INDIA’S STRATEGIC CULTURE AND ITS NUCLEAR POLICY[1]

Rashed Uz Zaman*

[The 1974 explosion] came as a surprise to the world. They hadn’t expected such an achievement from a developing country … their criterion for measuring success was different in the sense that they judged the success of a country by its material acquisitions and its overt proof of development .… India didn’t conform to any of these, and in this context alone it seemed somewhat relevant when the Western world expressed bewilderment, coupled with fear and panic at the success of Pokhran.

--- Raja Ramanna[2]

India has come a long way since that first nuclear explosion in the desert of Rajasthan. But it must be remembered that, despite having nuclear weapons from the 1970s onwards, India preferred not to proceed with further testing of the weapons. In fact, she even refused to call the device exploded in 1974 a weapon, instead referring to it as a peaceful nuclear explosion. Ironically, the codeword used to convey the success of the 1974 testing was ‘Buddha Smile’, perhaps symbolically reflecting the dichotomy between the bomb and that apostle of nonviolence, or more precisely, between India’s postures and real intentions with regard to nuclear weapons.

Nearly 24 years later, on 11 and 13 May 1998, the desert of Rajasthan shook again. India carried out five nuclear tests between 11 and 13 May, effectively removing the ‘purdah’ or the veil of the ambiguity that had shrouded her nuclear weapons programme. Even though the 1998 tests did not (and could not, due to the stipulations of the 1968 Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty, or NPT) officially confer the status of a nuclear weapons state on India, the world now sees India as such a state. A recent bilateral deal sees the United States committing itself to treating India as a nuclear weapons state under the NPT, even though India is not a signatory to the Treaty and will not be required to accede to it.[3] World recognition apart, India has been pursuing her nuclear ambition slowly but steadily over the years and today boasts an enviable weapons delivery programme along with her arsenal of nuclear weapons.[4] The Indian Navy has also been actively involved in acquiring missiles that could be used to deliver nuclear weapons.[5]

This paper argues that there is an ‘Indian way’ of thinking both about the threat or use of the nuclear force for political purposes, and of acting strategically with regard to the perception, acquisition and use of such weapons. Indian strategic culture helps us identify and make sense of this ‘Indian way’ of thinking and behaviour.[6] India’s historical experience, religious values and geographical location all make up a unique Indian way of comprehending security. This paper adheres to the assertion that “‘realist’ analysis is undertaken by particularly encultured people and organisations.”[7] Since even a realist must be, in this sense, an Indian realist, there is no escaping the influence of Indian strategic culture. This paper will attempt to highlight the characteristics of Indian strategic culture as gathered from the study of India’s nuclearisation programme.[8] It will also examine the possibility of competing Indian strategic cultures. It will conclude by pointing out the implications of the existence of a distinct ‘Indian strategic culture’.

Evolution of the Indian nuclear programme – The Nehru years (1947-1964)

The Indian nuclear programme was conceived even before India achieved her independence. The man who laid the foundation of the programme was Homi J. Bhabha, a brilliant engineer and a theoretical physicist who had been educated in the United Kingdom. In 1944, Bhabha wrote to the Tata Trust requesting funds for a project to establish a research institute dealing with nuclear physics. The Tata Institute of Fundamental Research (TFIR) was established in 1945 and has since played a crucial role in India’s quest for nuclear weapons. Bhabha also had little difficulty in convincing Nehru, who had a scientific predisposition, about the potential of the atom, in its peaceful guise, to transform India from a ‘dung power’ to nuclear power in a single step.[9]

Nehru also understood well the implications of nuclear energy for military purposes. Thus we find him writing to the Cabinet in 1946: “Modern defence as well as modern industry requires scientific research both on a broad scale and in highly specialised ways. If India has not got highly qualified scientists and up-to-date scientific institutions in large numbers, it must remain a weak country incapable of playing a primary part in a war.”[10] Portraying India’s misfortunes as being the result of missing out on the gunpowder revolution, Nehru made it clear that India could not afford to miss this new opportunity. Bharat Karnad observes that through his remarks about the dual nature of science and his comparing of the advent of atomic energy to the revolution wrought by gunpowder, Nehru clearly signalled his intention to have Bhabha’s programme develop the atom bomb to make the country ‘self reliant’ in security as well.[11]

Nehru’s views on the civilian and military uses of nuclear power were not simply a manifestation of his own belief in the tremendous potential of science. Nor were they solely influenced by the views of Homi Bhabha. British thinking about India’s security in the post-independence era also influenced Nehru’s ideas about nuclear power, significantly the writings of Field Marshal Sir Claude Auchinleck, Commander-in-Chief, India, and Lieutenant General Sir Francis Tuker.[12] Auchinleck proposed, among other things, that the presence of nuclear weapons in defence considerations be acknowledged by policymakers, and highlighted the tactical and strategic implications this reality would have on any force planning for the future. Sir Francis Tuker on the other hand, pointed to the advantage big-sized countries with large ‘land space’ might enjoy in a war where nuclear weapons were used. Tuker also hinted at the availability of thorium, the basic material to make fissionable Uranium 233 isotope for nuclear bombs, in the sands of southern India and India’s ability to make the bomb should she desire to do so.

After India gained independence, Nehru, well-supported by Bhabha, was able to create a congenial atmosphere in which India’s pursuit of nuclearisation could proceed smoothly. Infrastructure and organisations were created to implement the nuclear policy, ostensibly for the generation of electricity for civilian use. These included the Atomic Energy Research Committee (AERC) aimed at promoting research in nuclear physics. A year after independence, in August 1948, the Atomic Energy Act (AEA) was passed. This legislation replaced the AERC with the Indian Atomic Energy Commission (IAEC) and accelerated nuclear research and development. In 1954, the Department of Atomic Energy (DAE) was established and in the same year the Indian Government also created the Atomic Energy Establishment, Trombay, now known as the Bhabha Atomic Research Centre (BARC). These developments signified Nehru’s and Bhabha’s quest to develop a self-reliant nuclear infrastructure and complete mastery of the nuclear fuel cycle.[13]

Interestingly, although India has a record of being a liberal democracy since independence and the government was accountable to Parliament, the record falters when it comes to Nehru’s accountability to Parliament with regard to the development of the nuclear research infrastructure. The atomic energy establishment under the direction of the Prime Minister enjoyed a high degree of autonomy and was largely shielded from public scrutiny.[14] It is important to ask why this was so. If India’s nuclear programme was concerned solely with civilian (read peaceful) use of nuclear energy, then what was the rationale behind this need for excessive secrecy? The answer lies in the fact that the Indian nuclear programme from its very inception was perceived by Nehru as having the built-in advantage of being used to develop weapons should the need arise. Nehru himself admitted this during the Constituent Assembly debates on nuclear energy in 1948.[15] In his later years Nehru, in spite of his hope of nuclear energy being used for peaceful purposes, continued to hold a dual position. Shortly before his death in 1964, while commenting on a memorandum by Bhabha, Nehru reiterated his belief that nuclear technology offered the “built-in advantage of defence should the need arise.”[16]

Thus, the Indian nuclear programme always had an inherent military objective. At the same time, supporters of India’s nuclearisation consistently attempted to highlight the peaceful nature of the programme. The concept of nonviolence was cited to the point of becoming a cliché. India’s ancient religious figures were quoted and most of all, Mahatma Gandhi and his use of nonviolence against the colonial rule of the British was invoked to drive home the point that nonviolence is an Indian prerogative and India cannot and will not embark upon any venture that would violate this basic tenet.[17] Nehru’s abhorrence of violence and even of nuclear weapons has also been noted by serious Western experts on South Asia.[18]

The enunciation of nonviolence on the one hand and adhering to a different policy – in this case, the pursuit of nuclear weapons – on the other, is the classic Indian style and is a unique characteristic of Indian strategic culture. Let us delve deeper into this issue by looking at how a double policy was practised by Indian leaders. We turn our attention to Mahatma Gandhi first. The way Gandhi’s ideas were received and practised in post-1947 India has been discussed elsewhere.[19] It would also be interesting to see what Gandhi himself had to say about nonviolence. Gandhi wanted “India to practise non-violence being conscious of her strength and power.”[20] Speaking as far back as 1920, when he articulated his so-called ‘Doctrine of the Sword’, Gandhi made it clear that if given the chance between cowardice and violence he would choose the latter. He went on to clarify that he would rather see India resort to arms in order to defend her honour than have her become or remain, in a cowardly way, a helpless witness to her own dishonour.[21]

