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This case discusses the origin and impact of India’s choices to develop and then openly deploy a nuclear-weapons capability. Indian leaders did not take these steps specifically as a way to deal with Pakistan, with which they have fought three wars since 1947. To the contrary, the record shows the crucial role played by Indian leaders’ unhappiness with the international norms regarding nuclear weapons, their fears of China, their concerns about India’s status in the world, and the growing impact of nationalist sentiments within key Indian constituencies. Nevertheless, their decision to go public with their nuclear weapons capability intensified the conflict with Pakistan, which had initiated a secret nuclear weapons development program of its own after being defeated by India in a war in 1971. The case thus illustrates the ways in which a widely varied set of international and domestic incentives can come together to worsen an already severe security dilemma between two states. Indian Nuclear Policy from 1947 to 1968. In the first fifteen years after India gained independence from Britain in 1947, Jawaharlal Nehru, the country’s first prime minister and leader of its dominant Congress Party, had a clear and largely unchallenged conception of his country’s identity, its world role, and its preferred foreign-policy tools. As Nehru saw it, India would be economically self-sufficient, it would pursue an autonomous foreign policy, it would enjoy military and political dominance on the South Asian subcontinent, and it would become a key player in the post-World War II international arena. This vision did not include a nuclear-weapons capability. Nehru, an early and ardent advocate of global disarmament, repeatedly stated that India could satisfy its security needs without nuclear weapons. As he put it, "so far as we are concerned, we are determined not to go in for making atomic bombs and the like. But we are equally determined not to be left behind... in the use of this new power."53 Nehru thus supported the creation of an Indian Atomic Energy Commission in 1948; by 1954, a Department of Atomic Energy was receiving regular budgetary funding. India also participated during the 1950s in President Eisenhower’s Atoms for Peace initiative (a mechanism for sharing peaceful nuclear technology) and received French and Canadian assistance for its nuclear power program. Both policies were linked by the foreign donors to a pledge that the assistance provided would not be used to acquire a nuclear weapons capability.54 Fortunately for Nehru and other Indians who shared this normative commitment, the international strategic situation that India faced in the late 1940s and 1950s did not seem to require nuclear weapons. They were irrelevant or even harmful to Nehru’s efforts to position India outside of the Cold War alliance blocs and his broader efforts to legitimize non-alignment as a plausible strategy for Asian and African states. In addition, Indian policy makers during this period saw no specific security rationale for nuclear weapons. While relations with Pakistan—with which India had fought a bitter war in 1947—were hostile and often tense, Congress Party members felt confident that the better armed and more populous India could rely on conventional (non-nuclear) weapons to deter and, if necessary, to fight Pakistan.55 Moreover, India’s neighbor China was seen as a friendly fellow member of the non-aligned movement, not as a competitor for regional influence or security.56 China’s invasion of India in Autumn 1962 sparked a dramatic change in this optimistic view of India’s strategic situation. The war, which arose out of a border dispute in a remote section of the Himalayan frontier, was brief. Yet Indian leaders drew two major conclusions from it. They now saw China as a potential threat; that had not been the case before the war.57 As Indian officials saw it, China’s leaders did not appear to attach much value to the norms of peaceful coexistence that had become the staple of Third-World diplomatic gatherings. Instead, they had opportunistically used the territorial dispute to humble India and demonstrate their strategic dominance in South Asia.58 Once Chinese preferences were seen as incompatible with India’s, relative power became more important. Nehru and his colleagues thus became worried about the balance of military forces in the region and about their ability to address future disputes with their more populous neighbor. Their worries intensified in October 1964 when China successfully tested a nuclear device. In taking this step, Chinese leaders were responding to perceived threats from the Soviet Union and the United States, not India, which was largely viewed as peripheral to Chinese security concerns.59 Nevertheless, Indian leaders were still bitter about their humiliating defeat in the 1962 war and were uncertain about the motivations behind the Chinese test. In spite of those growing security concerns, the importance Nehru placed on his anti-nuclear position, his stature as India’s first prime minister, and his firm control over the Congress Party (which dominated parliament during his seventeen years in office) temporarily kept any counter-coalition from effectively challenging India’s nuclear weapons policy.60 That changed abruptly with his death later in 1964. Lal Bahadur Shastri, his successor as prime minister, faced different international and domestic incentives. Lacking both Nehru’s prestige and his command over the Congress Party, Shastri was unable to mute demands in parliament that India’s nuclear status should be modified in what was seen as an increasingly unfavorable international situation.61 Responding to those pressures, in late 1964 Shastri announced that India would continue nuclear research and development while avoiding explicit nuclear armament. The calculated ambiguity behind this policy was evident in its name: the "option strategy."62 This step permitted Shastri and future Indian leaders to put in motion a way to address troublesome international developments and satisfy internal demands for a more active nuclear policy without committing themselves to a full-fledged nuclear weapons program. Prime