The Day After

More on the thermonuclear bomb controversy. I am appending an article that also appeared alongside mine outlining the views of P.K. Iyengar, former bomb designer who has been saying from the very outset that our hydrogen bomb design was flawed.

THE government’s reaction to the revelation by former nuclear weapons programme coordinator K. Santhanam that India’s first thermonuclear or hydrogen bomb may have had a flawed design has been cautious and advisedly so. As the government of the day, it is the United Progressive Alliance (UPA) that must cope with the consequences of the bombshell.
Doubts about India’s nuclear capability could make it difficult for the government to sign the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty (CTBT). They could trigger pressures for another set of tests, which would put paid to the Indo-US nuclear deal as well.
The Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) is already suffering an implosion and has chosen not to comment on the issue, although former national security adviser Brajesh Mishra did weigh in with the comment that scientists had then assured the government that all the tests had been successful.
The issue, Santhanam has asserted, is not about “belief” but scientific verification. He has pointed out that no country in the world has ever got its thermonuclear design right on the very first test. It took the UK three tests to get its weapon right and France did 29 fission tests before it got the fusion (hydrogen) bomb. Therefore, in his view, given the doubts raised about the test, there is need for more tests to perfect the design and that India should grab the opportunity should it arise.
The doubts about the tests come primarily from seismic analyses and questions raised by the technique of data estimation that have been provided so far by the Bhabha Atomic Research Centre (BARC).
Writing in the Nuclear Weapons Archive, ex-nuclear weapons analyst Cary Sublette noted in 2001, “The consensus among outside seismic experts is that the yields of most Indian tests are overstated.” After analysing the claims and counterclaims on the data on the hydrogen bomb test, he concluded that what India carried out on May 11, 1998, was “a partially successful thermonuclear test”. This is what former Indian nuclear weapons designer P.K. Iyengar reiterates in an accompanying article.
Santhanam’s key point is that the thermonuclear or hydrogen bomb in May 1998 was of low yield and not sufficient to meet the country’s strategic objectives. Since India needs to conduct more tests, it should not rush to sign the CTBT.
Foreign ministry sources are playing cool. They say there is no hurry to ink the CTBT and maintain India’s stand on the treaty has been consistent since 1995. New Delhi was a consistent votary of the CTBT, but did not sign it as it eventually emerged because it was not explicitly linked to the goal of nuclear disarmament.
But they are not reckoning with the changed environment in the US. The last time around in 1999, the treaty was ambushed by the Republican party and voted down in the US Senate. Later, the Bush administration refused to move the treaty for ratification. This time, the Obama administration, which has a super-majority in the Senate, is determined to push it through. Once that happens, India will be confronted with the same dilemma it faced prior to the Pokhran-II tests of 1998.
The consequences of an Indian test will also torpedo the Indo-US nuclear deal. The key to the deal is the waiver to the US Atomic Energy Act, which barred nuclear trade between the US and countries that are not signatories to the nuclear non-proliferation treaty (NPT). But this waiver only covers Indian nuclear tests until May 13, 1998. Any new test means the ban on nuclear trade will resume.
It is true that article 14 of the Indo-US 123 Agreement is nuanced. According to section 2 of the article, the parties would consult each other before termination and would “take into account” whether the reasons for seeking termination were related to “a party’s serious concern about a changed security environment or as a response to a similar action by other states, which could impact national security”. In other words, a Chinese, Pakistani or even US nuclear test preceding an Indian one would not necessarily lead to the termination of the agreement.
But this is one clause of the agreement that New Delhi would rather not put to test.

This article and the one below appeared in Mail Today August 28, 2009

By Max Martin in Bangalore

Former Atomic Energy Commission chairman Dr P K Iyengar has re-confirmed the claim of K Santhanam that the hydrogen bomb that was tested in 1998 was a failure.

On Thursday, he advocated fresh tests to ensure a credible deterrence in a worsening regional security context, but criticised the government for forfeiting India’s “sovereignty to test” by signing the civilian nuclear treaty with the US.

Speaking to Mail Today, Iyengar said that there has been no certification of the thermonuclear device blasted in 1998 though the govenrment claimed that it – along with other blasts –was a success. “The signature of the nuclear blasts recorded worldwide did not suggest a thermonuclear explosion,” he said.

Reacting to Tuesday’s statement by Santhanam, who had coordinated the nuclear weapons programme during Pokharan II, Iyengar wondered why such an admission came 11 years later.