Waheguru P. S. Sidhu notes that Gandhi weighed the option of resorting to open warfare against the British and decided against it as there was not much prospect of success. Sidhu identifies this as a realisation on Gandhi’s part of the futility of trying to carry out an armed insurrection against a well-equipped and well-trained British army. While the use of force by Indian freedom fighters would automatically legitimise any retaliatory violence on the part of the British, the using of force against unarmed Indian revolutionaries would not only make the British lose the moral high ground but also prevent them from justifying their use of force.[22] Thus, the announcement and the practice of nonviolence was a political weapon meant to put the militarily superior British power on the back foot while allowing the Indian freedom movement to gain moral superiority and ultimately the political high ground. As Lord Wavell, the penultimate British Viceroy to India noted in his diary, Gandhi’s “professions of non-violence and saintliness are political weapons against the British rather than natural attributes.”[23]

Nehru himself understood well what his mentor was trying to attain by such policies. Speaking at the 1929 Nagpur session of the Congress Party, he made it clear that the Indian freedom movement did not possess either the material or the training to lead an armed movement against the British, and that it was to be rejected because it offered no substantial results. He also pointed out that if the realisation dawned at some point that methods of violence would help the country then India would adopt them.[24] Independent India’s subsequent calls to other countries to resolve disputes through negotiation and her own policy of resorting to force and taking military action against the princely states of Junagadh (1947), Hyderabad (1948) and the Portuguese colony of Goa (1961), demonstrate the pragmatic nature of India’s policy of nonviolence.

By identifying the policy of ambiguity demonstrated by both Gandhi and Nehru, one can draw important conclusions about India’s posture on nuclear weapons. Recognising this deliberate policy of ambiguity is crucial to the understanding of Indian strategic culture. So what does this ambiguity serve? In other words, what makes up this policy? Looking at both Gandhi’s and Nehru’s patterns of thinking and putting policies into action, one can identify this as a policy of moralpolitik – the aggressive use of morality to advance national interests.[25] Moralpolitik is a “mixture of calculation, caution and moralising which informed India’s statecraft, especially in the initial decades, and helped in the accretion of means necessary for India to realise its objective of becoming an influential power.”[26] Since the days of Bhabha establishing TFIR in pre-independence India, this moralpolitik policy has epitomised India’s nuclear policy and this includes the whole gamut of acquisition, use, and attitudes towards non-proliferation and disarmament. It facilitated the development of a dual nature nuclear policy, which, with its self-abnegating and Gandhian-sounding rhetoric blended well with the objective of disarmament. It also provided the cover for a more down-to-earth thrust designed to acquire a nuclear weapons capability.[27] Moralpolitik is the predominant feature of Indian nuclear policy and of Indian strategic culture. A study of the administrations of successive Indian prime ministers and their policies will make it clear that moralpolitik is indeed a strong component of Indian strategic culture and that this feature has been influenced by India’s historical, religious and geographical realities.

Through the 1950s and into the 1960s, India’s technical quest for developing nuclear weapons continued. In the meantime, the bonhomie between China and India had started wearing away. India was also aware of a developing Chinese nuclear industry which would soon be able to produce nuclear weapons. But at this stage there was little India could do to prevent China from acquiring nuclear weapons. In 1958 Nehru claimed India could become a nuclear weapons state within three or four years if she really set her heart to it. But in reality India did not have the material, equipment or the design necessary to detonate a bomb until as late as the 1970s.[28] New Delhi resorted to the pursuit of nuclear disarmament to limit the fallout from the Chinese nuclear programme.

In October 1962 China and India fought a brief but bloody border war. The war had far-reaching effects on India’s strategic thinking. For one thing it made deterrence and defence assume greater importance in India’s defence planning and an integral element of Indian diplomacy. Secondly, it also led to a more ‘realistic’ appreciation of the threats faced by India and put China on the Indian radar screen as a long-term danger.[29] But the Sino-Indian war had no drastic effect on India’s nuclear policy. Rather it was the October 1964 detonation of a Chinese nuclear device that thrust the nuclear weapons issue to the forefront.

The Shastri years (1964-1966)

Jawaharlal Nehru died in 1964, a broken man after the Indian debacle of 1962. He was succeeded by Lal Bahadur Shastri who faced strong pressure from both within his Congress Party and the opposition parties to reconsider what they thought to be a policy of abstention from nuclear weapons, a policy thought to be initiated by Nehru acting under the influence of Gandhi’s ‘non-violent’ moralising. But, as we have already seen in the preceding pages, Nehru did no such thing. On the contrary his policy of nuclear ambiguity was a skilful one. It bought time for India to pursue steps to develop a nuclear weapon and, at the same time, it presented to the world a different posture, one that assumed the moral high ground and tried to instil a sense of guilt in the minds of the nuclear weapons states. The subtlety of Nehru’s actions misled many. Shastri, however, refused to come out openly in favour of a weapons programme. He cited economic and political reasons for not favouring such a programme and observed that the possession of nuclear weapons went directly against the policy of peace and nonviolence espoused by Gandhi and Nehru.[30] Though Shastri initially expressed strong opposition to a weapons programme, there were subtle changes in his announcements which saw him changing his stance from a ‘no bomb ever’ to a ‘no bomb at present’ position. Given the state of India’s nuclear programme, such a decision was in tune with reality. Shastri was also the first Indian leader to float the idea of peaceful nuclear explosives (PNE). He was to give the green signal to initiate the ‘Subterranean Nuclear Explosion Project (SNEP)’. While the SNEP itself did not manufacture weapons, it implied the option of crossing the nuclear threshold from the foundation of peaceful nuclear explosives.[31] Following the death of Shastri, Indira Gandhi, daughter of Jawaharlal Nehru, became Prime Minister of India. It was during her tenure that India exploded a nuclear device in 1974 and crashed into the nuclear club.

The Indira Gandhi years (1967-1977 and 1980-1984)

Indira Gandhi, upon assuming office, made it clear that she would not go for the nuclear option and even shelved her predecessor’s project, the SNEP. Bhumitra Chakma argues that her initial policy stance was soon modified as strategic developments with enormous implications that occurred beyond India’s borders. China initiated a series of nuclear explosions and testing of missiles capable of carrying nuclear warheads and hitting targets deep within India.[32] At the same time, international efforts to stem proliferation were also gathering steam and would ultimately result in the NPT coming into force on 5 March 1970. By the late 1960s Indira Gandhi had ditched any qualms she may have had about the Indian nuclear programme and there was certainly no question of India rolling back the advances she had made in the field. What did change, however, was the narrow obsession of the Bhabha era that had been concerned with developing only the weapon. More attention was now paid to the significant problem of ensuring an integrated delivery system. One wonders if such a programme could have been conceived if India had been ambivalent about possessing nuclear weapons. The death of Bhabha in 1966 had seen Vikram Sarabhai assume the mantle of India’s nuclear programme. While Sarabhai has been portrayed as having a strong moral objection to nuclear weapons and as being critical of the economic cost of developing weapons and its effect on India’s economic development,[33] it must be noted that he was the pioneering figure behind India’s development and the subsequent deployment of an effective weapons delivery system. Known as the ‘Sarabhai Profile’, the plan was the most ambitious in the history of India’s nuclear and space development programme. It called for a self-reliant nuclear technological base and an advanced space programme which clearly foreshadowed the development of India’s missile delivery system.[34] In an article published in the Institute of Defence Studies and Analysis Journal in 1970, Sarabhai called for important developments in the arena of space research. These included the development of rocket systems capable of placing 1,200-kg payloads into geosynchronous orbit, flight guidance systems for rockets and the construction of large solid-propellant blocks.[35] The Sarabhai Profile, therefore, manifested India’s determination to strengthen the nuclear option by embarking on a vigorous programme of technology development.[36] It is clear from the above description that whatever may have been Sarabhai’s public pronouncements with regard to nuclear weapons, his actions tell a different story. Indeed, it revealed a very Indian style of acting as far as nuclearisation was concerned: taking a strong moral high ground against nuclear policy publicly but privately pursuing policies which brought India ever closer to a nuclear weapons arsenal. This dichotomous policy is something that is noticed repeatedly as we chart the progress of India’s nuclear programme.

