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VIEWPOINT: FIFTH COLUMN
Hold the Button
It's time to talk to Islamabad. At least on ways to prevent
a nuclear war.
By Tavleen Singh
 The
week in which we shot at two Pakistani planes in Chhamb is a good one
to discuss what could happen if our perennially hostile relations with
that country ever caused another war. We Indians like our nuclear bombs,
they make us feel safe, so the possibility of a nuclear war in the subcontinent
rarely enters the realm of public debate. When Atal Bihari Vajpayee forced
nuclear power status upon us in May 1998 our hearts brimmed over with
pride. There were celebrations in the streets and all polls indicated
that a majority felt it was necessary for India to produce and deploy
nuclear weapons. Across the border Pakistanis reacted with even more fervour-tinged
as it was with Islamic zeal-when Nawaz Sharif responded to our tests with
his own.
In both countries, opponents
of these weapons of mass destruction are derided as peaceniks, even traitors,
and about the only thing India and Pakistan have agreed on in the past
50 years is that nuclear bombs are a good thing. In the subcontinent,
it is not just defence experts but even ordinary people who believe that
nuclear weapons are a deterrent, perhaps the only one, against another
Indo-Pakistani war.
Let me say, at this point,
that my own views on the issue are ambiguous. Despite a fundamental horror
of nuclear weapons, I prefer having Pakistan's bomb out in the open rather
than concealed in some general's basement. But, although I can see almost
no situation in which an Indian prime minister would use nuclear weapons
first, I find it hard to be as sanguine about a bomb (hidden or not) in
the hands of Pakistan's ruling establishment comprised as it is of military
men and mullahs. I find it even harder to retain sanguinity since a seminar
I attended in Davos last month, called ''New Actors on the Nuclear Stage''
which chilled my very soul.
There were three American
speakers and a Russian and they all agreed that India and Pakistan were
the two countries most likely to start the next nuclear war and that not
since the Cuban missile crisis had two countries been as close to one.
A professor from Harvard University said war-game studies had been conducted
with India and Pakistan as the antagonists and two-thirds of these ended
with one or the other using nuclear weapons. The good news is that, unlike
what could have happened in a war between the former Soviet Union and
the United States, our nuclear war would not destroy the world. The bad
news is that it would certainly kill 10 million people and, of course,
destroy the subcontinent for a long, long time.
In India, we like to
dismiss this kind of analysis of our strategic problems as yet more evidence
of the foreign hand trying to stop us moving along the glorious road to
military power. I find it hard to dismiss it so easily for the simple
reason that we do not even speak the same language as Pakistan any more.
There is not a single issue I can think of on which India and Pakistan
have been able to agree.
Take last week's incident.
Our view is that the planes were definitely flying over our territory
but Islamabad's view is that they were ''well within Pakistani territory
in Listaharabad area''. Take other recent incidents and you find the same
completely opposite positions. When we shot down a Pakistani naval reconnaissance
plane in Kutch in 1999, we insisted that it was in our territory but the
Pakistanis disputed this and even produced wreckage from their side of
the border. We produced evidence that we were fighting Pakistani troops
in an ugly proxy war in Kargil. But they continue to insist that our war
was with Kashmiri ''freedom fighters''. When the Indian Airlines plane
was hijacked from Kathmandu, we detected the Pakistani hand and they charged
us with hijacking our own plane. On Kashmir, of course, the differences
are so irreconcilable that we do not even see the point of talking to
them. We want to talk to them even less because we see General Pervez
Musharraf as a pushy, little military man whom we have nothing to say
to since he was Pakistan's Kargil hero. He has also been successful in
turning Kashmir's struggle for azadi into an Islamic jehad that seems
to have a grander design than mere ''liberation'' of Kashmir. What is
there to say to a Pakistani ruler such as this?
Perhaps nothing on Kashmir,
perhaps even less on cross-border terrorism since our terrorists are his
freedom fighters, but surely we should be talking about ways to prevent
a nuclear war? There are religious and nationalist zealots on both sides
who tend to get in the way of rational discourse-usually because they
understand nothing about the issues that so arouse their passions. One
way to get them on board would be to make the nuclear debate as public
as possible so that ordinary people understand the consequences. In any
case, it is time to talk.
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