“I have always been saying that the test was not successful. But the government claimed otherwise,” Iyegar said. “But why is he doing it now? Maybe he is breaking down under the burden. Old age can change people,” he said in a telephonic interview from Mumbai.

The veteran scientists said three parties have to agree to the efficacy of a weapon – the Atomic Energy Commission, the Prime Minister’s Office and along with that the National Security Agency and the armed forces. “But I have not seen any such statement,” he said.

In the current regional context, with the China having thermonuclear device and threats elesewhere, India’s credibe deterrance should include a similar weapon, Iyengar said. China tested the Hydrogen bomb in 1967 – after the USA (1952) and the USSR (1953) and the UK (1957).

But it is not likely that India has it, Iyengar suggested.

In a recent technical paper, Iyengar has given details of the tests . On May 11, 1998, India conducted simultaneously three nuclear explosions underground. “One was of very low yield, less than a kiloton and did not matter for the estimation of the yield. The two larger explosions, it was claimed one was of an improved fission bomb and the other was a thermonuclear device,” Iyengar wrote in a recent paper.

“The improved fission bomb could have at a minimum yielded 10 Kilotons. The total yield of these two together was estimated by international arrays to be of the order of 30 Kilotons whereas the Indian estimate was about 43 kilotons,” he claimed in briefing paper. “Granting that the Indian estimate is correct the thermonuclear device could have yielded only 43 minus 10 i.e. roughly 33 kilotons.”

Reportedly the thermonuclear device consisted of a boosted fission bomb to trigger a secondary, which was the true thermonuclear device. While it is not known what the yield of the boosted fission could be, experts claim that we can boost the fission trigger upto a factor of 10.

Based on that Iyengar argued that the total yield of 33 kilotons, which includes the boosted fission, can only account for a few kilotons for the secondary, or the real blast. “A thermonuclear device using the secondary is meant to be detonated when you want the yield to be several hundred kilotons going upto several megatons,” Iyengar noted.

While the simultaneous triggering of both the devices make the seismic signals overlap and may not get an independent evaluation of the yield of each. “Thus an uncertainty in the estimation of the yield of the thermonuclear device was introduced and has been debated in the international circles,” Iyengar concluded.

Tests are anyway needed to ensure that the weapon is useable for the armed forces, the senior scientists said. “But we have gone ahead and signed the civilian nuclear deal with the USA. And we have lost our sovereign right to test,” he said. “No Congress government – under Indira Gandhi or Rajiv Gandhi – would have ever done it.”

Iyengar, who was vocal against India entering into a civilain nuclear agreement with the USA and opposes signing of the Nuclear Non-Proliferin Treaty (NPT) says techology is essential for self defence. “Tipu Sultan lost his battle against the British because they had better arms. Any country could be invaded.”

Question mark over India’s nuclear test of 1998

Shocking revelation by K Santhanam, chief coordinator of Pokhran-II N-tests

K. SANTHANAM, the Defence Research and Development Organisation official who coordinated India’s nuclear weapons programme during the Pokhran nuclear tests in 1998, has thrown a bombshell.
He has declared that the first and most powerful of the three tests conducted on May 11 that year – a thermonuclear or hydrogen bomb – was a “fizzle.”


