As the dialogue with Pakistan is being resumed, we can already hear voices arguing that Mr. Rajiv Gandhi must try and work out an overall agreement which would even cover major issues such as Pakistan’s search for nuclear weapons capability and its acquisition of highly sophisticated weapons. We will surely hear more such voices as the dialogue proceeds, especially if some limited agreements are reached as they well might be. That makes it necessary to put the issue of relations with Pakistan in a proper perspective.
One must, of course, be an innocent to believe that Mr. Gandhi can succeed where President Reagan, with all the leverage at his disposal, has failed. The Indian Prime Minister cannot persuade Pakistan to give up its search for a nuclear capability.
To be candid, Mr. Gandhi’s own room for manoeuvre in this regard is rather limited. While he can, like his predecessors, refuse to exercise the nuclear option India has preserved at considerable cost to itself in terms of denial of access to Western expertise and equipment for its nuclear power programme, he cannot surrender it except at the risk of undermining his own domestic position. Mr. Morarji Desai wanted to do much less – surrender lndia’s right to hold any test for even peaceful purposes – and was forced to retreat.
In plain terms, it means that he cannot put the proposals Pakistan has made to the test. He cannot either sign the nuclear non-proliferation treaty, or accept mutual inspection with Pakistan.
Leading Indian experts, particularly Mr. K. Subrahmanyam, acknowledgedly the best informed Indian on the issue, have taken the view that Pakistan is not sincere about its proposals. Or else, it would first let the world know the use to which it proposes to put the enriched uranium it is, on its own admission, producing. There is merit in this argument. Pakistan has built its uranium enrichment and plutonium separation facilities on the basis of utmost secrecy and evasion of the laws of other countries. It can be depended upon to continue to employ these techniques to make nonsense of any agreement with India or anyone else.
It is possible to argue that India does not need, and will not need, nuclear weapons and should, therefore, give up its option on them. The argument can now be pressed on the additional ground that such an action on its part could oblige Pakistan to follow suit. But that choice is not open to Mr. Gandhi, whatever his own inclination in the matter.
Swept By Hatred
Americans even in the Reagan administration have as much reason to be concerned over Pakistan’s determined bid to acquire a nuclear weapons capability, and possibly nuclear weapons, as we do. Pakistan is part of the Muslim world which is being swept by a hatred of the United States. An American must be a brave man to believe that Pakistan will remain immune to this hatred, if it is so today. In fact, anti-US sentiment runs pretty strong just below the surface in that country. Remember that in 1979 mobs had put the US embassy in Islamabad on fire and almost roasted alive all Americans present there on a mere rumour of the CIA’s involvement in the attack on the Grand Mosque in Saudi Arabia by fellow Muslims.
We can cope with a Pakistan armed with nuclear weapons by producing our own; America cannot, in view of its stakes in west Asia and in the security of Israel. A revolution of the type which has taken place in Iran does not appear to be a practical proposition in Pakistan today. But the rise of some kind of radicalism cannot be ruled out.
So we can leave the task of stopping Pakistan’s nuclear weapons programme to the Americans. We do not need to urge them on. That is why I have taken the view that Mr. Rajiv Gandhi was ill-advised to have pressed the nuclear issue as hard as he did during his recent visit to the United States.
America will need to engage, and will engage, in a complicated game. In the fifties and sixties, it was obsessed with the fear of Arab nationalism, represented above all by Col. Nasser, and used every kind of weapon to put it out of the way. In the final analysis, Nasser destroyed himself when he took on Israel in 1967. Now the U.S. preoccupation could be Shia fundamentalism. Its overall strategy to cope with it does not yet exist. Indeed, it cannot. Pakistan would find it difficult to figure in this new game. That could tear it apart.
It is impossible to predict the course of events in the Muslim world. In fact, it is absurd to speak of only one possible course of development. There will be many courses and they will crisscross. We should try to stay as far away from all this as humanly possible. So should Pakistan. But there is precious little we can do to persuade it to do so. At best, we can point out the dangers of involvement in west Asia for it.
