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Madhavee Inamdar
The recent nuclear tests by India and Pakistan are examples of the fact that in the post-Cold War world all the modern military weapons are useful even if they are not used. The mere possession of nuclear capability, not its use, is sufficient to deter attack. Both India and Pakistan now know it for sure that none of them can win a war if at all it takes place. Their common interests, therefore, lie in promoting peace and preventing war.
A new era of diplomacy has begun for India and Pakistan wherein nuclear capability forms the main backdrop. After all, the US and the USSR did go through that era during the Cold War. War and threat to use force have always been an integral part of their diplomacy.
Today India and Pakistan have to use the same ``diplomacy of violence'' to promote peace and cooperation. In fact with the possession of nuclear capability, diplomacy has gone beyond military sphere. It has come concretely into a political domain as the political structures would influence the maintenance ofnuclear deterrence and only political crisis could lead to a nuclear conflict and that would influence the command and control of nuclear forces.
South Asian security environment has displayed a durable bipolar structure for nearly five decades. Its continuity resides in the primacy of India and Pakistan in the subcontinent, in the continuation of their treatment of each other as the major rival. The recent nuclear tests have made this South Asian security pattern even stronger. Internal changes, including the partition of Pakistan, have not altered the basic pattern of relations.
In South Asia, India's absorption of small states like Sikkim and Goa made no real difference to the distribution of power in the subcontinent. Pakistan's loss of Bangladesh was both absolutely and relatively a much more substantial event, and at first seemed likely to put India into a position of such dominance as to call into question the basic bipolarity of the status quo.
Although Pakistan was weakened politically by theloss of its pretension to its Islamic foundations, its military strength was not much affected. In some ways, the secession of Bangladesh removed a strategic liability from Pakistan and made its military position easier to handle. Despite its many troubles Pakistan has remained strong and willful enough to sustain bipolarity. While India has not tried to push advantage of its size, Pakistan has shown a willingness to bear a proportionately greater military burden.
The newly implemented nuclear capability of India and Pakistan has not in any manner transformed security relations in South Asia. The South Asian status quo is complete with its fundamentally intact structure of the local conflicts, its distribution of power and pattern of hostility. In South Asia, the pattern of hostility is as simple as it could be, and the only path of internal change is resolution.
Nuclear defence dilemma, which lies at the heart of South Asian confrontation, might well be providing a fundamentally important stepping-stonefor India and Pakistan towards a more mature conflict management. Nuclear deterrence might paralyse the military relations between them, thereby forcing India and Pakistan to find ways other than war to manage their rivalries.
Nuclear defence dilemma can provide an unprecedented service in South Asia because war can no longer act as major instrument of change -- except change involving the destruction of the system and most of its components. In a nuclear armed system, a philosophy of live-and-let-live becomes the only practical alternative to high-risk annihilation.
The forthcoming Indo-Pak dialogue has to have an agreed framework as far as the Kashmir issue is concerned. Both the countries have to separate the ``problem from the people'' and have to agree that the Kashmiris will not suffer any more for the problem. Secondly, both the countries have to ensure that the dialogue doesn't become a routine ''dialogue of the deaf'' where the talks take place with preconceived notions. Diplomats andpolicy-makers in both the countries have to break their own mindsets.
Copyright © 1998 Indian Express Newspapers (Bombay) Ltd.
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