This is the first time that a top-ranked figure, directly associated with the nuclear weapons programme, has acknowledged the test had not been as successful as was trumpeted at the time.
Prime Minister Atal Bihari Vajpayee himself had acknowledged at the time that India had tested a"big" bomb among the five tests it had conducted on May 11 and 13. This was later confirmed by Department of Atomic Energy (DAE) Chief R. Chidambaram who had said that the bomb's yield was 45 kilotonnes (45,000 tonnes of conventional explosive).
Santhanam made the remarks at a semi-public seminar on the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty at the Institute of Defence Studies and Analyses on Tuesday that followed off-the-record Chatham House rules (where the identity of the speaker is not revealed, although what he or she said can be freely quoted).
However, after reports of his remarks appeared in a section of the media, he said on Wednesday that his recollection of his statements was slightly more nuanced. His view was that India should not sign the CTBT and that it needed to conduct more thermonuclear tests.
“There is no country in the world,” he emphasised, “which managed to get its thermonuclear weapon right in just one test.” He said that he had also pointed to the fact that western seismic experts had doubted India’s claim that the three simultaneous tests on May 11 had a combined explosives yield of 60 kt.
The Santhanam revelation could have major reverberations in the country’s security policy. The Indo-US nuclear deal, for instance, rests upon the assumption that India will not test again.
It is also likely to make it difficult for the Manmohan Singh government to sign the CTBT, an issue that has gained considerable salience in the Obama administration’s non-proliferation policy.
The doyen of nuclear weapons scientists, P.K. Iyengar, who had retired by the time the Pokhran tests were conducted, made a similar statement in scientific language in a newspaper article in 2000. He noted that “the secondary (fusion) device burnt only partially, perhaps less than 10 per cent”.
Thermonuclear weapons are much more powerful than atomic weapons and they work in two stages: a normal plutonium implosion device (primary) acts as a trigger to set off a fusion or thermonuclear process (secondary) that releases a vast amount of energy. Thus while the fission bombs that destroyed Hiroshima, or the type that India tested in Pokhran-I in 1974 had an explosive yield of 12-15 kt, thermonuclear or hydrogen bombs can be anywhere from 200 kt to a megaton.
Santhanam’s doubts about the hydrogen bomb after the Pokhran tests were first featured, on an unattributable basis, in security analyst Bharat Karnad’s book India’s Nuclear Policy (2008) where he pointed out that “a senior DRDO official involved in the testing” had, some six months after the tests, “recommended resumption of testing to the government because he was convinced that the test of the hydrogen bomb was inadequate”.
Karnad, a professor at the Centre for Policy Research, felt that the Indian need to test again “is less a matter of opinion than of fact.”
In his view, Santhanam’s “extremely courageous stand” had struck a fatal blow at the foundation of the Indo-US nuclear deal “predicated on India’s never testing again and at any accommodationist policies the Manmohan Singh regime may be considering vis-a-vis the CTBT and the Fissile Material Cutoff Treaty”.



At a press conference following the test in May 1998, DAE chief Chidambaram claimed that they had deliberately kept the secondary of the thermonuclear Shakti-I explosion low so as not to damage a nearby village. But this claim was met with scepticism.
The first doubts on the test were cast by western seismic experts who questioned the 6o kt total yield for the three tests of May 11. US intelligence sources had also raised questions about whether India’s claim of testing a “thermonuclear device” actually amounted to a hydrogen bomb. They believed that it could have been a “boosted” fission device.
Scientists from the Bhabha Atomic Research Centre in Mumbai insisted all along that all the tests, including the hydrogen bomb or thermonuclear test, had been successful. They followed this up by publishing a series of papers arguing that the yields were in accordance with the design objectives.
Two papers by S.K. Sikka and DAE chief R. Chidambaram had debunked the western seismic analyses. In various issues of the BARC Newsletter in 1999, scientists had provided radio-chemical analysis backing up the official claims that the yields were as expected.
Santhanam’s revelation is likely to be like a bucket of cold water on the security establishment in the country.
India claims that it is second to none as a military power. It is building a nuclear triad — basing nuclear weapons on land, air and sea — just like the US, China and Russia.
But the lack of a weapon of adequate explosive yield undermines Indian claims of possessing world-class strategic capability and damages its nuclear force posture.
Asked why Santhanam might have decided to go public now, Karnad said that it was his belief that “as a nuclear scientist who has always dealt in physical certainties, try as he might Santhanam could not reconcile the physical facts of deficiencies in the design of the thermonuclear device evidenced in the test results with the profession of satisfaction by the government with the same results.”
He said that for reasons best known to him, the DAE chief Chidambaram had claimed success, a position that had undermined the credibility of India’s deterrent posture and brought into question the reliability of the unproven thermonuclear armaments in the country’s arsenal.
This was the lead story in Mail Today on August 27, 2009

Crime without punishment

Crime flourishes because there is no deterrent, moral or physical

On Tuesday, a bunch of students burnt several compartments of the Shramjeevi Express in Patna. The reason? They were not being allowed to break the law i.e. travel ticketless on the train. Such clashes are common all across the north where bands of young hooligans effectively hijack trains for their own use, assaulting and intimidating any passenger who dares to protest. Another firebrand and a rabble-rouser-turned-minister, railways minister Mamata Banerjee reportedly told a news agency that nothing could be done about such incidents and that “these things happen almost daily”.
When I was young, there was a story, almost certainly apocryphal, about a dacoit about to be hanged. When his last visitor, his mother, entered the condemned cell, she expected tears and remorse. Instead, she was confronted by an angry son who blamed her for his fate. “Remember, when I first stole a needle?” the son asked. “If you had only slapped me then, I would not be here,” he said. Instead, unchastised, the young boy moved up the cycle of criminality to the point where he reached the death cell.

