India's Nuclear Doctrine Isn't Worth the Paper it is Written On
Washington, D.C., Wednesday, September 01, 1999 - The recently published so-called "nuclear doctrine" of the fascist Swastika- worshipping BJP Caretaker government in India seeks to persuade the world in general, and the United States in particular, to agree to further nuclearization of the most squalidly region on this planet earth – South Asia.This "nuclear doctrine", released in Delhi a few days ago by the National Security Advisory Board, hardens India’s nuclear posture and bears testimony to the moral and political debasement of India’s Brahmin caste dominated ruling elite and its arrogant ambitions and delusions of grandeur. The Doctrine is in total contravention of the will of the world community which was spelled out in the binding United Nations Security Council Resolution No. 1172, adopted in June 1998. This document orders nuclear restrain on India and Pakistan. This pompous official document also throws down the gauntlet at the very powerful Chairman of the United States Senate Foreign Relations Committee, Senator Jesse Helms, whose views against India and Pakistan going nuclear are well known and are on record. It will be interesting to see how the indomitable Republican Senator from North Carolina takes up the gauntlet?
This ‘nuclear doctrine’ described by the opposition CPI (M) party as a manifesto of a ‘government of Hindu Bombers’ effects a region where India alone (GNP. $370/- per annum, yes an annual GNP of $370/-) out of the seven under-developed countries that make up South Asia – India, Pakistan, Bangladesh, Nepal , Sri Lanka, Bhutan and Maldives – can ‘boast’ that after fifty two years of independence 680 million Indians (yes 680 million Indians – over 65% of the population) have never seen a latrine. Every morning this mass of humanity (over 580 million of whom are illiterate, 490 million have never tasted a glass of clean drinking water, 200 million are bonded child-slaves, 190 million suffer from Tuberculosis, 60 million are blind and 30 million carry the AIDS virus) moves in a mass rush, like a herd of stampeding animals, to answer the call of nature behind a bush or a culvert or in a ditch wherever they can hide their shame and their squalor. Some nuclear – weapons State – this India! Some Democracy! Some ‘nuclear doctrine’! .
Except for a few "Panday’s like Congressman Frank Pallone – Democrat of New Jersey who have lost their self-respect in the quest for campaign donations and prejudiced Indophile South Asia "experts" like Messrs. Stephen Cohen, Selig Harrison & Co., who consider the announcement as a prelude to India’s admission into the exclusive Nuclear Club – from which they are trying to keep out Muslim Pakistan . Most American opinion makers view Delhi’s ‘nuclear doctrine’ as farce and another invitation to greater nuclear danger and an escalation in the South Asian nuclear equation like the ill –advised May 1998 Pokhran Nuclear tests by India in the Sikh Punjab’s hinterland which resulted in an alarmed and enraged Pakistan rushing into its hasty copycat Chagai nuclear blasts.
Despite the fact that the usually sober and prestigious Times of India (August 30, 1999) got carried away and trumpet the official line that the most important principle in India’s ‘nuclear doctrine’ is the Indian commitment to no-first-use, most experts agree that the no-first use assurance does not mean a thing. No nuclear-armed country which has absolutely certain information that its adversary is about to launch a nuclear attack is going to wait to be hit and will most certainly take preemptive measures. In South Asia the most important principle therefore, for the two nuclear – weapons states of India and Pakistan will obviously be to "use it or lose it". No useless, no-first use agreement is going to usher in restraint. This terrible situation is of great concern to the 18 million Sikh Sikhs, captive in the Indian map since 1947, as their Homeland of Sikh Punjab sits astride the Pakistan border and is smack in the middle. This Sikh homeland will obviously be targeted as India has deployed nuclear – capable Prithvi missiles in Jalandhar and Bhatinda which deployment will most certainly invite Pakistani nuclear retaliation.
Luckily during the recent Kargil firefight Indian and Pakistani Punjabis were saved from a Nuclear holocaust by President Clinton when he persuaded economically hard-pressed Pakistan Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif in the July 4, 1999 Washington meeting to avoid retaliation and ignore the Indian dezinformatisya that it had fitted its Prithvi Missiles with tactical nuclear war heads (William Safire’s July2, 1999 New York Times column) and instead convinced the Sikh-friendly Pakistani statesman into withdrawing the Mujahideen from the Kargil heights. South Asia may not be that lucky, next time when Kargil-2 or Kargil-3 take place in the future, and they will, as long as the Indian army of Occupation oppresses the Muslim Kashmiris who have as much a right to self-determination as the Christian East Taimureses in the Indonesian archipelago or the Sikhs of Punjab for their homeland Khalistan.
The drafters of India’s ‘Nuclear doctrine’ (which nuclear posturing will initially cost Rs 50,000 crores or over US $0.12 billion) in their haste to release the document before the September election have done Islamabad a favor by threatening the Pakistan – friendly Persian Gulf states and Saudi Arabia which are aligned with Islamabad by declaring that: "India reserves the right to target non-nuclear states ‘aligned’ with nuclear powers." In their delusion (of grandeur) the Indian rulers forgot to divide their ambitions by their limitations before making the above threat and did not think about the millions of very vulnerable Indians gainfully employed in these Muslim states.
Interestingly the following editorial comment on the Indian ‘nuclear doctrine’ (a strategic audit of which indicates a serious dysfunction between minimum deterrence’ and a tri-service arsenal) by the usually well-informed Friday Times, a Lahore (Pakistan) news weekly (whose editor, Najam Sethi, was arrested and kept incommunicado for a month in May this year by the Nawaz Sharif government) is very appropriate and says it all. The Friday Times editorial declares; "In fact, India was saved from humiliation in Kargil only because the United States was able to persuade Pakistan to back off. If that is how nuclear war in South Asia is to be avoided, then India’s ‘nuclear doctrine’ isn’t worth the paper it is written on."