“Though Pakistan has not enunciated a formal nuclear doctrine, its then head of strategic planning division of its nuclear command authority, Lt-Gen Khalid Kidwai, had averred that Pakistan’s nuclear weapons were “aimed solely at India”. Kidwai added that Pakistan would use nuclear weapons if India conquers a large part of Pakistani territory, or destroys a large part of its land and air forces. Kidwai also held out the possibility of using nuclear weapons if India tries to “economically strangulate” Pakistan, or pushes it to political destabilization”, says the author.

Led by the US and Soviet Union, the five Permanent Members of the UN Security Council tried to ensure, some five decades ago, that they alone had the divine right to possess nuclear weapons in perpetuity, with the signing of the nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT). Their nuclear arsenals steadily increased and pleas for nuclear disarmament arrogantly disregarded. The world nuclear scenario today is now different to what the five envisaged. Nuclear stockpiles have steadily grown. In the past few decades, Israel, Pakistan, India and North Korea have joined the “nuclear club”. Others like Japan and Iran are capable of doing so when needed. There are an estimated 14,900 nuclear warheads in nine countries, with 93 per cent of these in the possession of the US and Russia.

While China tested and acquired nuclear weapons in the 1960s, the next country to acquire nuclear weapons was Pakistan, which commenced its quest for nuclear weapons after the 1971 Bangladesh conflict. India crossed the nuclear threshold only after it received a veiled nuclear threat from Pakistan during tensions over military exercises named “Operation Brasstacks” in January 1987. Instructions were issued in 1988 to nuclear scientist PK Iyengar and scientific adviser VS Arunachalam to assemble a nuclear arsenal. India’s distinguished strategic thinker, K Subrahmanyam, provided the strategic rationale for the nuclear weapons program. India decisively demonstrated its nuclear weapons capabilities 10 years later, with the Pokhran tests. Pakistan predictably followed suit, barely a fortnight later.

India is today confronted with a situation where China has not only provided Pakistan with designs and equipment for manufacturing nuclear weapons, but has also given Pakistan the knowhow and materials for manufacturing missiles capable of carrying nuclear weapons to every part of India, including the Andaman Islands. While these facts are known to those involved inside and outside the government in monitoring nuclear developments, it is astonishing that public knowledge on this crucial issue is limited. Sadly, it has never been debated seriously in Parliament. Surely, the public and Parliament need to know more on these issues, to promote awareness of the challenges the nation faces from two hostile neighbors working together dangerously. American nuclear analyst Gary Milhollin has perceptively noted: “If you subtract China’s help from Pakistan’s nuclear program, there is no Pakistani nuclear weapons program.”

While Zulfikar Ali Bhutto moved to establish a nuclear weapons capability within weeks of the Bangladesh conflict, his prison memoirs suggest that he was guaranteed of Chinese assistance after his meeting with Chairman Mao in 1976. China, with antiquated uranium enrichment facilities, benefited from designs stolen by AQ Khan from European (URENCO) enrichment facilities. By the early 1980s, China was providing Pakistan designs for nuclear weapons. China currently has approximately 280 nuclear warheads for delivery by 150 land-based and 48 sea-based missiles and fighter aircraft. While India is estimated to possess 110-120 nuclear warheads. Pakistan has 130-140 nuclear warheads, designed for delivery by ballistic and cruise missiles and aircraft. Experts estimate that Pakistan’s stockpile could potentially grow to 220-250 warheads by 2025, making it the world’s fifth-largest nuclear weapons state. Pakistan’s missiles, with ranges up to 2,750 km, are all of Chinese design and produced at the National Defence Complex facilities in the Kala Chitta Dhar mountain range to the west of Islamabad. The development, production and test launching of missiles is done at locations south of Attock, using road mobile Chinese-designed missile launchers, produced in Fatehjang.

According to former US Air Force Secretary Thomas Reed, himself a designer of nuclear weapons at America’s Los Alamos Laboratories: “The Chinese did a massive training of Pakistani (nuclear) scientists, brought them to China for lectures, even gave the design of the CHIC-4 device, which was a weapon that was easy to build as a model for export. There is evidence that AQ Khan used Chinese designs for his nuclear designs. Notes from those lectures later turned up in Libya. And the Chinese did similar things for the Saudis, North Koreans and Algerians.” The great champions of nuclear non-proliferation in the US, who lectured India for decades on non-proliferation, covered up and did nothing to curb these Chinese activities. Pakistan is also known to have received liquid-fueled ballistic missiles from North Korea in exchange for information on uranium enrichment, in a deal evidently undertaken with Chinese blessings.