Wrongdoing
When you torch a train because you cannot travel ticketless as a student, where do you land up? Most likely, in criminal gangs, or Maoist dalams, or unemployed, because the kind of education you have picked up makes you unemployable anyway.
But what does this say of the system that systematically condones the arson and violence? And sends the message that mob crime is exempt from the force of the law. It only encourages the kind of organised mob rule that the Maoist movement represents.


Why speak of unspeakable Bihar? Look at New Delhi, the capital of the republic. For two days, auto-rickshaw drivers held the city to ransom. They beat up any of their colleagues who dared to break the strike, and the authorities stood by. What was their demand? That they be exempt from any law even as they cheat passengers and pollute the air.
Clearly, there is little correlation between crime and punishment in India. What we are down to is that it is the exception not the rule that crime is punished. You would have to be remarkably unlucky to be caught for murder, or if caught, convicted, given the shoddy investigation procedure and the possibility of being able to bribe forensic expert or the investigating officer.
And even if convicted, your punishment hardly fits the crime. Across the country, we have a lot of bleeding hearts for the murderers, rapists, extortionists and common criminals. They are not their associates or families, as could be expected, but our lawmakers — MPs, MLAs, ministers and babus. Every year, in the name of our sacred Independence Day, Republic Day or Mahatma Gandhi’s birthday, they remit, or even commute the sentence of these worthies. Their hearts bleed for these criminals, while not a thought is spared for the victims who may be alive, scarred and traumatised for life.
The most recent example of this comes from Andhra Pradesh. Last week, only a Supreme Court injunction prevented the state government led by Y.S.R. Reddy from releasing 1,000 convicts who were serving life sentences which could only have been for the most heinous crimes.
But there have been instances in Haryana and Punjab as well. No doubt some among the 1,000 planned to be released were close to those in power. Or is it simply that the dead no longer have a vote, while the living, even criminals have one?
How many of the ministers and legislators would like to employ the people they have just released from the jail? Or live next to them?
In the Indian culture it would seem, the fault of the crime lies on the victim (his or her karma), so why blame the poor perpetrator? He is merely an instrument of forces beyond his/her control. So, after a token genuflection to the universally accepted dictum that wrongdoing
must be punished, our philosophers find a way to relieve the criminal of his karmic penalty.
Crime must have consequences. There must be action — a scolding for a child who steals a pencil, a fine for someone who violates traffic laws, a term of imprisonment for a hooligan who burns a train or bus, a longer one for a rapist, and death for someone who intentionally takes another’s life.
If there are no consequences, social order as we know it will dissolve. The compact between the state and the individual rests on the assumption that the state alone has the monopoly of violence, which it exercises for the purpose of collective self-defence, or in the act of dispensing justice. But if individuals and mobs get away with murder, the system begins to crumble.

Justification
Crime wears the cloak of justification in some places — people denied justice for the Gujarat massacre, the destitute deprived of their rights in the jungles of Jharkhand and Chhattisgarh, the brother whose father is assaulted or whose sister is disgraced —take recourse to violence. In most cases, however, it is simply criminal and even nihilistic.
People undertake acts of unspeakable brutality without the slightest flutter in their conscience. What is worse, the relatives, brothers, fathers and mothers of rapists, murderers, terrorists actually step out to justify the acts of their wards — as distinct from enabling them to get the best legal defence which ought to be the right of everyone, including a terrorist. There is a moral black hole there which is systematically sucking the country in. Like actual black holes, it is difficult to detect, but its event horizon can be determined by the enormous pendency of cases that ensures that justice is delayed, and hence denied.

Ethics
Democracy must rest on the ethical foundations. Nation-building, to use a somewhat grandiose term, requires a life-long effort by the constituent members of a nation. The primary responsibility to uphold the system lies with the political class, and the main custodians of this system must be the police and the administration. This is not something that can be privatised.
But if you look at the problem of crime and punishment in India from any angle, you will see that these very pillars of the system are the ones that are the problem. Is there any hope for this system then? Difficult to say, but the only process that will work is that of self-correction. The revolutionary way of the Maoists is a non-starter.
The political class needs to draw the right lessons from the spread of organised mass-violence that Naxalism represents. In essence, it is a response to the failure of our system in not being able to provide employment, development and, above all, justice.
The dispensation of justice — which in terms of law and order means ensuring punishment befitting a crime — must become completely blind to status, caste, numbers, or politics, if this country’s de facto oligarchic system is to evolve to a truly democratic one.