Indira Gandhi’s first term was also marked by the third Indo-Pakistan war of 1971 which led to the dismemberment of Pakistan and the birth of Bangladesh. The war saw India emerging as the most powerful player in South Asia both politically and militarily. While the war was an unqualified success for India, one particular incident left a strong impact on the Indian psyche and has affected Indian strategic culture in a way seldom understood by Western observers. As India was fighting Pakistan both in the east and west, the US sent Task Force 74 headed by the nuclear aircraft carrier USS Enterprise into the Bay of Bengal. While the true motive of the US action was never disclosed fully and has led to various rationales being offered for the action, the fact remains that this incident had a strong impact on India’s strategic thinking. The steaming of the Enterprise into the Bay of Bengal played on the Indian mind which could not help but draw conclusions from India’s past history: Westerners using their superior naval vessels to come to India, involving themselves in the region’s political matters and ultimately assuming political control. It was also perceived to be an act of nuclear intimidation against India[37] and has since influenced India’s thinking about nuclear weapons and deterrence policy. Thus, the then Vice Chief of Naval Staff, Vice Admiral M. R. Schunker observed in the early 1980s: “[T]he memory of “Exercise Enterprise, 1971” should alert us to the danger that superpower nuclear threats are not necessarily confined to mutual deterrent postures: that in certain scenarios, that threat can be directed against us also.”[38] The ramifications of the USS Enterprise’s foray in the Bay of Bengal has also shaped subsequent Indian views of her own security and both real and imagined Western interference against India’s national interest and meddling in her security sphere.

As mentioned previously, India exploded her first nuclear device in May 1974. The Indians however refused to admit that a proper bomb had been tested. Instead they preferred to identify it as a peaceful nuclear explosion (PNE). Indian officials claimed the detonation was geared towards exploring such things as enhanced mining techniques, and the “stimulation of oil reservoirs to increase both the production and the ultimate recovery” of oil, and to conduct other feats of large-scale underground nuclear engineering.[39] But one strives hard and in vain to see if it is possible to distinguish between peaceful and military nuclear explosions. The logical conclusion would be that India was fully aware that a PNE could be used for ‘nonpeaceful’, military purposes. This conclusion gathers strength when one realises that India never gave a clear explanation about the results and the accomplishments of the 1974 test. Indeed there had been no mention of any coherent scientific and industrial application of the results of the experiment and there is no evidence that she used the results derived from the explosion for any socio-economic or industrial developments in the years following the test.[40] Any pretence about the peaceful nature of the 1974 test was firmly buried when Raja Ramanna, one of the principal scientists involved in that test, confessed in his autobiography that his participation in the development of a prototype weapon had lent him a special status.[41] Thus, one can safely deduce that the 1974 explosion was the rational culmination of a consistent and coherent nuclear policy that India has been pursuing since the mid-1940s, notwithstanding the ambiguous and evasive postures assumed by all Indian leaders.

While the testing of the bomb caught the international community by surprise and debates raged about the true nature of the Indian nuclear programme, one puzzling aspect was the testing abstinence practised by India from 1974 until 1998. It is true that there were times between 1974 and 1998 when India contemplated and even arranged testing but was ultimately forced to rescind the decision.[42] But even more importantly, there was sound strategic reasoning behind India’s posture during this period. True, the political situation of the 1980s, the domestic instability of the 1990s and the poor state of the economy did not make the idea of further nuclear testing a very feasible option. But Deepa Ollapally argues convincingly that this long nuclear testing abstinence period fitted well within Indian strategic culture, economic constraints and normative proclivity. Instead of carrying out further tests and inviting the criticism of the international community, India chose to undertake a series of technology demonstrations, which, Ollapally argues, might be interpreted as a kind of strategic posturing. This posturing, she explains, had strong symbolic significance for the credibility of the latent nuclear option, even though it sought to indicate self-restraint. She lists India’s technological developments during this period which were to have far reaching consequences for an open Indian weaponisation programme when it did come about. The establishment of the Integrated Guided Missile Development Programme in 1983 and the successful test firing of the short and middle range ballistic missiles like Prithvi and Agni; the operational launch of the Polar Satellite Launch Vehicle in 1997 which allowed India to operate reconnaissance satellites into the optimal 800-900 km altitude orbit and thus overcome the barrier of light payloads and low earth orbits that were not sufficient for major military or commercial applications; the development of the first indigenous supercomputer project PARAM which used computer architecture called parallel processing to match the speed of modern supercomputers – all took place during this period and served to make India’s ambiguous nuclear option a realistic one even without open weaponisation. Underlying this position was the implicit assumption that, should the need arise, India could move on the military front as well.[43]

The Morarji Desai years (1977-1979)

The 1977 general elections brought the Janata Party-led coalition into power. The new Prime Minister, Morarji Desai, was an old Congress hand renowned for his strong conviction about the efficacy of Gandhian nonviolence and was known to be viscerally anti-nuclear. But while Desai started off with the now familiar attitude of opposition to nuclear weapons, he soon adopted the line of ambiguity. In fact, the Prime Minister took the position of ambiguity a step further by announcing that he was against ‘nuclear explosions’ but not against ‘blasts’.[44] Desai went on to explain that explosions were needed for political purposes and did not add to any further knowledge while blasts helped to attain peaceful activities like digging canals, extraction of minerals and the like. The truth is that technologically there was nothing which could substantiate this ‘Indian distinction’, but it served its purpose as India kept up her weaponisation programme, developed and enhanced a delivery system, all the while posturing and loudly trumpeting her moral revulsion against the bomb. Morarji Desai should also be remembered for explaining India’s apparently confusing policy of supporting nuclear weapon-free zones in various parts of the world and her opposition to a Pakistani proposal for such a zone in South Asia. By pointing out that a nuclear weapon-free zone did not provide security to non-nuclear weapon states as long as the nuclear weapon states continued to have nuclear weapons, Desai not only resolved the anomaly of the Indian position,[45] but also may have been pointing out some of the nuances ingrained within India’s nuclear weapons programme but often overlooked by observers. By identifying South Asia as different from other regions of the world, Desai was drawing attention to the fact that the security concerns of South Asia must include the Chinese and Western nuclear arsenals. Hence India did not and could not accept a simple geographical definition to circumscribe her security needs. Also, he put a renewed emphasis on the fact that India’s nuclear policy was umbilical with the objective of a world where it was not possible for some countries to have nuclear weapons and where others either renounced them or were forced to give them up. These themes kept recurring as India gradually made her way to the 1998 tests.

Desai’s coalition government collapsed in 1979 and he was succeeded by Charan Singh. Charan Singh’s administration made it clear that India would keep her nuclear options open and added a new rationale in the Indian quest for the bomb: Pakistan. During his brief tenure Charan Singh officially expressed concern about Pakistan’s nuclear weapons programme[46] and it became obvious that India’s nuclear policy would from now on also have to take this new factor into consideration. It made the South Asian nuclear picture different from the rest of the world, with obvious implications for Indian strategic culture.

The Rajiv Gandhi years (1984-1989)

Rajiv Gandhi brought a new trend to India’s foreign policy and that was the image of a muscular India, at least within the South Asian region. It was during his term as prime minister that India embarked on a programme of defence modernisation and expansion, forced Nepal to toe the line India wanted her to by closing down most of her access to the sea and virtually holding the land-locked country hostage. India intervened, with disastrous consequences, in the ongoing civil war in Sri Lanka between the Tamil terrorist group, the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE), and the Sri Lankan government. During this period it also became clear to India that Pakistan’s nuclear programme had succeeded in developing nuclear weapons and India nearly got drawn into a fourth war with Pakistan by initiating a massive military exercise – Operation Brasstacks – close to Pakistan’s eastern borders.

While Rajiv Gandhi’s India went about flexing her conventional military muscle, New Delhi also pushed ahead with its long entrenched contradictory nuclear policy. In 1988 Rajiv Gandhi put forward what came to be known as the Rajiv Gandhi Plan for nuclear disarmament at the Third United Nations Special Session on Disarmament. The Plan called for a comprehensive phased programme of elimination of all nuclear arsenals by the year 2010. The Plan was not treated seriously by the great powers. At the same time Rajiv Gandhi also moved to give a considerable boost to the Indian nuclear weapons programme. It is now clear that by 1988 India had made substantial progress toward the acquisition of a nuclear weapons capability. It is now known that by this time India had stockpiled between 100 and 200 kg of plutonium, sufficient to build between 12 and 50 weapons.[47] Subrahmanyam confirmed this statement immediately after the 1998 tests when he wrote that it was under Rajiv Gandhi that India made the decision to acquire missiles and other technology to form an effective nuclear deterrent.[48]

With the death of Rajiv Gandhi in 1989, India entered a decade of political instability. Coalition governments came and went while the international scenario also underwent dramatic changes. But as far as India’s nuclear programme was concerned, little changed. During the 1990s, the pattern of nuclear ambiguity was continued by successive administrations. It was with the assumption of power by the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) that India removed the shroud of mystery and emerged as a state possessing nuclear weapons.