Though Pakistan has not enunciated a formal nuclear doctrine, its then head of strategic planning division of its nuclear command authority, Lt-Gen Khalid Kidwai, had averred that Pakistan’s nuclear weapons were “aimed solely at India”. Kidwai added that Pakistan would use nuclear weapons if India conquers a large part of Pakistani territory, or destroys a large part of its land and air forces. Kidwai also held out the possibility of using nuclear weapons if India tries to “economically strangulate” Pakistan, or pushes it to political destabilization. India has declared that it will not be the first to use nuclear weapons and will use nuclear weapons only if its territory or armed forces face an attack anywhere, in which nuclear, chemical or biological weapons are used. Since India has no desire to conquer large parts of Pakistani territories or destroy its armed forces, there is no possibility of India provoking a nuclear conflict. But, given Kidwai’s utterances about a “full spectrum” deterrent, involving the use of tactical nuclear weapons, issued after he retired, New Delhi has to carefully review nuclear strategy imaginatively, bearing in mind that our “no first use” doctrine has served us well internationally.

It is obvious, especially after Xi Jinping’s recent enunciation of Chinese global ambitions at the Party Congress, that missile and nuclear proliferation by China to Pakistan will continue in its efforts to “contain” India. Pakistan has already tested a sea-based missile and China is set to strengthen Pakistan’s navy with substantial supply of submarines and frigates. China appears determined to use Pakistan as its stalking horse for its maritime ambitions to promote its OBOR projects in the Indian Ocean. The most crucial challenge we now face is how to deal with a jingoistic China, for which “containing” India has been a continuing strategic effort for over four decades now. Balancing Chinese power necessarily involves developing partnerships with others across the Indo-Pacific region. China’s policies are multi-faceted, and Beijing will likely avoid open hostility, even as it continues to keep up pressures along its borders with India and uses proxies across India’s immediate neighborhood to keep India tied up in South Asia. These issues will, hopefully, be reviewed and discussed in Parliament.

(The author is a career diplomat)

“The Congress’s de-option of Patel was an error, Hindutva’s co-option of Patel is an execration”, says the author.

Vallabhbhai Patel (1875-1950), whose birth anniversary was observed on 31^st October, is sorely missed. He has been, ever since he died at the none-too-great an age of 75, in 1950. He was the keel that the boat of the freedom struggle needed so as never to tip over, the ballast that the ship of state required to stay steady, move safe.

This is because he was, first and last, a patriot. A Congress patriot. And then, a man who knew India. The India which the Congress was seeking to define for itself, for India.

What was that India? Let us have Gandhi answer the question. In 1931, the year that Patel, for the first time, became Congress president, Gandhi went as the Congress’s sole representative to the second Round Table Conference in London. He defined at that Conference, the nature of the party, and explained to that gathering how the Congress represented the entire country. He explained, in fact, their inextricable oneness.

Under a big tent

In Gandhi’s words: “In as much… as I represent the Indian National Congress, I must clearly set forth its position. In spite of appearances to the contrary, especially in England, the Congress claims to represent the whole nation and most decidedly the dumb millions among whom are included the numberless untouchables who are more suppressed than depressed, as also in a way the more unfortunate neglected classes known as backward races…”

And again, at the Conference’s Minorities Committee: “…if you were to examine the register of the Congress, if you were to examine the records of the prisons of India, you would find that the Congress represented and represents on its register a very large number of Mohammedans. Several thousand Mohammedans went to jail last year under the banner of the Congress… The Congress has Indian Christians also on its register. I do not know that there is a single community which is not represented on the Congress on its register…even landlords and even mill-owners and millionaires are represented there…”

Serving the nation through that party representing ‘the whole nation’ and its various communities, strengthening that party at its plural grassroots, shaping the resolutions and decisions of its Working Committee and helping it form ministries in eight of the 11 provinces in the elections of 1936-37, Patel then guided it as it took over the reins of the Government of India in 1947. Working for and through the Congress was the Alpha and Omega of Patel’s political career.

That made him what he was, the ‘indomitable’ iron man of India. That also made the Congress, in very great part, what it was — an all-India organisation.

Congress was Patel’s life

No Patel, no national Congress. No Congress, no Sardar Patel. Congress patriotism was his patriotism; Congress politics was his politics.

No one, howsoever anxious to wrench his legacy off from that of the Congress, can dispute and much less deny that basic and incontrovertible fact. No one, howsoever desperate to annex his legacy to that of another body, cultural or political, like the Hindu Mahasabha or the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh or the Bharatiya Janata Party, can succeed in staging so ridiculous a trapeze show.

Sardar Patel was the Congress’s spine. The Congress was Sardar Patel’s life.

Does that mean that the Sardar’s membership, leadership and stewardship of the Congress was free of tensions? Of course not, because he was human, and his party was led and peopled by other humans, each with tempers and temperaments that were distinct. Despite Gandhi’s pre-eminent position in it and in the hearts of the people of India, the Congress was not a hegemonic party and its most charismatic leader, Jawaharlal Nehru, was, by instinct, self-training and practice, its most natural democrat. Nehru’s was a lunar luminosity in Gandhi’s Congress. Nehru’s glow could brighten and lessen, and on a moonless light plunge the party in inky gloom. Patel, with his seven great skills — resoluteness, clarity, direction, focus, loyalty, grounded-ness and guts — was the party’s saptarshi, its Ursa Major.