The Four Horsemen of Apocalypse stalk India

What a difference one year makes. A year ago, the country was in a celebratory mood. The United Progressive Alliance had just won a trust vote in Parliament and the Indo-US nuclear deal signifying a major shift in the approach of world powers to India had more-or-less been clinched.
But today as the PM addresses the nation, he cannot but help noticing the four horses of apocalypse hovering in the horizon named Pestilence, Famine, War and Death.

(Drawing by R. Prasad)

Though this year has begun spectacularly well for the UPA, which won the elections hands down— and for Prime Minister Manmohan Singh who returned to office politically stronger— the country’s ambiance has not been that sanguine. Uncertainty and doubt remain over the macro-economic situation and now famine and disease stalk the land.
The PM has made it clear that the government will fight them with all the authority at his command and, no doubt, today he will repeat that message from the ramparts of the Red Fort. He will promise food for all, education, healthcare, employment and everything that a patronage-oriented political party has to offer.
But he could well be speaking against the wind. Last year he had money to throw at the problem, this year he is likely to have only goodwill. According to the Economic Survey 2007-2008, revenue receipts of the government had increased from Rs 230,834 crores in 2002-03 to Rs 486,422 in 2007-2008. But in one short year, the 6th Pay Commission outgoings, the farm loan waiver and the economic stimulus packages have rapidly depleted government finances.
Beyond money and promises there are sound reasons to believe that the government would find the going tough in handling the challenges that have emerged anyway. The problems with the delivery system are obvious. A corrupt bureaucracy will prevent the money you throw at the problems from reaching the intended beneficiaries. An even more corrupt police force will connive in the process rather than root it out. The politician, will of course, preside over this system and gain from it.
But this system of governance, if you can call it that, has reached the limit of its already limited efficacy. More money, more bureaucrats, more schemes, will produce not produce the needed outcome, which is presumably the winning of more elections. The major reason for this is that the four horsemen could change the state of play.

Famine
In a country where 60 per cent of the crop is grown on non-irrigated land, monsoon is a game-changer, and this failed monsoon could well be one as well. 177 of the 600 or so districts of the country have been declared drought hit. Though India is operating with record production and procurement of food-grains in 2007 and 2008, it has to contend with a deficit of some six million hectares in paddy alone. These figures will not convey the individual tragedies that will accompany a failed monsoon—hunger, unemployment, displacement and disease, layered over already existing deprivation and destitution.
There is another problem as well—ossified thinking. Even in normal years, half the children under the age of five are malnourished. What will happen in a “famine” year? Food for the poor, as our political elites see it, is getting rice to them at a subsidised rate. There is never talk of dal, vegetables or milk. You will be surprised to know that the consumption of dal, the only source of protein for the poor has actually declined in India. It averaged 65 grams per person per day in the 1951-1955 period but in the last five years the figure is just 33 grams. True, the production of milk, eggs and fish has shot up exponentially, but these are things many of our countrymen never get to see, let alone eat.
Our politicians need to aim not at just getting rice into the hands of the poor, but to ensure all-round nourishment which will enable the young to reach their full mental and physical potential. This requires dal, vegetables, fruits and milk products. No government in India seems to be talking about these.
Naysayers will argue that we can reach that point only after we can ensure enough rice for the hungry. But that is mechanical thinking. India is the largest producer of milk in the world and it has the world’s largest bovine population. What it needs is imagination and capable hands at the helm to boost production even further. The same could be said about the humble dal which has become so elusive these days.

Pestilence
Along with the failed monsoon we have a pandemic. The H1N1 or Swine flu has so far created more panic than death. But it has the potential of being as virulent as the Great Flu — the pandemic that began in March 1918 and lasted till 1920. An estimated 500 million people —some one-third of the world’s population at the time — were affected and anywhere between 50-100 million died, an estimated 17 million in India alone. The current epidemic is in its early form. It is not yet as virulent as even some other kinds of flu. But all that could change. But it has already brought out the infirmity of our public health system which is more likely to encourage the spread of the disease. There are reports of masks being hoarded, fake Tamiflu being sold and even of policemen using it to con money from the unwary.
The government has, of course, promised to fight the good fight against the flu. But does it have the weapons to do so? The ongoing H1N1 pandemic has revealed the inadequacies of our public health system in a city like New Delhi. What about the rest of the country. If we do not have a system that can fight infant diarrhea that takes the lives of hundreds of thousands of young children, where will we have the ability to fight a flu pandemic? You may find government dispensaries, but they will be minus the most rudimentary facility, and even doctors. The H1N1, for example attacks the lungs, making breathing difficult and for this ventilators are needed, and perhaps oxygen.
India’s public health care system is a scandal. It has been underfunded to the point where 85 per cent of the health care delivered is by the private sector, which means that the really poor are completely outside the healthcare net. The flu epidemic is an opportunity for the government to get back into health care in one form or the other.
Like hunger, war is endemic in India. But like the other plagues, chronic insurgencies, too, are showing signs of changing qualitatively and becoming malignant diseases.