On 11 May and again on 13 May 1998, India conducted a total of five tests including a thermonuclear one. In contrast to 1974, however, nuances such as ‘PNE’ were not used and Prime Minister Atal Behari Vajpayee pronounced India to be a nuclear power while also declaring a unilateral moratorium on further testing.[49] The tests and the declaration by the Indian Prime Minister laid to rest five decades of nuclear ambiguity and saw India opting for an overt nuclear posture. Putting aside the dichotomy between public announcements and secret planning with regard to nuclear weapons, India had crossed the nuclear Rubicon whether the world liked it or not. From this point on, there was no turning back from India’s decision to explore the uncharted waters of a nuclear future.[50] A brief survey of India’s attitudes and diplomatic policies with regard to global attempts to stop proliferation and if possible, bring about meaningful reductions in the nuclear arsenals of the states will help us discern the trends of Indian strategic culture with regard to nuclear weapons.

Nonproliferation regimes and India

India’s approach to nuclear non-proliferation regimes before the 1998 tests was generally one of opposition. In spite of her vociferous support to global disarmament ever since her independence, she has refused to sign the NPT and the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty (CTBT). She acceded to the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) in the mid-1950s with substantial reservations, but never allowed international inspections of her most critical facilities. The recent signing of the historic nuclear deal between the US and India, which Indians perceive to be a major accomplishment, also ran into controversy in India over its alleged ‘loss of sovereignty’ implications. Even though the treaty allows for none of India’s uranium-enrichment or plutonium-reprocessing plants or her planned plutonium producing fast-breed reactors to be included in the civilian list, the agreement met with hostility from many groups: the coalition partners of the present government as well as the opposition parties; influential scientists and bureaucrats within India’s nuclear establishment; and some respected commentators.[51] Like the Indian quest for the bomb, the Indian approach to non-proliferation has been mired in double talk, is contradictory in nature (at least to Westerners), and can be downright confusing. But if one sifts through the evidence, and delves deeply and critically into Indian policies with regard to proliferation and disarmament issues, then one notices a thread connecting the policies and also how they helped provide a momentum for India’s bomb.

How to strike a balance between the dream of having the bomb and the underlying stark realities of the dearth of resources and popular revulsion against the bomb was a challenge Nehru faced. The answer was the application of moralpolitik. This time moralpolitik was to be applied in the following way: India was to become a vociferous champion of disarmament and of a nuclear weapons-free world, skilfully using Mahatma Gandhi’s image as an apostle of non-violence and his messages about the reprehensible nature of nuclear weapons. At the same time, she would use this campaign of disarmament as a shield behind which to build up her own arsenal of nuclear weapons. From the Baruch Plan of the US in 1946, to the NPT of the 1990s, India consistently harped on the theme that strategic arms reductions, while of universal concern, are the exclusive responsibility of the big powers (countries having nuclear weapons), to be furthered primarily by cuts in their weapons inventories, which aim India would support enthusiastically.[52] The Indian negotiating strategy was premised on a brilliant stand. India stated that any regime seeking to control the spread of nuclear technologies had to be applied equally to all states. India’s position was that the issue of ‘horizontal’ proliferation could not be given precedence over that of ‘vertical’ proliferation. In other words, nuclear weapons powers could not be allowed to continue their arms build-up (vertical proliferation), while non-nuclear countries found themselves facing a range of restrictions as they attempted to develop nuclear technology in their national interest.[53] Thus in 1965, the Indian representative asserted at the UN Disarmament Commission:

Unless the nuclear powers and would-be nuclear Powers [sic] undertake from now on not to produce any nuclear weapons or vehicles for weapons delivery, and, in addition, agree to reduce their existing stockpile of nuclear weapons, there is no way of doing away with the proliferation that has already taken place or of preventing further proliferation […]. We must therefore, stop proliferation urgently.[54]

But this was only one part of the Indian argument. The Indian negotiating strategy also brought the issue of national sovereignty to the forefront. The position adopted by the countries possessing nuclear weapons (the US, the Soviet Union, the United Kingdom, France and China) during the negotiations on the issue of proliferation was, according to India, an attempt to place restrictions on the behaviour of non-nuclear weapons states, in effect, informing them of what they could and could not do to further their own national goals and objectives.[55] In an era when the majority of the members of the United Nations were leaving behind their colonial status and emerging as independent countries or had just attained their independence, such a proposal seemed to be signalling a return to their past and was not acceptable. It had the odious connotation of colonialism. India skilfully played on such emotions and made every effort to highlight these points whenever discussions on non-proliferation came up. More recently, after the 1998 explosions, Jaswant Singh, who served as Foreign Minister, and also briefly held the position of the Defence Minister, under the Vajpayee administration, clarified why India opted for the bomb, citing the ‘unequal’ provisions of the CTBT and the ‘discriminatory’ policies of official nuclear weapons states. Singh reiterated that India’s nuclear policy remained committed to a basic tenet: that the country’s national security in a world of nuclear proliferation lies either in global disarmament or in exercise of the principle of equal and legitimate security for all. The title of the article was “Against Nuclear Apartheid”, and those three words summed up India’s position with regard to proliferation norms.[56]

The Indian negotiating position described above should be read in conjunction with the Indian strategy of striving and ultimately acquiring the nuclear bomb. It did bring useful results for India. Itty Abraham points out that such a ‘principled’ position helped India to: (a) strengthen her claim to leadership of the non-aligned movement and the developing world; (b) divide the nuclear powers (the erstwhile Soviet Union, hearing the accusation of neo-colonialism, out of ideological necessity had to identify with the ‘progressive’ Indian position in order to distinguish itself from the ‘imperialist’ capitalist states) and thus weaken the argument that selective nuclear restraint was for universal good; and (c) proclaim itself as a norm producing country (through her emphasis on different principles like nonalignment, and leader of the silent majority), and thereby allow her to assert a claim to membership in the elite group of states that set the rules and established norms for the international system.[57]

But these real or perceived benefits pale in contrast to what Bharat Karnad identifies as the real success stemming from India’s position on proliferation issues. Karnad claims Indian thinking was based on the view that if one takes history into consideration then one would realise that the principal powers, even if they agreed to eliminate their large and sophisticated nuclear weapons stockpiles, would insist on a long drawn out process. This would give India the time and the rationale for a nuclear build-up of her own, were that ever needed, without the country attracting any negative fallout in the interim.[58]

The Indian nuclear tests of 1998 put an end to the need for India to stick to the postures she had been following while developing her capabilities. Nowhere is this shift more pronounced than in Indian views with regard to issues like nuclear weapon-free zones, transfer of technology and surprisingly, the dismantling of the Anti-Ballistic Missile (ABM) Treaty by the administration of US President George W. Bush. India’s opposition to a nuclear weapons-free zone in South Asia has already been noted. Now, with her objective of being a nuclear weapons state achieved, India has herself suggested such a zone for South Asia, signalling her own responsible role as a nuclear weapons power. She can now extend security guarantees to non-nuclear weapons states in South Asia and thus call for a nuclear weapons free zone. Similarly, India in the past emphasised that non-proliferation measures should never be allowed to prevent the transfer of nuclear technology to any country. With her own nuclearisation process now complete, India has started underscoring the importance of such restrictions lest such arms fall in the hands of countries which might harm her interests. The pragmatic nature of India’s policies towards proliferation was however best demonstrated through her support for the dismantling of the ABM Treaty. India sensed concrete benefits if it supported counter-proliferation, i.e. having the military capabilities to deal with an environment in which there is proliferation of weapons of mass destruction. These benefits were: finally being able to join the nuclear rule-making club, solving the problems of proliferation in her neighbourhood, and preventing undesirable elements that do not abide by traditional rules of nuclear deterrence from acquiring nuclear weapons.[59] Global disarmament was the masthead of Indian nuclear diplomacy throughout the Cold War period and well into the 1990s. India’s fervent endorsement of this principle, however, has diminished greatly. As the above discussion shows, India has evolved new ways of thinking and acting on nuclear proliferation related issues. Still, the ingrained ideas of disarmament and its relationship with India’s acquisition of nuclear weapons find resonance in Indian policy documents and public postures. Commenting on the make-up of the Indian Draft Nuclear Doctrine announced in 1999, Deepa Ollapally notes the presence of an open commitment to pursuing disarmament in an otherwise generally hard-hitting nuclear doctrine. She quotes a member of India’s Nuclear Advisory Board who is at pains to point out that global disarmament is the primary issue and that the rest of the doctrine is conditioned by the persistent absence of any serious progress on such disarmament, especially among the permanent members of the United Nations Security Council.[60]

Why did India go nuclear?

