Abstract
The word “surreal” is often used to depict the woes of human existence on the Indo-Pakistan subcontinent. It also aptly characterizes the security milieu emerging in the wake of the May 1998 nuclear tests.
Pakistan and India are the only countries in history to have had high-casualty, heavy-artillery border clashes after declaring themselves capable of making and deploying nuclear weapons. It happened immediately after their (in)famous nuclear tests last year, and their troops still exchange fire with alarming frequency, killing mostly poor civilians living along the Line of Control in Kashmir. The two new claimants to nuclear-weapons power status are also locked in a 15-year-old battle on the Siachen glacier–the highest battlefield the world has ever seen. These battles for disputed territories are in addition to the proxy war that each side alleges the other is waging in the form of terrorism or support for organized militancy, such as the Kashmir insurgency.
Statements of mutual threat perception by the top military strategists of the two sides cannot be understood within the traditional Cold War models of nuclear deterrence.
“There is zero chance of war,” Pakistan's army chief Gen. Parvez Musharraf told journalists who accompanied him on his visit to the Siachen glacier on January 29, his certainty stemming from his country's nuclear prowess.
But only a week and a half later, his Indian counterpart Gen. V. P. Malik took a totally different view of the situation: “Having crossed the nuclear threshold does not mean that a conventional war is out,” General Malik told a press conference in New Delhi on February 10.
Imagine any two other nuclear powers in a similar situation. If the forces of the two Cold War protagonists had been engaged in border battles, killing each other's civilians and soldiers as a matter of routine, the trumpets announcing World War III would quickly have sounded. And doomsday would not have been far away if there had been as diametric a divergence in the threat perceptions of the commanders of the American and Soviet strategic forces as is the case with the Pakistani and Indian army chiefs.
Still, running parallel to verbal and military confrontations are efforts to normalize bilateral relations. The peace bus has started. Cricket and hockey matches have resumed. The poet prime minister of India, Mr. Atal Behari Vajpayee, visited Pakistan not too long after the Indian army chief expressed his opinion regarding the possibility of war. Pakistan has been selling sugar and onions to India. A deal to sell electricity to India is almost done and, ironically, the Pakistani team negotiating the supply of power to its “enemy” was headed by a senior army officer. A large number of the two countries' parliamentarians met at a conference in Islamabad whose second leg will be held in New Delhi. Indian film stars and singers are still as much adored by the Pakistani public as ever; Pakistani cricketers are demigods in India.
All this indeed is very surreal.
Against this confusing backdrop, the security debate in the region cannot, and must not, be delimited to preventing nuclear strikes (which are, in any case, unlikely to happen, jingoistic rhetoric notwithstanding). Nor should how and when the two sides join the nonproliferation treaties be its ultimate objective. It must be seen in the context of domestic power plays by competing groups who have prospered for the last half century at the expense of the vast majority of Indians and Pakistanis mired inextricably in the cauldron of poverty.
The entire security debate in South Asia has been decontextualized and obfuscated by the dominant civil and military classes. It helps them perpetuate the status quo in the domestic as well as the regional political milieu. That allows the beneficiary classes of the socio-economic systems in Pakistan and India to keep on enjoying their privileged status–they find that having nuclear weapons in their military arsenals and regurgitating Cold War phrases to create an image of enhanced security help their cause.
But if nuclear deterrence guarantees peace, why is defense spending by both countries continuing to rise? And if nuclear weapons are “the cheapest means of defense,” why are the budgets for conventional forces increasing?
In nuclear weapons the Indian and Pakistani elite have got hold of new tools to exercise control over the lives of the poor and illiterate masses, hopelessly languishing on the deep margins of a social and political system that condemns them to live in a mythical world of hollow grandeur.