War
A more dangerous situation is emerging—the steady hardening of China’s attitude towards India. There are no easy explanations as to why this is happening. But despite two decades of steady dialogue and agreements, the situation today is again causing disquiet. Perhaps it has to do with an assertive China, or maybe some inner-party struggle in Beijing, but the fact of the matter is that we have an unresolved boundary with China and a disputed boundary can always offer a cassus belli.
Coincidentally or otherwise, the UPA’s second term could be dramatically different from its first, not necessarily for the better. The Congress party and its government needs to understand that some of the key problems of the country — hunger, disease, illiteracy and war — have developed a resistance to the usual medicine they have been given.
Just as dumping Tamiflu will not check H1N1, nor will the current patronage politics of the Congress party. The need of the hour is to modernise our government, but for that we first need a sophisticated understanding of our problems.
This article appeared in Mail Today August 15, 2009

The Russians also deserve our thanks

Pity the poor Russians. They have not been given any thanks for helping us build our nuclear propelled submarine. The media, out of ignorance or jingoist pride ignored them, the Department of Atomic Energy and Defence Research and Development Organisation officials are still waxing pompously about their respective “achievements”, shamelessly stealing credit for designing not just the sub, but its reactor and the Sagarika submarine launched missile as well. The Indian Navy, in tune with the motto of Silent Service, has stayed silent.
Two weeks ago, when US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton visited India, the media fell over itself in trying to outdo each other. There were affirmations and promises galore on how our “strategic” relationship will flourish. But the core outcomes were a technology safeguards agreement and the end-user monitoring agreement, whose essential purpose was to lay down conditions on which the US would sell us defence and aerospace materials and equipment.

Friends
The Russians also have conditionalities, but most relate to intellectual property rights, not what use India will put to a piece of equipment. Considering we are talking about weapons or instruments of war, isn’t it somewhat peculiar that there is need to prove you are using it in a “legitimate” fashion? Let us get a sense of proportion here.
No other country, most certainly not the United States, would sell us an aircraft carrier. As for helping us design a boomer, that would be simply unthinkable. But the Russians have done both. And not only have they not got any thanks for it, the Comptroller & Auditor General has jumped on them for overcharging India for the refit of a disused aircraft carrier, Gorshkov. In our righteous indignation we fail to see that we are dealing with a seller’s market here.


The Gorshkov facts are somewhat complex. The large carrier, commissioned in 1987, was damaged by fire and lay in the shipyard for years before India decided to acquire it in 1996. The best of inspections — and there were several — failed to gauge the level of refurbishment needed. Indeed, when the Russians reached the engines, which were expected to be in good conditions, they found two of the six needed to be replaced and four were in need of considerable repair. They did the needful without presenting a bill.
As for the Arihant, without Russian designs, drawings, technical assistance for the hull and the nuclear reactor, we would not have been able to build the ATV.
Srikumar Banerjee, Director Bhabha Atomic Research Centre, told newsmen at Kalpakkam on Sunday that “we have used the Russians as consultants” though he insisted that “everything is totally indigenous.” He is understating the truth by several magnitudes, and don’t let the DAE tell you that the NPT or the Nuclear Suppliers Group occasions the subterfuge. A loophole in the NPT permits marine reactor export, and as for the NSG, we have applied the “grandfather” clause since the Russians have been helping us on the reactor from the 1980s, before they became members of the NSG.

