Deterrence without illusions

As polling continues in India’s five-week long parliamentary elections, BJP leaders are showing growing confidence that their party will form the next government. Some opinion polls now suggest that the NDA alliance the BJP leads might even get an outright majority in the new parliament without the need of support from the regional parties.

Driven as the BJP is by the Hindutva ideology and a Hindu nationalist agenda, the party has promised a more muscular foreign policy than that pursued by the outgoing UPA government, especially towards Pakistan. In a clear allusion to Pakistan, the party manifesto declares that a BJP government will not hesitate from taking “strong stand and steps”. The charge that the Manmohan government has been “soft” on Islamabad figures prominently in the BJP’s indictment of Congress rule.

The widely prevalent anti-Pakistan sentiment, never far from the surface, is also being exploited by the BJP to attack its domestic political opponents. Last week the party leader in Bihar advised those who were opposed to Modi to leave India and go to Pakistan. He refused to retract his threat despite an admonition by the country’s election commission and a perfunctory distancing by Modi.

For his part, Modi has curbed his natural instincts on the urging of his foreign policy advisers and left Pakistan-bashing mostly to his underlings, but he has not always been able to resist the temptation. In March he accused India’s defence minister, A K Antony, of being an agent of Pakistan and an enemy of India for supposedly having failed to respond befittingly to the beheading of an Indian soldier on the LoC last August allegedly by Pakistani soldiers.

Muslim-baiting Amit Shah, one of Modi’s closest advisers who is tipped to become a minister in the prime minister’s office in the coming BJP government, has promised that with Modi in power, Pakistanis would not dare behead an Indian soldier.

Besides a visceral hostility towards Pakistan, Modi also harbours the belief that he has been chosen by God to lead India to greatness, as he told party workers last Thursday. It is worthwhile reproducing his words verbatim. “There are some people who are chosen by Ishwar (God) for undertaking difficult tasks,” Modi said, “… I think Ishwar has chosen me to do this work. … And I will do it.”

History has no dearth of rulers who brought their countries to ruin and wrought massive destruction ontheir perceived enemies in pursuing what they saw was their divinely ordained destiny to greatness and immortality. Because of this belief, they become deaf to wiser counsel and are prepared to embark upon reckless policies which defy rationality. Modi too seems to labour under the same failings.

When he comes to power in about a month from now, Pakistan will have to deal with an Indian government headed by an autocratic leader animated by a strong belief in his divinely ordained destiny to correct the wrongs of history and a burning nationalism fuelled by Hindutva and anti-Muslim rancour. In an article last December (‘Will Modi save India or wreck it?’), the British weekly The Economist pointed to the danger of Modi having a finger on the button of a potential nuclear conflict with Pakistan.

The BJP manifesto now seems to confirm that the Modi government would have fewer scruples than its predecessor in pressing the nuclear trigger or unleashing a conventional war that could escalate to the nuclear level. The party has pledged itself to “study in detail India’s nuclear doctrine, and revise and update it, to make it relevant to challenges of current times”. According to Reuters, two sources involved in drafting the manifesto told the news agency that the BJP wanted to reconsider the no-first-use policy in view of advances made by Pakistan in tactical nuclear weaponry.

In the wake of negative international reaction to the proposed abandonment of the no-first-use pledge, the party has since reaffirmed this commitment which was first given by Vajpayee in 1998. Modi himself has said that there would be no “compromise” on that pledge. Nevertheless, the manifesto’s promise to revise India’s nuclear doctrine stands and it is no secret that India continues to work assiduously on military plans to launch a conventional attack on Pakistan “under the nuclear threshold”.

Clearly Pakistan will have to upgrade its level of readiness to deal with “Modi madness”, as The Economist called it. In addition, it will be necessary to close any gaps in the credibility of the country’s nuclear deterrent, including through the development of a second strike capability.

Pakistan must also discard all illusions about the real intentions of the coming Modi government. In a meeting with the Indian media last week, the Pakistan high commissioner in Delhi played down all the warning signals emanating from the BJP as “election rhetoric” and instead placed reliance on one interview given by Modi to a little-known Marathi newspaper.

In that interview, the BJP leader had said that his party’s foreign policy would be based on the Hindu concept of “Vasudhaiva Kutumbakam” (The world is a family) and that mutual respect and cooperation should be the basis for India’s relationships with all foreign countries. He had also pledged to follow the foreign policy of the Vajpayee government.

It would in fact be more correct to say that these declarations of a benign approach are the ‘election rhetoric’ that we should be disregarding. The true intentions of the BJP are reflected better in the party manifesto and other statements of its leaders.

It is worth recalling in this connection that the BJP manifesto of 1998 had made a pledge to “re-evaluate the country’s nuclear policy and exercise the option to induct nuclear weapons.” There were many who felt at the time that this too was mere ;election rhetoric’. They were proved wrong when India carried out nuclear tests in May 1998. We should not be repeating their mistake by turning a blind eye to clear warnings of “strong stand and steps” contained in the present BJP manifesto and of the plans to reviseIndia’s nuclear doctrine to counter Pakistan’s tactical nuclear weapons capability.

Another illusion that the Nawaz government has been nursing is that the last BJP government led by Vajpayee was good for Pakistan-India relations, although there is little on the ground to warrant such a view. Nawaz has also formed the fixed view, again quite detached from reality, that after the Lahore summit of 1999, he and Vajpayee could together have made a breakthrough in normalising bilateral relations and even found a solution to Kashmir, but were kept from achieving these noble goals by Musharraf’s Kargil adventure.

All this would be largely a matter of historical interest today, were it not for the fact that Nawaz is now keen to launch a similar major initiative with Modi and is prepared to grant some unilateral concessions to India in the field of trade in the hope of kick-starting a dialogue with India. There is a possibility that a special envoy of the prime minister might visit Delhi soon after the Indian election to convey Nawaz’s earnest desire for a breakthrough in bilateral relations based on bilateral cooperation in the economic, trade and energy fields.

While the Modi government would be happy to pocket all these concessions, it should be clear to Nawaz that it is not going to restart a structured dialogue with Pakistan until the trial of those accused of involvement in the Mumbai terrorist attack of 2008 is concluded to its satisfaction.

If the Nawaz government has done its homework, it would also know that even if a full dialogue were to resume, Delhi’s position on issues of interest to Pakistan will remain inflexible. The reason India has been unwilling to make any concessions is not, as the Nawaz government naively seems to think, that the Indian government has not been strong enough to take bold steps for peace, but that it feels it is in such a strong position that it does not have to concede anything.

The writer is a former member of the Pakistan Foreign Service.Email: asifezdi@yahoo.com