Minister Indira Gandhi, who succeeded Shastri in 1966, was soon faced with the question of whether to support the Nonproliferation Treaty (NPT), which was under negotiation in the late 1960s. The NPT provided that all signatories that did not possess nuclear weapons would pledge not to acquire them and that nuclear-weapons states would promise not to transfer such technology to any non-nuclear state. In return, non-nuclear states would be given access to nuclear energy for peaceful purposes. Mrs. Gandhi ultimately made what amounted to an "easy" choice under these circumstances. Because the NPT would forbid an Indian nuclear arsenal while allowing China to retain its arsenal, would permanently establish "have" and "have not" groups of nuclear-weapons states, and would do nothing to promote global disarmament (which remained a stated Indian objective), there was little to be gained in signing the treaty. (The same calculations produced a subsequent choice not to sign the Comprehensive Nuclear Test Ban Treaty when it was opened for signature in September 1996.) Since pro-nuclear sentiment within the major parties in parliament had, if anything, increased with subsequent Chinese nuclear tests in 1965 and 1966, the Gandhi government had few domestic political incentives to accept what were seen as the unfair provisions of the NPT.63 Moreover, in rejecting the NPT, Indian leaders implicitly retained a nuclear option, dampening parliamentary interest in and debate on the issue.64 This gave them virtually a free hand to move toward a nuclear capability in the early 1970s. Indian Nuclear Policy From 1968 to 1974 By the late 1960s, Indian leaders began to sense a deterioration in their international strategic environment. Two issues concerned them at this point. They worried that the United States and the Soviet Union were taking a heightened geopolitical interest in the Indian Ocean. Any Soviet or American military presence in the area, they believed, would thwart Indian attempts to gain regional pre-eminence.65 They also worried about a recent increase in U.S. military assistance to Pakistan, which came on top of the help that Pakistan was receiving from China. While the main incentive behind U.S. policy in South Asia was to contain Soviet influence in the region, Indian leaders viewed the problem through the lens of the severe security rivalry that had developed between them and Pakistan: they believed that Pakistan’s purpose in building up its military forces was to provoke another war with India from a position of increased armed strength.66 A series of events in 1971 further heightened the sense in India that the security situation was deteriorating. A diplomatic rapprochement initiated by the United States toward mainland China in 1971 triggered immediate concern among Indian officials. They believed that closer Sino-American ties might lead to military collaboration between the two states, thereby increasing the threat India already faced from China. 1971 was also the year that a prolonged crisis in Bangladesh (formerly East Pakistan) came to a head. In the ensuing war, India fought on the side of the successful Bengali effort to gain independence from Pakistan. During this conflict, U.S. policy makers attempted to avoid alienating China, Pakistan’s close ally, by deliberately ignoring Pakistani brutality in Bangladesh.67 As a result, Indian officials began to fear the development of a Sino-American-Pakistani security relationship that would come at their expense. In response, Indian leaders moved to augment their own reliance on potential power resources by signing a Treaty of Peace, Friendship, and Cooperation with the Soviet Union in 1971. While this alliance was primarily symbolic in nature, it was seen as insurance against the evolving diplomatic and military developments that seemed, from the perspective of Indian decision makers, to be isolating their country.68 For Mrs. Gandhi and her Congress Party, domestic political and economic conditions soon deteriorated as well. The costs of the war in Bangladesh and the appearance of ten million refugees in India from the war-torn areas severely depressed the economy, and scandals developed involving corruption in the Congress Party and Mrs. Gandhi’s efforts to conceal it.69 These domestic difficulties helped move Indian leaders toward a choice they believed would help to alleviate their security and political problems. President Nixon’s visit to China in February 1972 seems to have been the catalyst that prompted Mrs. Gandhi to order preparations for a nuclear test. But domestic difficulties seem to have played a role as well. Scientific constituencies had exerted powerful pressures on Mrs. Gandhi to validate their achievements.70 A nuclear capability also signified to many Indians that the country had to be taken seriously by outsiders. In addition, Mrs. Gandhi may have acted in part to divert attention from an anti-Congress-Party movement that was gaining ground as a result of the economic and corruption problems.71 The world was nevertheless taken by surprise on May 18, 1974, when India tested its first nuclear device at the Pokhran test site in the Rajasthan desert in northwest India. The explosion made visible and obvious what the "option strategy" had been designed to keep ambiguous. Yet in an important sense, it was only an incremental step away from that earlier policy, under which all future nuclear decisions had been left open. Indian officials deliberately referred to the test as a "peaceful nuclear explosion," not as a weapons test. Doing so gave Chinese and Pakistani officials some flexibility to respond non-provocatively and made it less necessary for the United States or the Soviet Union, both strong opponents of nuclear proliferation, to take strong diplomatic or economic measures against India. This deliberate ambiguity about whether India was now a nuclear-weapons state would last twenty-four years. The End of Nuclear Ambiguity: India’s 1998 Nuclear Weapons Test In early May 1998, India tested nuclear weapons for a second time at Pokhran, and once again the outside world was taken by surprise. A major part of the surprise was that the ambiguity about the country’s nuclear-weapons status that had been