Americans
That the US does not provide its cutting edge technology to everyone and anyone is understandable, as is the fact that it puts conditions on its use. Accepting conditions to import such technology would be a necessary evil. What is inexplicable is that India is being forced to accept conditionalities for importing equipment — some of it dated — that the Americans are desperate to sell.
We accepted conditionalities on a 36-year old amphibious transport ship USS Trenton (now INS Jalashwa) which restricts us from deploying the ship in offensive operations. Why we have a ship in our naval fleet that cannot be used for offensive operations is not clear.
The Trenton conditions became known through the C&AG which had occasion to examine and criticise this purchase in 2006. What could the conditions be were India to agree to buy American-made aircraft —the F-16 or the FA-18 — to meet its needs for as many as 126 medium multi-role combat aircraft? Could we be denied the right to use them against Pakistan? General conditions such that you can only use them for “legitimate self-defence” are always open to interpretation.
The issue is not that the Americans are bad and Russians are good. But that India needs to carefully balance its relationships keeping its self-interest at the fore. It also needs to clearly understand that when it comes to strategic programmes, the US and India are simply not on the same page.
The US may have agreed to a nuclear deal as part of their grand strategy. But it was also an acknowledgment that the forty year old non-proliferation treaty was not working. It was punishing countries like India, whose non-proliferation record is excellent, and benefiting China whose is simply abominable, and was also being used by signatories like Iran and North Korea to camouflage their nuclear weapons programmes.
Russia has been India’s tried and tested associate — let’s not use the cliched “friend.” This relationship has been forged in the crucible of regional politics and is based on enlightened self- interest. USSR/Russia backed India on Jammu & Kashmir and still does, and has backed almost every regional initiative India has undertaken, including the liberation of Bangladesh.



Self-interest persuaded the two to stand by the Northern Alliance against the Taliban in the dark days of the mid-1990s. It was fickle Uncle Sam, in its temporary self-interest, which created the mujahideen in the 1980s, and is now fighting them and wants the world to do the same. It is entirely possible that come 2011, the US declares victory and pulls out of Afghanistan leaving us high and dry.
India and Russia were united, too, in understanding the Chinese threat. For the US, this is a matter of the moment. Sometimes Beijing is up on a pedestal where it can do no wrong, even when it gives away nuclear weapons designs. At other times it is an adversary that Washington does not know how to handle.
As the world’s only real superpower, the US has the luxury of acting on whim, and it does. But it also drags its “friends” and allies into the bar when it goes on a bender, as it did with the mujahideen in the 1980s, and more recently in Iraq. Its action in knocking out the Taliban in 2001, and then taking the dangerous detour to Iraq, have only strengthened the Taliban and expanded their influence into Pakistan.

Balance
In some measure this is a result of the American political process which, over the years, has displayed a dangerous level of partisanship. Political attitudes between the right and the left have hardened and there seems to be little meeting ground between them. Some of this ideological conflict is spilling over into world affairs with negative consequences.
Despite the end of the Cold War, the world has remained a dangerous place. Though buffeted by its backwash, India has managed to play a role as a major stabilising force in the South Asian region. The record will show that Russia has been a helpful factor; this is not just today, when it has retreated from its Cold War frontline positions. The US has made significant efforts to befriend India, but there is considerable historical baggage and mistrust between us that we must first overcome.
The Indian grand strategy has to be to get extra-regional powers to see things our way, rather than the other way around. Unfortunately, New Delhi seems to be determined to play second fiddle to Washington DC.
Perhaps we are dazzled by the American attention. But even so, let’s not forget the Russians, who have, by loyally tailing us in the region, enhanced our security and provided us the much needed room for maneuver.
This article appeared in Mail Today August 6, 2009

Move on Pakistan was imprudent and untimely

There is no need to beat about the bush. The India-Pakistan joint statement at Sharm el-Sheikh was both imprudent and untimely. It was based on assumptions that are simply not valid and the Prime Minister’s call to the nation to take a leap of faith with him on the matter of dealing with Pakistan is simply not borne out by the facts on the ground, as yet.
Just how untimely was evident from the fact that two days before the statement, the Pakistan Punjab province government withdrew its appeal at the Lahore High Court against the release of Lashkar-e-Tayyeba leader Hafiz Muhammad Saeed. It said that it had detained Saeed at the instance of the federal government in the first place, but Islamabad had failed to back up the provincial government’s case with appropriate evidence and so it had no alternative. The federal government is, of course, headed by Yousaf Raza Gilani, one of the parties to the joint statement at Sharm el-Sheikh two days later.