At times it has been fashionable for us in India to talk of a crisis of identity in Pakistan. Pakistanis have not felt that they were caught in such a crisis and had to resolve it by deciding whether they and their country belonged to the sub-continent or to Muslim west Asia. They could comfortably belong to both. And they emphasised their Indo-Muslimness negatively – by seeking to maintain a parity with, if not establish a superiority over, India in respect of military power. Fortunately for them and unfortunately for us, the United States was willing to help them in the pursuit of its own interests and illusions.
Obvious Connection
But Pakistan could play this game on certain counts, the existence of an independent Afghanistan which could keep Soviet power at a safe distance being only one of them. The more important precondition was that the struggle for power between radical Arab nationalists and orthodox pro-West sheikhs was sufficiently far away. In this case, the Shah’s Iran was the buffer, its pro-western orientation notwithstanding, it was not involved in that intra-Arab fight.
Nasser could not and did not wish to tap the deep emotional sources which Ayatollah Khomeini does. As a modernist, he just could not and did not want to arouse that atavistic hatred of the West, especially the United States, which now dominates the Muslim youth in most Muslim countries. His decline and finally his death in 1970 were bound to unleash new forces. This was not visible then. Indeed, the connection did not become visible even when the fundamentalists overwhelmed the Shah in Iran in 1978-79. But the connection should be obvious, though no one can deny the existence of independent factors in Iran which led to the fall of the Shah. In any case, preconditions which had given Pakistan the freedom to concentrate on India ceased to exist after the revolution in Iran, followed, as it was, by Soviet military intervention in Afghanistan.
I do not wish to opine on President Zia’s deepest passions. I do not know how strongly he feels against predominantly Hindu India and whether he is genuinely interested in friendship with India. But there can be little doubt that a Pakistani disengagement from the anti-Soviet war in Afghanistan can help restore the country’s old anti-Indian orientation. The personal inclinations of the Pakistan foreign minister, Sahabzada Yaqub Khan, who is negotiating with the Soviets through the UN emissary, Senor Diego Cordovez, and of others who favour such a disengagement are immaterial.
Americans must have a pretty dim view of our capacity to think coherently about our interests to believe we would, if we could, actively work for an agreement on Afghanistan. More surprisingly, however, there is no dearth of Indians who want Mr. Rajiv Gandhi to engage in this exercise. Afghanistan, like west Asia, is not our business so long as Pakistan does not reorient its policy and becomes for all practical purposes our ally. As things are, it has not moved its forces to its western frontier even in the context of the Soviet military presence in Afghanistan and its own involvement with the mujahideen.
Significant Changes
As indicated earlier, the Soviet presence in Afghanistan is, however, only one aspect of the change in Pakistan’s environment, the other, at least equally important, being the movement of west Asian turbulence close to its border with the triumph of the Islamic revolution in Iran, the continuance of the Iran-Iraq war and the rise of Shia fundamentalism as a power to reckon with in Lebanon.
The central issue in all this is clearly the survival or the collapse of the Islamic revolution in Iran. According to some experts, it represents the most fundamental development since the Russian revolution in 1917. This assessment is open to question. But there can be no doubt that it is a development of the greatest importance. It brings together the revolutionary fervour so characteristic of our age and the religious fervour so characteristic of an aroused Islam. The revolution has been besieged; it has been blundering; in secular terms, its performance has been miserable; Khomeini has not shown the resilience of Lenin who sought
peace at any price in order to be able to consolidate the revolution; but its appeal has already transformed the scene in Lebanon and it could spread; the rulers in Bahrain, Kuwait and even Saudi Arabia live in fear of it; and it could well survive. If it does, Pakistan will face a challenge it has not so far. At the very least, it will find it difficult to maintain its pro-US orientation.
It has often been said that we in India have been preoccupied with Pakistan. In fact, we have been preoccupied with just one aspect – US military assistance to Pakistan – and more recently with one more – the regime’s alleged involvement with Sikh extremists, which it strongly denies. We have not even cared to study the changes in Pakistan’s security environment following the Islamic revolution in Iran despite its fall-out in the shape of an obvious aggravation of the Sunni-Shia conflict in Pakistan. If we had done that, we would not have been on the defensive, as we have been. And that applies as much to the United States as to Pakistan.
The change in Pakistan’s environment took place before Mrs. Indira Gandhi returned to office in January 1980. But she failed to take note and advantage of it. Perhaps no one around her explained its significance to her. The son should not be similarly handicapped.
The Times of India, 1 July 1985