maintained for over two decades was suddenly over: India explicitly portrayed these tests to the world as weapons tests. While the tests broke no legal agreements, since India had not signed the NPT, the choice to become the world’s sixth openly declared nuclear weapons state left many observers feeling that Indian leaders had decisively broken an implied commitment to avoid such an unequivocal step.72 Why, then, did they take it? Again, a combination of international and domestic incentives drove the choice. The end of the Cold War had produced in India a growing sense of international vulnerability and irrelevance. With Sino-American relations steadily improving, and with Indians still quite suspicious about Chinese and Pakistani intentions, the country’s leaders felt particularly isolated internationally. It did not help that with the East and West blocs now either disbanded or largely without purpose, India’s role as a leader of the global Non-Aligned movement had become largely meaningless. Moreover, India’s inefficient business climate contributed to its marginalization in an era dominated by increasingly quick and mobile trans-state capital movements. Perhaps even more important was a sense of wounded cultural pride. To Indians, nuclear politics is as much about "cultural authority"—whose values are taken seriously and accepted by others internationally—as strategic interests. When the legal life of the NPT was extended indefinitely in 1996, Indians took it as a signal that their moral argument against the nuclear double-standard had been decisively rejected. If such hypocrisy (as they see it) is going to persist, Indians overwhelmingly refuse to be bound by an international norm they view as illegitimate. In this context, the electoral victory of the Hindu Nationalist Bharatiya Janata (BJP) Party led by A. B. Vajpayee in March 1998 was a critical turning point. It sparked a choice to end the nuclear ambiguity that had persisted for over two decades and make India an openly declared nuclear weapons state. Part of the BJP’s appeal was that it offered what seemed like a plausible alternative to the discredited major parties of the center and left. Indian politics had been unstable since the assassination of Prime Minister Rajiv Gandhi (Indira’s son and Nehru’s grandson) in 1991. Fragile coalition governments came and went with depressing frequency, and official corruption served to delegitimize the once-dominant Congress Party. While the BJP at one time had advocated the creation of a purer Hindu society with little regard for the rights of India’s large Islamic minority community, such positions had been dropped from the official party platform in an effort to appeal to a wider audience. What remained were policy positions most Indians would support. For example, the BJP had long supported the development of an Indian nuclear weapons capability on the grounds that it would restore national pride. These efforts were rewarded in the general election of March 1998, in which the BJP won 25.5 percent of the national vote, giving it the largest delegation in parliament and the right to try to form a coalition government.73 A major source of strength for the BJP prior to the election had been a set of tactical alliances forged with various regional parties. This asset, however, turned into a weakness soon after the election. Corruption investigations into some of the BJP’s regional coalition partners tarnished the Vajpayee government’s anti-corruption promises, and the party leaders targeted in the corruption investigations threatened to bring down the government in a parliamentary vote of no-confidence if the inquiries were not halted. He was characterized in the Indian press as a "toothless tiger" who seemed unable to provide the promised "stable administration that would break with the ramshackle governments of the past."74 Fortunately for BJP leaders, the nuclear-weapons issue gave them an easy way to breathe new life into their coalition. Less than two months after they formed a government, five nuclear tests were conducted. Indians erupted in patriotic fervor, even as most of the rest of the world denounced the move. Ninety-one percent of the population supported the tests, forcing the BJP’s wayward coalition partners to set aside their threats to desert the government.75 The negative international repercussions of the nuclear tests, moreover, were seen as tolerably low or, perhaps, as worth paying in the context of other political and policy objectives. As Indian leaders saw the situation, even the United States—the actor with the broadest array of resources that might be used to coerce India in an effort to reverse its nuclear policy—would be unwilling or unable to hurt them very much. In contrast to its behavior on Iraq, Washington had resigned itself to the existence of an Indian nuclear-weapons program. In 1995, U.S. Secretary of Defense William Perry had said that "the nuclear capabilities of India and Pakistan flow from a dynamic that we are unlikely to be able to influence in the near term. Rather than seeking to roll back-which we have concluded is unattainable in these two countries-we have decided, instead, to seek to cap their nuclear capabilities."76 Economic coercion was much more likely, but that was seen as manageable. In addition to Shakti ("strength"), one of the major Hindu nationalist principles was Swadeshi ("self-reliance"). It was under the second of these banners that the BJP had released its economic development plan during the early weeks of the Vajpayee government, emphasizing the importance of self-sufficiency. Limits would be sought on direct foreign investment in consumer products and little would be done to dismantle the economy’s complex set of barriers that stood between the Indian economy and international markets. Rather than adjust to the era of globalization, BJP doctrine held that Indians would develop their own resources. This orientation made it easy for BJP leaders to shrug off the effects of any resulting U.S. sanctions. NOTES
53. Quoted in Chris Smith, India’s Ad Hoc Arsenal: Direction or Drift in Defense Policy? (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1994), 179.
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