Balochistan
The imprudence comes in relation to Balochistan. Pakistan suffers from a chronic neurosis in relation to being “equal” to India. What New Delhi does, Islamabad must repeat. Nawaz Sharif termed the Chagai nuclear tests of 1998 in terms of making the score even. It has its more amusing side. In 1993, I was a participant in an international seminar organised by the Indian Navy in New Delhi. Lo and behold, in 1994, I was invited to participate in a similar function, but bigger and more lavish, in Islamabad, courtesy the Pakistan Navy. By some quirk of fate, I happened to be the only Indian participant, and naturally had to face a barrage from Pakistani participants wanting to do all kinds of nasty things to India.
More seriously, Pakistan’s pillorying at the bar of international opinion over its support and succour to terrorist groups has been galling its elite. For some time now it has sought to build up an entirely fictitious case of Indian involvement in terrorist strikes in Pakistan. If you read certain sections of the Pakistani press, you will come away with the impression that not only is India involved in converting Islamabad’s backyard, Afghanistan, into an Indian protectorate, but that the events in Swat, Waziristan, Balochistan, and even the attacks in Lahore are the work of India’s sinister spy agency, the R&AW.
Everything that has been said in defence of the Baloch reference only serves to confirm the belief that it was based on some extraordinarily naïve assumptions. The PM himself has said that it was based on the belief that India has nothing to hide. Finance Minister Pranab Mukherjee has made the peculiar claim that Balochistan’s was a “unilateral” reference by Pakistan. That is really the point: how can there be a unilateral reference in a “joint” statement?
But its net effect has been to add fuel to the fire of Pakistani paranoia. In many Pakistani minds, India has now come at the same level as them as a state sponsor of terrorism. Pakistani leaders darkly hint that they have the goods on India; one entirely false report was planted in Pakistan’s respected daily Dawn.

Blowback
But, as US envoy Richard Holbrooke testified on Thursday, Islamabad has not provided a shred of evidence to back its case. In April, he told the Islamabad-based Geo News Channel — whose principal anchor Hamid Mir claimed in an article in an Indian newspaper that Pakistan has captured three Indian equivalents of Ajmal Kasabs in Balochistan — that “if the Indians were supporting those miscreants that would be extraordinarily bad [and] really dangerous. But they’re not. There is no evidence at all that the Indians are supporting the miscreants in the Federally Administered Tribal Areas or North West Frontier Province or Waziristan. None.”
He also debunked the Pakistani belief that India was running a major consulate in Kandahar from where it conducted covert operations against Pakistan. Holbrooke pointed out that there were just about six or eight persons in the facility.
The argument that Pakistan displayed its goodwill by providing for the first time a dossier detailing the Lashkar-e-Tayyeba’s involvement in the Mumbai attack is a tenuous one. India has been giving Islamabad dossiers for the past two decades and little has come out of them. What makes the situation different was that Ajmal Amir Kasab is in Indian custody, and that New Delhi has been smart enough to get the US Federal Bureau of Investigation into the picture. The dossier was no favour to us, it was just about the barest minimum of cooperation that could be expected.
But this is just the first step. New Delhi needed to have waited for a second step — the arrest and charging of Hafiz Saeed, the mastermind of the attack.
There is much truth in Ramchandra Guha’s assertion that inexperience had much to do with the problem. Unlike Nehru, Narasimha Rao and Vajpayee, who specialised in foreign affairs, Singh is, as everyone knows, an economist. His instincts are good, he wants peace with Pakistan. But you cannot pose the issue in the “when did you stop beating your wife” kind of a format where anyone questioning the current approach of the government is seen as some kind of a dangerous warmonger.
We all want peace with Pakistan, but we also think that the Sharm el-Sheikh maneuver was injudicious and can actually worsen the situation. The Balochistan reference may harden opinions in Pakistan against India, and that in turn could push the Indian attitudes towards a harder line on Pakistan.

Assessments
Another factor, besides inexperience, is the proximity of the analyst to the subject. The PM has been personally driving Indian policy towards Islamabad in the past four years. His problem is that he is too close to the subject to realise that it has changed since he last dealt with it in a substantive manner in 2007. That was the era of Pervez Musharraf who as Army chief and head of government could make promises, or break them, and you knew who was responsible. Today nothing can be said with any certainty. As it is, the situation in Pakistan combines the features of a sectarian conflict overlayed by a civil war and a class war.
The biggest infirmity in the government’s case on Shram el Sheikh is that it is dealing with men of straw. India has neither the ability nor the responsibility of converting them into real men by creating an illusion that we are both victims of terrorism of a common origin.
Neither is that a desirable policy line. While Islamabad does need help to pull out of its free fall, Indian help is always extremely problematic when it comes to Pakistan.
Dr Singh as Prime Minister is the man responsible for making our Pakistan policy. He has decided to take a massive gamble and has very clearly laid out his own political capital in this enterprise, not Sonia’s. It would be perverse to wish that he fails, but it would be foolish not to outline the risks involved to the investors, which means the Indian people.
The article appeared in Mail Today August 1, 2009