This paper has thus far sought to describe the evolution of the Indian nuclear programme. It has charted the growth of the programme and striven to show the policies adopted by Indian decision makers towards the attainment of their objective. But we also need to understand what made India ‘go nuclear’ and build arsenals. Usually analysts proffer four arguments about proliferation. These are: (i) security concerns, (ii) prestige, (iii) technological imperatives, and (iv) domestic politics.[61] Let us go through each briefly. The security or the realist argument posits that security concerns directly related to a state’s physical security and survival ultimately drive a state to acquire nuclear weapons. Thus, a state operating under an anarchic international system and facing serious security pressures might go for the nuclear option. The second position informs us that nuclear weapons are a symbol of prestige. States acquire great power status or international recognition by developing a nuclear arsenal. The third view proposes that a state’s decision to go for nuclear weapons is an inevitable outcome of the technological momentum created by nuclear research and development programmes. The final argument is that intra-bureaucratic politics as well as politicians’ drive to score domestic political points may lead a state down the nuclear path. In other words, bureaucrats acting on the basis of their own individual policy preferences or bureaucracies carrying out their specific institutional interests may propel a country towards nuclear weapons.

The discussion on why India went for nuclear weapons has followers of all schools vying with each other to explain India’s actions. For George Perkovich, domestic factors and prestige issues play the most important role in India’s actions. He points out that India’s quest for nuclear weapons capabilities began before a Chinese threat emerged and was driven not by military or national security experts but rather by bureaucrats like Homi Bhabha. It was also a reflection of India’s moral norms and post colonial identity manifested through Nehru’s recognition that India could gain international power, standing and a measure of security if she went for nuclear weapons.[62] Others like C. Raja Mohan and Bhumitra Chakma argue that it was mainly security concerns that led to India’s decision to acquire nuclear weapons. Chakma convincingly writes that given India’s pressing economic problems it is very difficult to imagine that she would invest such huge resources in a nuclear programme merely to satisfy the need for recognition and prestige. Similarly, India’s decision to persist with the nuclear programme was not strongly influenced by technological imperatives or domestic pressures. If such were the case, then India would not have abstained from going nuclear in the 1960s and Indira Gandhi and other prime ministers would have chosen to carry out the tests when their domestic popularity was plummeting. While prestige, technology and domestic factors might have played some role, it was the emergence of China as a nuclear weapon state and later on, the development of the Pakistani nuclear bomb, which led India to acquire a nuclear arsenal.[63] Raja Mohan argues in a similar vein. He mentions the same reasons as Chakma, but adds that in the 1990s the demise of the Soviet Union and the removal of a security back-up, the emergence of the US as the sole superpower, China’s rise and international pressure to adhere to the NPT and CTBT− all aggravated India’s security concerns and pushed New Delhi inexorably towards the nuclear option.[64] Sumit Ganguly also places emphasis on the realist rationales while conceding that prestige and technological imperatives also had roles to play.[65]

While the role played by prestige, technological and bureaucratic factors in India’s nuclear programme must be acknowledged, the arguments made by Chakma, Raja Mohan and Ganguly – regarding the importance of realism in deciphering India’s nuclear posture – appear to be the most convincing. At the same time, this ‘realism’ is strictly an Indian understanding of realism, and a study of Indian strategic culture is necessary to unearth the peculiar ways in which Indians have viewed security. Some argue that realism and culturalist explanations of international events are two distinct approaches. They then consider whether the culturalist explanations might yield superior insight.[66] Stuart Poore, for his part, sees strategic culture protagonists as posing a direct challenge to the hegemony of realist thinking.[67] However, there are, and can be, no unencultured realists.[68] As argued above, India’s approach to nuclear weapons – including the means of their development, the rationale for them, and India’s stance on global efforts to stem proliferation – reflects a distinctive Indian way of thinking and acting. The use of moralpolitik is a good example of such behaviour.

Traits of Indian strategic culture

Any discussion of Indian strategic culture, even one dealing with nuclear weapons, must start by understanding the role of history in the development of Indian strategic culture. Why is history so important? Because the movers and shakers behind India’s nuclear journey were men and women who were conditioned by the way they understood Indian history. Writing about the first atomic bombs, constructed by refugee scientists in the United States, John Lukacs reminds us that the “causes” of the atom bomb are historical (and ultimately, personal); they are scientific and technical only on a secondary level of “causes.” The main reasons for the development of the bomb included Hitler, the Second World War and the persecution of Jews in Germany. Lukacs contends that the bomb was made at a particular time and for a specific purpose, not merely because at a certain phase of scientific development a certain stage of technological know-how was attained. He argues that it was actually because at a certain point in history, certain scientists began to fear that other scientists might be building an atom bomb for Hitler. Although important scientific and technological breakthroughs had taken place between 1938 and 1945, these ought not to obscure the principal reasons behind the bomb’s creation, which as in every historical act, were formed by personal choices, through historical thinking and historical consciousness, and conditioned by the political, racial, national, religious and ideological inclinations of responsible individuals.[69] In the same way, one can see how Nehru’s understanding as well as the general Indian perspective of Indian history influenced opinions about the building of the bomb.

The fact that India has been constantly subjected to foreign invasions and subjugation is ever present in the Indian mind, and Nehru was a serious student of Indian history who knew the feeling of insecurity it generated. This insecurity was premised, in part, on the belief that the Europeans had been able to intervene in India because of Indian divisiveness, and that Britain’s ability to play off the Indian powers against one another had been particularly successful. But the overarching feeling was that this conquest was made easier, if not possible, because of superior Western technology. Nehru himself was no exception to this conviction. Speaking on the occasion of the introduction of the Atomic Energy Bill, he noted that in the past few hundred years of human history the world had developed a new source of power, i.e. steam, and that this had subsequently ushered in the industrial age. India, Nehru pointed out, did not develop steam power and it became a backward country for that reason.[70] The message of the speech is that India was colonised because of her lack of technological sophistication. This understanding of technological backwardness and its disastrous consequences for India’s security has been a powerful rationale in Indian thinking about the nuclear bomb.

But there is another dimension to this need for countries like India. Technological backwardness not only meant a danger to her security, making her vulnerable to colonial and neo-colonial powers, but also implied social backwardness. Lacking in technological skills, and unable to master elementary, let alone complex, scientific and technological knowledge – this was how the civilisations of India, China and Africa were identified by European conquerors and colonisers and were thus deemed unfit to be counted as equals. Michael Adas writes that underlying all attempts to ‘transform’ non-Western societies was the assumption that Europeans were best suited to rule African and Asian societies because they represented the most progressive and advanced civilisations ever known. The ultimate proof of this assumption lay in Europe’s unrivalled scientific and technological achievements.[71] European superiority manifested through technological advancements gradually but surely attained racial connotations. But even in the 19^th century, when racist theories relating to non-Western people found wide acceptance among the articulate classes of Europe, many thinkers gave credence to scientific and technological proofs of Western superiority while rejecting those based on racist arguments. Racism should therefore be viewed as a subordinate rather than dominant theme in the European intellectual discourse on non-Western peoples.[72] For newly independent India’s leader, the attainment of technological and scientific prowess through the mastery of nuclear science was an objective that would not only ensure security, but also serve as a proof of the ability of Indians to compete with Western powers. Thus, India’s strategic culture was influenced by the need to destroy the myth of Western technical (also read military) superiority that has become the symbol of the Western claim to racial superiority. And any attempt to prevent such a policy is seen as perpetuating the inferior status of India and Indians as experienced during colonial rule. The terms India has used to justify her nuclear programme – apartheid, racism, equal treatment, etc. – have been reiterated a number of times. They are wielded either to endorse India’s progress in developing a nuclear arsenal, or to explain India’s position at various conferences on nuclear proliferation. This characteristic of Indian strategic culture was not limited to people like Nehru, who had spent most of his life under colonial rule, but can also be seen in recent times. Jaswant Singh’s article and his position have already been mentioned. And Perkovich points out that when a Western researcher reported that India had sought material help from China for her nuclear programme, the then IAEC Chairman Raja Ramanna lashed out by saying that Indians are used to “white” people having a low opinion of them and that the researcher’s remark indicated envy at India’s achievement of total independence in her nuclear requirements. Raja Ramanna’s behaviour, according to Perkovich, highlighted the recurrent and vitally important issue of racist colonialism prevalent, as India sees it, in the international nuclear arena.[73]

Given the waves of foreign invaders that came to India, it is only natural that Indians should be concerned about any foreign intervention in South Asia. The Indian desire for nuclear weapons must be seen in this light. It has already been shown how the Enterprise exercise of 1971 led India to believe that a superpower’s nuclear arsenal could also be used to thwart Indian objectives and threaten India herself. The fear of (Western) intervention with its obvious security connotations for India has been a part of Indian strategic culture due to Western forays and the subsequent conquest by Britain in the eighteenth century, reinforced by the experience of 1971. The importance of seeking a nuclear capability to ward off the probability of any such event occurring again cannot be emphasised enough. India has always been sensitive to any nuclear threat made by Western powers against non-nuclear states, and Rajiv Gandhi was in tune with this position when he made known that he was very concerned by the nuclear threats implied during the Gulf crisis of 1990-91.[74] A similar concern and uneasiness engulfed Indian policy makers and analysts when the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) decided to intervene in the crisis surrounding the former Yugoslavia in 1999. Such an act was perceived by Indians, suffering from their own separatist conflicts, as a harbinger of more unilateral actions by the United States and thus justified India’s acquisition of nuclear weapons.[75] Indian history, in short, is an important source for understanding Indian strategic culture with regard to nuclear weapons.

