Neighbours: Indo-Pak; Peace Pledge

Reducing the risk of accidental nuclear holocaust was a key goal of the Lahore summit.

Catalysts: Directed by their PMs, Ahmad and Raghunath worked out the N-MoU

In the gladiator pit of Indo-Pakistani diplomacy where no quarter is given or asked for, they have met earlier. Foreign Secretary K. Raghunath and his Pakistani counterpart Shamshad Ahmad. So too have Zamir Akram, director-general for South Asia, Salman Bashir, director-general of the UN division of the Pakistan Foreign Ministry, Joint Secretary (Pakistan, Iran and Afghanistan) Vivek Katju and Joint Secretary (disarmament) Rakesh Sood. Theirs is an engagement like no other, matched in its intensity only by the Indo-Pak cricket matches. But this time, they had their orders: work out a package of nuclear risk-reduction measures that would be acceptable to each other and their bosses.

LAHORE MEMORANDUM

ťGive advance notification of ballistic-missile tests.
Test missiles can go haywire, forewarning will prevent panic.

ťPrevent incidents at sea or air space by vessels and aircraft.
Gung-ho officers playing the game of "chicken" could touch off conflict.

ťDiscuss each other's security concepts and doctrines to avoid conflict.
Draw each side's Lakshman Rekha and explain what could happen if it were breached.

ťTake measures to avoid accidental or unauthorised use of nuclear weapons.
Accidents or unexplained incidents can be misinterpreted.

ťAbide by the pledge not to conduct nuclear tests.
Should assure the world community that even minus CTBT there will be no more tests.

ťReview and upgrade communication links.
Messages in a crisis should be authentic, accessible and safe from snoopers.

At first sight the Memorandum of Understanding (MoU), signed by Raghunath and Ahmad in Lahore on February 21, appears to be nothing more than a declaration of intent. But place it in the perspective of history and it looks like what it is, a far-reaching commitment by both sides to reduce the risk of nuclear war and, eventually, build a framework of peace. It symbolises the enormous distance that the two countries have traversed since their May 1998 nuclear tests, if not August 1947.

Pakistan's formal entry into the nuclear age was frenetic. There were wild charges of an Indo-Israeli attack, and then a sense of over-weening power leading to a high-risk attempt to leverage the event to push India on Kashmir. By the end of July, the intensity of shelling on the Line of Control had reached what a brigadier says was "wartime level". Discussion on ways to reduce the risk of nuclear war had to await the bus diplomacy of last month. The MOU worked out by the officials after hundreds of man-hours of negotiations between February 14 and 20 is a major first step in ensuring that the two neighbours do not create a nuclear holocaust by error or through misunderstanding.

Shorn of cant, their commitment to discuss security concepts and nuclear doctrines could lead to path-breaking agreements on defence postures that do not threaten the other. Currently almost everything that one side says it is doing for "defence" is seen as being offensive by the other. The commitment to "national measures" to reduce the risk of accidental or unauthorised use of nuclear weapons will mean working out ways in which authentic and authoritative information on disasters like Chernobyl or some "unexplained" incident that could trigger off a nuclear war is immediately available.

Linked to this is the commitment to work out agreements on notifying each other before missile tests. The Lahore MOU also seeks to plug a loophole which could have allowed tensions to arise out of the tactic of "shadowing" each other's ships on the high seas. Coincidentally, among the charges flying fast and hard in the Vishnu Bhagwat affair was one which claimed that he had once ordered his ship to fire at a Pakistani aircraft on the high seas.

Officials caution that the MoU still requires considerable work before it yields working agreements. A target of mid-1999 has been set. But as an official who negotiated the undertakings says, "Six months is a long time in Indo-Pakistan relations." Things will work, he says, only if the "political direction remains constant". He points out that India and Pakistan worked out agreements on Siachen and the Tulbul project in 1989 and 1992 and then put them in deep freeze when the political climate changed.

Cynics would say the situation now is different because of the near-universal condemnation of the nuclear tests and the economic sanctions. But there are simpler explanations: Nawaz Sharif and Atal Bihari Vajpayee created a diplomatic firestorm by crossing the nuclear threshold in May 1998. Their goal was preserving national security. Having achieved this, they now seem to be signalling that the time has come to get on with more urgent tasks of governing their poor and backward nations.