a wholesale reform of the police and administration, and free Pakistan of corruption, crime and poverty.

Few were convinced by Sharif's vision of 'instant justice'. His parallel justice system was seen as a ruse to grant the prime minister the powers to over-ride existing legal and constitutional safeguards, and overturn legislation passed by the four provincial assemblies. Opponents of the bill - virtually all political parties bar Sharif's Pakistan Muslim League (PML), human rights activists and the military - also feared it would lead to growing intolerance in a society riven by sectarian violence and general lawlessness. there was even a fluttering of revolt against the Sharia bill from within Sharif's party before it was passed, with a few amendments, by 151 to 16 in the National Assembly on 10 October. By the end of 1998, Sharif had yet to present the law for approval by the upper house, or Senate, where his PML did not enjoy such a strong majority.

Two days before the passage of the Sharia bill, Sharif managed to get rid of his most formidable critic: Pakistan's military chief, General Jehangir Karamat, who retired four months before he was due to do so. His exit was precipitated by his public criticism of the government's attempts to manage Pakistan's economic crisis, and his proposal of a National Security Council to 'institutionalise' decision-making and rid the country of 'polarisation, vendetta and insecurity-driven politics.'

While Karamat's dramatic gesture appeared to reflect the military's continued respect for civilian rule, ten years after the restoration of democracy in Pakistan, it also raised questions about Sharif's long-term relationship with the army. General Pervez Musharraf, Karamat's successor, is also a Mohajir and is believed to share his predecessor's concern about the economy and political violence.

Meanwhile, Sharif moved against the Muttahida Qaumi Movement (MQM), which represents the Mohajir community, dominant in urban areas of Sind province especially Karachi. In November, following the murder of a leading philanthropist and former governor of Sind, Hakim Mohammed Said, the prime minister dismissed the provincial government, which was a coalition of his own PML and the MQM. Although violence had been rising in Karachi, with more than 1,000 murders in 1998, MQM leaders saw the dismissal of the government as retribution for their refusal to support Sharif's Sharia bill.

As part of the crackdown in Karachi, Sharif replaced the provincial police chief with a trusted officer from Punjab, adding to the resentment of Pakistan's largest and most politically dominant province, and introduced military courts to try serious crimes involving activists in the MQM and its splinter group, the MQM Haqiqi. Initially, Sharif ordered the military courts to deliver verdicts within three days. However, even the army was disturbed at his haste, and , in January 1999, the Supreme Court stayed the first death sentences to be handed down by the courts. Undeterred, Sharif announced he would introduce military courts throughout Pakistan, resorting again to the claim that such a measure would deliver 'instant justice'. Meanwhile, a dispute that had been simmering for several months between the country's largest newspaper group, the Jang Group, and the prime minister reached a crisis point. In February, Sharif defied the Supreme Court to order police vans to stop the delivery of newsprint to the group's publications by force. Sharif is clearly moving towards authoritarian rule.

By following India in becoming a declared nuclear state, Pakistan may have developed a deterrent to attack by Indian armoured divisions or nuclear bombs. But this does little to offset the true threat to the security of the Pakistani people, which is contained in the massive deterioration in public law and order. Everyday life in Pakistan must contend with political, sectarian and criminal violence at a level never seen before. It is taking an increasing toll on human life, destroying popular trust in the government's ability to control it, and undermining economic growth, both by inhibiting foreign investment and weakening local business. Against this dismal background of failure of existing institutions and tensions involving the military and Islamic authoritarians there is a risk that the vestiges of parliamentary democracy will be undermined. Nuclear weapons are of no use against this threat.

Troubles Ahead

The nuclear tests by India and Pakistan have further upset the stability of an already unsettled region suffering from acute poverty. They have challenged global efforts on arms control and non-proliferation and have provoked international condemnation. Whatever may have been the supposed rationale for the tests in terms of national security and domestic opinion, such consequences are in no country's interests. The economic and political costs for India and Pakistan could prove devastating.

Both countries are showing some awareness of these effects. The resumption of bilateral dialogue, the agreement on a way forward, presided over by the two prime ministers in Lahore in February 1999, and the possibility of adherence to the CTBT offer some promise of progress. But much more remains to be done. There is a desperate need for substantive confidence - and security-building measures in the region as a whole, extending beyond the subcontinent to take in China. Arms control regimes need to be reinforced. All this will call for restraint and responsibility in economic and political governance in the countries concerned and measured stimulation from the international community. The challenge, and the dangers arising from failure to meet it, are very great.