The role of religion in understanding the nature of Indian strategic culture is also significant for “religion is a particularly useful device for sacralizing violence and thus legitimizing it.”[76] Not only does religion play a cathartic influence on the way societies see war, it also influences the way societies act in times of war and peace and their approach to the use of force. Looking for the traits of a community’s strategic culture in religion might not be a common practice in contemporary social sciences, but in a country like India, where the influence of Hinduism is so powerful and pervades all aspects of life, it would be a most serious error to ignore it.

The Indian quest for nuclear weapons has been justified by some analysts as having its roots in Hinduism’s sacred texts. In the Vedas, the Epics and the Puranas, citations can be found which might be said to describe ancient weapons of mass destruction, perhaps even nuclear weapons. Indeed some analysts identify the most terrible weapon described in the Mahabharata (one of the Epics), the Brahmastra, as the ultimate weapon, the modern version of which is the nuclear bomb.[77] While the modern mind will rightly find this claim incredible, given the powerful impact such religious texts have on the Indian mind, it would be wise not to ignore them totally. A devoted admirer of science and technology like Nehru identified the tendency to cite the presence of WMD in the ancient texts as nothing more than traditional stories of magical exploits.[78] But elsewhere Nehru quotes Goethe’s observation on Roman myths (“if the Romans were great enough to invent things like that, we at least should be great enough to believe them”) and suggests that Hindu epics and stories should be believed.[79] It is clear that nuclear weapons were not totally unacceptable to the Indian mind, at least from a religious point of view.

It has already been pointed out that moralpolitik has been a significant, if not the most important, characteristic of the Indian strategic culture insofar as the issue of nuclear weapons is concerned. This moralpolitik trait also finds its justification and practice in Hindu religious texts. A study of the two epics, Ramayana and Mahabharata, provides a better understanding of the Indian propensity to take a high moral position publicly but to secretly and deviously act in a completely different manner. This paper proposes that Indian strategic culture has two traits, both derived from the central characters of Ramayana and Mahabharata, i.e., Rama and Krishna respectively. Both Rama and Krishna’s features operate concurrently in the Indian strategic mind. Let us briefly identify these two features.[80] The central character of the Ramayana is Rama, a prince forced into exile through the evil machinations of his stepmother. The Ramayana is all about the adventures of Rama as he endures his exile and finally reclaims the throne. Rama is an incarnation of Vishnu (one of the three main gods who rule the Hindu pantheon of gods) and is the very embodiment of goodness. He is virtuous, truthful, and mighty but always on the side of the right, a fierce warrior but seldom moved by anger, kind and helpful. There were only a few minor lapses in his impeccable conduct. Rama displayed a fatalistic nature through his acceptance of suffering. He would not fight for his rights. He accepts his fate or karma and will not struggle against it. The main character of Mahabharata is somewhat difficult to pin down as the epic contains quite a few great heroes. The story centres on an apocalyptic battle pitting two sides (kinsmen) and ends with the defeat of Kauravas and the victory of Pandavas. The Pandavas are helped in this titanic battle by Krishna, another incarnation of Vishnu. But unlike Rama, Krishna is not bound by any ethical considerations. It was Krishna’s crafty and resourceful ways that led to the extermination of the Kauravas. Deception, subterfuge, a relentlessly offensive posture and the use of cunning methods were Krishna’s forte. It is Krishna who urges Arjuna, the great warrior hero of the Pandavas, immobilised by the prospect of fratricidal war, to show no pity or remorse, but to do his duty (dharma) and kill his enemies even if they were Arjuna’s cousins, teachers, mentors and kinsmen.

Indian strategic culture sees an interaction between both these traits. Thus India talks about morality, virtue and victimhood – the Rama of world politics. At the same time India will resort to whatever means are necessary to attain her objective – the Indian Krishna. Therefore, the moralpolitik trait of Indian strategic culture embodies both these values within itself. But it has to be remembered that though the Ramayana and the Mahabharata are immensely popular epics, it is the Mahabharata that really captures the Indian mind.[81] In other words Rama is the Indian ideal, Krishna the Indian reality.[82] India will adhere simultaneously to both postures, as moralpolitik stipulates, without any contradiction. After all, are not Krishna and Rama incarnations of one entity, Vishnu?

A discussion on the importance of religious beliefs influencing Indian strategic culture must also take into account that most familiar feature of Hindu religion – the caste system. In an interesting model developed by Anirudha Gupta, one sees independent India formulating a foreign policy in South Asia based on a “caste” system. Thus, India is the Brahmin of the region and other states fall into various castes according to their capabilities.[83] The same framework can be applied to the world system which is perceived to be rigidly hierarchical. As per the stipulations of the caste system, the Brahmin is at the top of the social hierarchy and India’s quest for nuclear weapons can be identified as a means by which a ‘Brahmin’ India seeks to be in the top rank of the world hierarchy. And as no one can deny the Brahmin his divine right to be at the top, any proliferation measure intended to prevent India from attaining her rightful status is to be ignored. Therefore, the reasoning behind India’s nuclear programme and her behaviour with regard to such weapons must be approached with an understanding of the religious beliefs and characteristics of Indian society. Such an understanding will help explain why India’s realist, i.e. moralpolitik, approach to nuclear weapons is so uniquely Indian.

While religious texts and beliefs help shed light on the use of moralpolitik, one must also note that India’s actions have their origins in the teachings of traditional Indian strategic thinking. The most important source of such thinking is the Arthashastra written by Kautilya. It was with the help of Kautilya that Chandragupta Maurya laid the foundations of a truly great Indian empire in 320 B.C. For understanding India’s adherence to moralpolitik policies, it should be noted that Kautilya advocated the use of deceit to attain one’s objective and such methods as wearing a mask of moral probity, religious righteousness or citing moral righteousness to mask one’s intentions, all fall under this category. Nehru was strongly influenced by Kautilya’s theories[84], and it is important to consider how Indian strategic culture has been influenced by Kautilya’s teachings.

Any discussion of Indian strategic culture and its impact on the nuclear programme must take India’s geographical realities into consideration. George Tanham in his seminal essay on Indian strategic thinking identified geography as having profoundly affected Indian history and culture and therefore her strategic thinking.[85] A history of invasion along India’s north-western routes has traditionally oriented defence planners to pay special attention to that region. The arrival of the Europeans from the sea and their naval superiority made India aware of the need for a powerful navy. When one thinks of India’s nuclear programme, geography is seldom mentioned. But it has profound implications. Even though India is placed in the South Asian region by analysts, India’s security thinking takes into consideration the fact that China, too, is an actor in the South Asian strategic framework. China and India share a long border and China has a geographical advantage through her control over the Tibetan plateau overlooking the plains of India. There is also the reality of China’s military and nuclear connection with Pakistan. Most Western analysts are unable to include an ‘outside’ country in their neatly compartmentalised artificial geographical units, but the fact is that China is included by the Indians in any nuclear calculation in South Asia.[86]

A uniform Indian strategic culture?

This paper has shown the nuclear policies pursued by India to have been a manifestation of Indian strategic culture. However, this culture has not been uniformly successful in explaining the whole phenomenon. The various actors involved in the nuclear debate, especially those purporting to advocate ‘Gandhian’ policies, and their impact on Indian nuclear policy must also not be ignored. The presence of various strands of strategic culture under an umbrella concept of strategic culture has already been demonstrated.[87] Therefore, the connections between, and the implications of, (i) a public culture (ii) a strategic culture and (iii) a military (organisational) culture must also be analysed.