The Congress not only accommodated personality and political variations, it regarded itself as their natural home. It was a place to which people belonged, not a place in which people assembled for a drill. Its sifat, to use a Persian word that stands for essence or ethos, was its diversity. And its Working Committee embodied that sifat. It had, Gandhi apart, Nehru the socialist and agnostic, Patel the conservative, C. Rajagopalachari the liberal, Rajendra Prasad the traditionalist, Abul Kalam Azad the scholar, J.B. Kripalani the scoffer. At different times it had Subhas Chandra Bose the nationalist, Sarojini Naidu the poet. Each Congressman and Congresswoman was himself or herself first, and then a soldier of the party. Each person was ‘rare’. Which is why, describing Acharya Narendra Deva in his obituary speech in Parliament, Nehru spoke of him being “…a man of rare distinction — distinction in many fields — rare in spirit, rare in mind and intellect, rare in integrity of mind and otherwise.” The Congress’s ranking leaders, as indeed its countless ‘file’, differed, debated, wrangled and even warred, but stayed true to the party’s sifat, because the party gave them that ‘play’, not as a policy but as an inherent personality trait, India’s trait.

The mutual differences between Nehru and Patel are no secret. The Congress did not believe in secrecy. Their mutual trust was no secret. The Congress believed in trust.

Their differences are not to be exaggerated. They are not to be minimized. They are to be contextualized. In the democratic spirit of that plural party.

Sardar Patel led a party as its Ursa Major that was anything but a homogenizing factory. It was as plural as it was because it saw itself in the words Gandhi used to describe its eclectic rolls in London in 1931.

‘India first’

Gandhi, who knew the meaning and action of political variegation, encouraged and succeeded in getting Nehru and Patel to work with coordination and cooperation if not coalescence. And for this, the realism of both leaders has to be thanked. Their realism, and their sense of ‘India first’.

India first was part of their idea of India. And ‘India first’ was integral to their sense of patriotism, their Congress patriotism.

Four days after Gandhi’s assassination, in a letter to his senior in politics, in the party and in age, Nehru wrote: “With Bapu’s death everything is changed… I have been greatly distressed by the persistence of whispers and rumors about you and me, magnifying out of all proportion any difference we may have.”

Patel replied on May 5, 1948: “I am deeply touched…We both have been lifelong comrades in a common cause. The paramount interests of our country and our mutual love and regard, transcending such differences of outlook and temperament as existed, have held us together.”

The very previous day, addressing the Congress Party in the Constituent Assembly, Patel described Nehru as “my leader” and said: “I am one with the Prime Minister on all national issues. For over a quarter of a century, both of us sat at the feet of our master and struggled together for the freedom of India. It is unthinkable today, when the Mahatma is no more, that we should quarrel.”

The Congress’s rank and file should ponder these observations of Nehru and Patel and rectify years of neglect, post-Nehru, of the Sardar’s legacy at the false altar of political cronyism. That neglect has lubricated the crassly opportunistic co-option of Patel by the Hindu Right which has no right, logical, political or moral, to that legacy. What the Congress squandered, Hindutva is shoveling in.

The Congress’s unwitting de-option of Patel was an error, Hindutva’s calculated co-option of Patel is an execration.

‘India first’ believers should be aware of both.

(The author is a former administrator, diplomat and Governor)

The worst terrorist attack in New York after the 9/11 tragedy came on Tuesday. Eight persons were killed and 12 injured when a rented pickup truck ran them down in a bicycle lane, in Lower Manhattan. The driver, Sayfullo Saipov, was shot at and arrested shortly afterwards. He is an immigrant from Uzbekistan, and the killing is believed to have been inspired by the ISIS, even though not explicitly claimed by the terrorist organization.

As the story of the immigrant-turned-terrorist unfurls, we see an alienated, frustrated, rootless man who was unable to adjust to life in the US. Yet, he managed to earn and provide for a family that he raised there. There is also the disturbing picture of how his frustrations took a violent hue and how he turned radical over a period of time. He was, allegedly, on the radar of the authorities and his conduct had raised concerns even among the preachers at one of the mosques he used to frequent.

Trump lost little time in blaming the Diversity Visa Lottery program under which Saipov had migrated to the US. Trump also said that he would consider sending Saipov to the military prison at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba. The President was unnecessarily critical of the federal justice system, which has delivered hundreds of convictions of terrorists since 9/11. Even as the law enforcement agencies and the justice system work in sync to bring the terror suspect to justice, New Yorkers, and Americans in general, have shown the will to weather this unfortunate “new normal” in the life in America. As for the right-wing “nativists”, the message to them would be the same as was affirmed by the White House Press Secretary after the killings in Las Vegas by a US-born white terrorist: “There’s a time and place for political debate, but now is a time to unite as a country.”

(Tribune India)