Op-ed: Steps to peace

M V Ramana

Apart from nuclear weapons, any peace effort between Pakistan and India needs to address other obstacles to genuine amity. Among the most important of these obstacles is the amount of mistrust and lack of understanding among the citizens of the two countries

There are now the welcome beginnings of a peace process between Pakistan and India. Much to the chagrin of the constituencies that thrive on spreading hate, Prime Minister Vajpayee’s speech in Srinagar last month and Prime Minister Jamali’s reciprocation have been widely greeted with hope, even if tempered by the caution that follows naturally from the history of the subcontinent.

Even at this early stage there has been a set back: Vajpayee’s refusal to consider Pakistan’s offer to get rid of its nuclear weapons should India do the same. Because of this, Vajpayee, as analyst C. Rammanohar Reddy put it, lost his chance “for a bigger page in the book of history — as the only world statesman since 1945 who made his country go nuclear, realised the folly of acquiring such weapons and then had the stockpile destroyed.”

Regardless, the proposal is intriguing in its implications. In the past, several Pakistani leaders have maintained that Pakistan’s nuclear weapons are meant as a counterweight to India’s conventional military superiority. If Pakistani leaders are now willing to denuclearise jointly with India without demanding reductions in conventional military forces, then clearly in their estimation Pakistan does not need nuclear weapons to deal with India’s conventional might and only needs it to offset India’s nuclear weapons.

However, because of its conventional military superiority, India does not need to use nuclear weapons to attack Pakistan. Which is the reason India can offer a No First Use guarantee. Therefore Pakistan can, if one pushes the logic of the offer of joint denuclearisation to its limit, unilaterally dismantle its nuclear weapons. Of course, the same kind of logic also operates in the India-China case and so there is an obvious case to be made for India to unilaterally dismantle its nuclear weapons.

It is of course likely that the offer was made knowing fully well that India would turn it down. Just as Indian leaders repeatedly suggest a mutual No First Use agreement confident that Pakistan will refuse the offer. Nevertheless, the denuclearisation offer is an important acknowledgement that nuclear weapons are detrimental to security and that India and Pakistan are best rid of them. This has important implications for the ongoing peace process.

The most important step at the current juncture would be for India and Pakistan to formally agree not to deploy their nuclear weapons. The two countries are generally believed not to have mated their nuclear weapons with delivery vehicles. Non-deployment is an important firebreak in preventing the frequent military confrontations in South Asia from quickly escalating into nuclear war. Deployment would reduce the warning time for nuclear attack to a few minutes: the time it takes a ballistic missile to reach the “other” country. It is therefore imperative that the maintenance of the present state of affairs be formalised through an official agreement. Of course, such an agreement should not be construed to mean that the two countries should maintain their nuclear weapons indefinitely — it goes without saying that the two should continue to work towards complete nuclear disarmament.

The other area where the two countries could agree to convert their present policies into formal agreement is with regard to nuclear tests. Despite both countries maintaining a test moratorium, there are periodic reports in the news media of the other country’s plans for further nuclear tests resulting in increased tensions. There are also pressures from hawkish elements to conduct further tests. A formal agreement not to conduct any nuclear tests, and possibly jointly signing the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty (CTBT), would largely eliminate these pressures.

Apart from nuclear weapons, any peace effort between Pakistan and India needs to address other obstacles to genuine amity. Among the most important of these obstacles is the amount of mistrust and lack of understanding among the citizens of the two countries. The best way to counter this is to promote the free exchanges of people between the two countries.

Going from one country to another has not been particularly difficult for politicians or those involved in the so-called Track II dialogue. However, thanks to their relationship to the structures of political power, these people remain largely trapped within their national positions that have trapped us in hostility for over five decades. Rather the people who should be allowed and encouraged to travel across the borders should come from the realm of civil society, including artists, writers, journalists, sportspeople, trade unionists and so on. The framework for such measures could be the Indo-Pak Agreement on Cultural Co-operation of December 31, 1988 for promoting and developing their relations and understanding in the realms of art, culture, archaeology, education, mass media and sports.

One category of people that could help forward better understanding between the two countries is academics. Unfortunately, they face great obstacles in visiting the other country. Apart from the normal difficulties involved in getting a visa and actually travelling to the other country, most academics, being employed in universities and therefore government servants, also have to deal with getting a No Objection Certificate from their government. In practice this is all but impossible to obtain within a reasonable amount of time. As part of the peace process, such practices should be discontinued and academic exchanges supported.

Indian and Pakistani societies share a lot of similar social problems that could be usefully analysed using a common framework. One such example is the growth of religious extremism in the two countries; the historical and sociological factors that go into this development should be jointly studied by academics on both sides.

For long relations between India and Pakistan have been dominated by hard line elements. The trend has only been accelerating since the nuclear tests of May 1998. We need to go beyond this and promote an agenda that is conducive to peace. It is time, as Prime Minister Jamali said, to isolate the hawks in India and Pakistan.

M V Ramana is a physicist and research staff member at Princeton University’s Program on Science and Global Security and co-editor of Prisoners of the Nuclear Dream

Home | Editorial