An examination of Indian decision-making with regard to the nuclear programme shows that the military has not been involved with the programme at all. The exclusion of the armed forces from the nuclear programme decision-making process has been made clear by George Perkovich in his study.[88] The absence of the armed forces from the decision-making loop on the nuclear issue resulted in one army chief, General K. Sundarji, depicting the frustration of the service chiefs through a novel titled The Blind Men of Hindustan.[89] On the other hand, various other actors such as the political parties, the Indian Parliament, the bureaucracy and even public opinion, have had little or no impact on decisions relating to the nuclear programme.[90] The real debate on nuclear weapons has been carried on by followers of Mahatma Gandhi who stressed the principles of nonviolence and morality in India’s actions. While this paper has argued that Gandhi himself was not against violence when it came to pursuing India’s interests, the truth is that some segments of the Indian population came to adhere rigidly to such a concept, as a result of misreading the subtle nature of the thoughts and actions of Gandhi and Nehru.[91] Nevertheless, in the 1970s the seemingly contradictory approaches were merged through a clever synthesis, resulting in a now widely accepted formula. Known as the Subrahmanyam formula, it reinforced the broad strategic culture under which the nuclear programme is located. It stipulated that India would acquire nuclear weapons in order to pressure the nuclear ‘haves’ to disarm, and to protect itself against nuclear blackmail.[92] Thus, by combining idealism with self-interest, the thunder of the no-bomb lobby – which had a negligible impact, if at all, on the programme – was taken away.

But while in the previous years the armed services had very little to do with nuclear weapons, this now seems to be changing. Further, Indian strategic culture should not be perceived to be static. With the development of an Indian triad, it is undergoing a slow but substantive change, and this is taking place in the balance between the political and operational aspects of deterrence. The once overwhelming political understanding of nuclear weapons manifested through the total absence of the armed forces from the nuclear arena is slowly giving way to a more operational conception of nuclear weapons. The development of various delivery systems – including long range missiles and weapons platform systems like nuclear submarines – is pushing the erstwhile practice of deterrence, which remained restricted to broad declarations on doctrine and the development of limited capabilities, towards more pressing operational questions about the quantity and quality of weapons and the infrastructure surrounding them.[93]

Conclusion

The journey India has taken from the writing of the letter in 1944 by Bhabha to the Tata Foundation, to the nuclear tests of 1998, has been a long and arduous one. As this paper has tried to show, realist security considerations played the most important role in propelling India towards nuclear weapons. But this realist thinking has been Indian in nature. The motivations for such thinking and behaviour are influenced by what India thinks about herself. Thus, one notices how history, religion and geography have all interacted and produced a distinctively Indian approach to nuclear weapons. While all the nuclear states of the world have travelled more or less the same path towards developing nuclear weapons, the rationales and the way they went about doing it differed. Strategic culture helps explain these different pathways and styles. In India’s case a distinctive style, that of moralpolitik, epitomises the Indian way of approaching the nuclear issue. This moralpolitik has been brought about by India’s history, geography, religious and strategic thinking. It is important to recognize that this culture is not transhistorical, either in the sense that it can be traced back to some ‘authentic’ pre-colonial tradition or that it is timeless, immutable and unchanging.[94] It is a strategic culture influenced by events, experiences past and present and modified as and when thought necessary. As the world awakens to the growing importance of India, an understanding of Indian strategic culture as discerned from her nuclear policy will certainly help make sense of the way India sees the world.

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[1] This paper is excerpted from the author’s PhD thesis titled Strategic Culture and the Rise of the Indian Navy, University of Reading, United Kingdom, July 2007.

* Associate Professor, Department of International Relations, University of Dhaka.

[2] Quoted in Itty Abraham, The Making of the Indian Atomic Bomb: Silence, Secrecy and the Postcolonial State (London and New York: Zed Books, 1998), p. 1.

[3] Ashton B. Carter, “America’s New Strategic Partner”, Foreign Affairs, Vol. 85, No. 4, July/August 2006, p. 36.

[4] Robert S. Norris and Hans M. Kristensen, “India’s nuclear forces, 2005”, Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, Vol. 61, No. 5, September/October 2005, pp. 73-74. See also T. S. Subramanian, “Next objective: a 5,000-km Agni”, Frontline, Vol. 24, No. 8, Apr. 21-May 04, 2007 (available at http://www.flonnet.com/fl2408/stories/20070504003802300.htm; retrieved on 25/04/2007).

[5] For a comprehensive survey of India’s sea-based nuclear capability see Rahul Roy-Chaudhury, “India and Pakistan: Nuclear-Related Programs and Aspirations at Sea”, in Lowell Dittmer (ed.), South Asia’s Nuclear Security Dilemma: India, Pakistan, and China (Armonk, New York and London, England: M. E. Sharpe, 2005), pp. 73-94.

[6] As proposed by Colin S. Gray, “Strategic culture as context: the first generation of theory strikes back”, Review of International Studies, Vol. 25, No. 1, January 1999, pp. 49-69.

[7] Ibid., pp. 55-56.

[8] On the importance of culture in a country’s approach to nuclear weapons, see Beatrice Heuser, “Beliefs, Culture, Proliferation and the Use of Nuclear Weapons”, Journal of Strategic Studies, Vol. 23, No. 1, March 2000, pp. 74-100.

[9] Stephen P. Cohen, India: Emerging Power (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001), p. 158.

[10] Jawaharlal Nehru, ‘Defence Policy and National Development’ note of 3 February 1947, cited in Itty Abraham, op.cit., p. 47.

[11] Bharat Karnad, Nuclear Weapons and Indian Security: The Realist Foundations of Strategy (New Delhi: Macmillan India Limited, 2002), p. 179.

[12] The discussion on Auchinleck’s and Tuker’s views has been taken from Bharat Karnad, ibid., pp. 171-178.

[13] For a description of India’s establishment of the nuclear research infrastructure in the 1940s and 1950s, see Bhumitra Chakma, Strategic Dynamics and Nuclear Weapons Proliferation in South Asia: A Historical Analysis (Bern: Peter Lang, 2004), pp. 45-47.

[14] David Brown, “Nuclear Power in India: A Comparative Analysis”, (London: Allen and Unwin, 1983) cited in Sumit Ganguly, “India’s Pathway to Pokhran II: The Prospects and Sources of New Delhi’s Nuclear Weapons Program”, International Security, Vol. 23(4), Spring 1999, p. 150.

[15] Itty Abraham, op.cit., p. 49.

[16] Ashok Kapur, India’s Nuclear Option: Atomic Diplomacy and Decision Making (New York: Praeger, 1976), pp. 193-194.

[17] See Sumit Ganguly, op.cit., p. 150.

[18] Stephen P. Cohen, op.cit., p. 161.

[19] See Rashed Uz Zaman, “Kautilya: The Indian Strategic Thinker and Indian Strategic Culture”, Comparative Strategy, Vol. 25, No. 3, July-September 2006, pp. 231-247.

[20] Arpit Rajain, Nuclear Deterrence in Southern Asia: China, India and Pakistan (New Delhi: Sage Publications India Pvt. Ltd., 2005), p. 203

[21] Gandhi quoted in Bharat Karnad, op.cit., p. 59.

[22] Waheguru P. S. Sidhu, “Of Oral Traditions and Ethnocentric Judgements”, in Kanti Bajpai and Amitabh Mattoo (eds.), Securing India: Strategic Thought and Practice (New Delhi: Manohar Publishers, 1996), p. 177.

[23] Bharat Karnad, op.cit., p. 46.

[24] Ibid., p. 163.

[25] Ibid., p. 3.

[26] Ibid., p. 62.

[27] Ibid., p. 3.

[28] George Perkovich, “What Makes The Indian Bomb Tick?”, in D. R. SarDesai and Raju G. C. Thomas (eds.), Nuclear India in the Twenty-First Century (Basingstoke and London: Palgrave-Macmillan, 2002) , pp. 27-28.

[29] Ashok Kapur, “Peace and Power in India’s Nuclear Policy”, Asian Survey, Vol. X, No. 9, September 1970, pp. 784-85.

[30] Bhumitra Chakma, “Toward Pokhran II: Explaining India’s Nuclearisation Process”, Modern Asian Studies, Vol. 39, No. 1, 2005, p. 201.

[31] Ibid., p. 203.

[32] Bhumitra Chakma (2004), op .cit., p. 75.

[33] George Perkovich, India’s Nuclear Bomb: The Impact on Global Proliferation (Berkeley, Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1999), p. 121.

[34] Bhumitra Chakma (2004), op.cit., p. 80.

[35] Sumit Ganguly, op.cit., p. 159.

[36] Bhumitra Chakma (2005), op.cit., p. 211.

[37] K. Subrahmanyam, “Indian Nuclear Policy – 1964-98 (A personal recollection)”, in Jasjit Singh (ed.), Nuclear India (New Delhi: Knowledge World, 1998), p. 31.

[38] Bhumitra Chakma (2005), op.cit., p. 212.

[39] R. Chidambaram and R. Ramanna, “Some Studies on India’s Peaceful Nuclear Explosion Experiment”, Peaceful Nuclear Explosions IV (Vienna: IAEA, 1975) cited in David Albright and Mark Hibbs, ‘India’s Silent Bomb’, Bulletin of Atomic Scientists, Vol. 48(7), September 1992, p. 28.

[40] Bhumitra Chakma (2005), op.cit., p. 215.

[41] Raja Ramanna, “Years of Pilgrimage: An Autobiography” cited in David Albright and Mark Hibbs, op.cit., p. 28.

[42] For an overview of India’s abortive plans to test nuclear devices before 1998, see C. Raja Mohan, Crossing The Rubicon: The Shaping of India’s New Foreign Policy (New Delhi: Penguin Books India, 2005), Chapter 1.

[43] Deepa M. Ollapally, “Mixed Motives in India’s Search for Nuclear Status”, Asian Survey, Vol. XLI, No. 6, November-December 2001, pp. 930-931.

[44] Rajesh M. Basrur, “Nuclear Weapons and Indian Strategic Culture”, Journal of Peace Research, Vol. 38, No. 2, 2001, p. 187; also see Rajesh M. Basrur, Minimum Deterrence and India’s Nuclear Security (Stanford, California: Stanford University Press, 2006).

[45] K. Subrahmanyam, op.cit., pp. 34-35.

[46] Bhumitra Chakma (2004), op.cit., p. 94.

[47] Steven R. Weisman, “ India’s Nuclear Energy Policy Raises New Doubts on Arms”, New York Times, 7 May 1988 quoted in Sumit Ganguly, “Explaining the Indian Nuclear Tests of 1998”, in Raju G.C. Thomas and Amit Gupta (eds.), India’s Nuclear Security (Boulder, CO and London: Lynne Rienner Publishers, 2000), p. 51.

[48] K. Subrahmanyam, op.cit., p. 44.

[49] Naeem Ahmad Salik, “Regional Dynamics and Deterrence: South Asia (2)”, in Ian R. Kenyon and John Simpson (eds.), Deterrence and the New Global Security Environment (Abingdon, Oxford: Routledge, 2006), p. 174.

[50] C. Raja Mohan, op.cit., p. 7.

[51] “The Sound of One Hand Clapping”, The Economist, July 22nd-28th, 2006.

[52] Bharat Karnad, op.cit., p. 214.

[53] Itty Abraham, op.cit., p. 138.

[54] Bhumitra Chakma (2004), op.cit., p. 188.

[55] Itty Abraham, op.cit., p. 138.

[56] Jaswant Singh, “Against Nuclear Apartheid”, Foreign Affairs, Vol. 77, No. 5, September/ October 1998, pp. 41-52.

[57] Itty Abraham, op.cit., pp. 138-139.

[58] Bharat Karnad, op.cit., p. 215.

[59] For a discussion on the changes in India’s position on proliferation see C. Raja Mohan, op. cit., pp. 18-24.

[60] Roddam Narasimha, “The Evolution of India’s Nuclear Policies”, 2 June 2001 quoted in Deepa Ollapally, op.cit., p. 935.

[61] This discussion on why countries go nuclear has been taken from Bhumitra Chakma (2005), op.cit., pp. 189-191.

[62] George Perkovich (2002), op.cit., pp. 26-27.

[63] Bhumitra Chakma (2005), op.cit., pp. 234-236.

[64] C. Raja Mohan, op.cit., pp. 11-14.

[65] Sumit Ganguly (1999), op.cit., pp. 171-173.

[66] Michael C. Desch, “Culture Clash: Assessing the Importance of Ideas in Security Studies”, International Security, Vol. 23, No. 1, Summer 1998, pp. 141-170.

[67] Stuart Poore, “What is the context? A reply to the Gray-Johnston debate on strategic culture”, Review of International Studies, Vol. 29, No. 2, April 2003, p. 283.

[68] Colin S. Gray, “In praise of strategy”, Review of International Studies, Vol. 29, No. 2, April 2003, p. 292.

[69] John Lukacs, Historical Consciousness: The Remembered Past (New Brunswick: Transaction Publishers, 1994), p. 299. On the importance of history in explaining political events, see also Charles Tilly, “Why and How History Matters” in Robert E. Goodin and Charles Tilly (eds.), The Oxford Handbook of Contextual Political Analysis (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006), pp. 417- 437; Williamson Murray and Mark Grimsley, “Introduction: On strategy” in Williamson Murray, MacGregor Knox, and Alvin Bernstein (eds.), The Making of Strategy: Rulers, States, and War (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), pp. 10-12; John Ellis, The Social History of the Machine Gun (Baltimore, Maryland: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1986).

[70] Nehru quoted in Itty Abraham, op. cit., p. 28.

[71] Michael Adas, Machines as the Measure of Men: Science, Technology, and Ideologies of Western Dominance (Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press, 1989), p. 203.

[72] Ibid., p. 12.

[73] George Perkovich (1999), op. cit., p. 286.

[74] K. Subrahmanyam, op. cit., p. 44.

[75] Raju G. C. Thomas, “ Whither Nuclear India?” in D. R. SarDesai and Raju G. C. Thomas (eds.), op. cit., pp. 9-10.

[76] Christopher Coker, Waging War Without Warriors?: The Changing Culture of Military Conflict (Boulder, CO and London: Lynne Rienner Publishers, 2002), p. 153.

[77] G. D. Bakshi, The Indian Art of War: The Mahabharata Paradigm (Delhi: Sharada Publishing House, 2002), p. 27.

[78] Jawaharlal Nehru, The Discovery of India (Calcutta: Signet Press, 1947) p. 74.

[79] Ibid., p. 101.

[80] The description of Rama and Krishna has been taken from Abraham Eraly, Gem in the Lotus: The Seeding of Indian Civilisation (London: Phoenix, 2005), pp. 70-75.

[81] Jawaharlal Nehru, op.cit., p. 78.

[82] Abraham Eraly, op.cit., p. 74.

[83] Anirudha Gupta, “A Brahmanic Framework of Power in South Asia?”, Economic and Political Weekly, April 7, 1990, pp. 711-714.

[84] M. J. Akbar, Nehru: The Making of India (London: Viking/Penguin Group, 1988), pp. 572-573.

[85] George K. Tanham, Indian Strategic Thought: An Interpretive Essay (Santa Monica, California: The Rand Corporation, 1992), p. 2.

[86] Brahma Chellaney, “South Asia’s Passage to Nuclear Power”, International Security, Vol. 16, No. 1, Summer 1991, p. 51.

[87] Colin S. Gray, “Out of the Wilderness: Prime-time for Strategic Culture”, inaugural speech made at the Defense Threat Reduction Agency (DTRA)-sponsored conference on strategic culture, University of Reading, Reading, United Kingdom, August 7 2006, pp. 12-13.

[88] George Perkovich (2002), op.cit., see p. 33 and p. 46 especially for a discussion on the military’s non-involvement in the nuclear programme.

[89] K. Subrahmanyam, op.cit., p. 45. Note that General Sundarji was one of the few army officers who seriously thought about the implications of India going nuclear. He presented his ideas in the unpublished monograph “Strategy in the Age of Nuclear Deterrence and Its Application to Developing Countries”, in 1984. As Commandant of the Indian Army’s College of Combat at Mhow, he ran a ‘mail seminar’ that attempted to systemise a study of the problems and prospects of an Indian deterrence policy.

[90] Rajesh M. Basrur, op.cit., pp. 189-190.

[91] Bharat Karnad, op.cit., p. 3.

[92] Stephen P. Cohen, op.cit., p. 169.

[93] Rajesh M. Basrur, op.cit., p. 195.

[94] Andrew Latham, “Constructing National Security: Culture and Identity in Indian Arms Control and Disarmament Practice”, in Keith R. Krause (ed.), Culture and Security: Multilateralism, Arms Control and Security Building (London and Portland, Oregon: Frank Cass, 1999), p. 133.