HVK Archives: Dissembling on duplicity
Dissembling on duplicity - The Hindustan Times
N.C. Menon on US response to nuclear tests
()
May 25, 1998
Title: Dissembling on duplicity
Author: N.C. Menon on US response to nuclear tests
Publication: The Hindustan Times
Date: May 25, 1998
In the cruellest of all political hoaxes, those who matter in the
Clinton administration have proved that they do not possess the
stuff they are accusing India ad nauseum of not having-honesty.
How else does one explain State Department spokesman James
Rubin's firing a broadside at India for engaging "in a campaign
of duplicity" with regard to its nuclear programme? The charge
came on May 14, three days after India set off its series of
nuclear tests. There was apparently no sense of deception until
then. The new stick used to beat India was clearly an
afterthought.
Rubin referred to a score of meetings between Indian and American
delegations at which, he claimed, India had never mentioned the
possibility of imminent tests, and had, in fact, talked about a
several-month review of its nuclear option. When the charges
began to be thrown about with wild abandon, New Delhi was forced
to give up its polite, diplomatic silence to refute the
allegations: India had never given any such assurances. On the
contrary, it had been pointed out that the right to exercise the
nuclear option was not negotiable. And that had been the policy
of successive govermnents. In any case, why on earth should India
tell Big Brother about its impending plans? There are hundreds of
American officials here whose primary task is to conceal
strategic secrets. Should all of them be accused of indulging in
deception? Or is it the arrogant stance of the Clinton
administration that what is sauce for the American gander is not
sauce for the Indian goose? Besides, where was the deception? On
May 4, a week before the tests, K. C. Pant, Chairman of India's
National Security Council task force, made an unequivocal
statement that India should have a credible nuclear deterrence.
Was that not clear enough? Or did Rubin want Pant to spell out
the latitude and longitude and the exact moment of the planned
test series? Give us a break.
Well, perhaps it is futile to blame Rubin. He is, after all, an
ardent follower of his master's voice-in this case, the voice of
Secretary of State Madeleine Albright who is known to be a hawk
in any situation where anyone looks America in the eye. Mrs
Albright plainly subscribes to the Dullesian view that "if you
are not with us, you are against us." However, in deference to
the proclivities of her boss in the Oval Office, Secretary
Albright can be very selective in her outrage. When intelligence
reports started coming in from America's own agents that China
was helping Pakistan in its nuclear weaponisation programme,
neither the President nor Mrs Albright displayed undue concern.
What was of primary importance was China's massive market. And
the strategy of choice was to "engage" with Beijing in an attempt
to make it a global partner. Every important American official is
aware that Islamabad and Beijing are in nexus against New Delhi.
But for the Clinton administration. the issue has been like sex
in the Victorian era: Everyone knows about it, but no one talks
about it.
The vehemence bordering on vitriol so evident in the official US
reaction to India's test series is clearly born out of a variety
of frustrations, at India being too big and too populous to be
pushed around; at the mistaken notion that the tests by India
will have a domino effect, and last, but not the least, the
frustration that America's much-wonted intelligence and
surveillance systems were caught with their pants embarrassingly
down.
There is thus an attempt to justify the intelligence failure by
claiming that India had deliberately tried to deceive. Having
started down that road, the Clinton administration has had to
continue its spin. An attempt has been made to convince an
unsuspecting American public that the tests have raised a great
deal of tension in the region, and that India and Pakistan might
be at each other's throats at any moment. The fact is that most
of the fallout from India's tests seems to be not in New Delhi or
Islamabad, but in Washington. The US feels that anything India
does has to fit into the India-Pakistan mould, that India's
strategic requirements should be limited by the South Asian
matrix. Washington conveniently forgets that, like China, India
is also a massive country, representing one-sixth of humanity.
What is missing generally in American foreign policy and
specifically in its nuclear policy is a sense of context. The
Clinton administration has become so excessively obsessed with
its lone superpower role that it has lost touch with the
political reality around the globe. In its response to India's
tests, the urgent and the expedient are driving out the important
and the desirable.
Meanwhile, the reaction in the US Congress, with a few honourable
exceptions, is even more infuriatingly obnoxious. This is
particularly true of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee
headed by Jesse Helms, whose hoary concepts of geopolitical
relationships have often embarrassed the administration, enraged
America's allies and jeopardised the very existence of the United
Nations. At committee hearings, Senators sitting on raised
platforms which they plainly misperceive as the Olympian heights,
look down and pronounce on their victim of the day-usually a
Third World nation which they exultingly excoriate with a
supercilious air of superiority. They often seem to burst at the
seams with their ludicrously inflated images of themselves, of
America, and of the power America has been given by divine writ
to run the rest of the world.
The honourable Senators do not seem to realise that global
nuclear policy, cobbled together and constantly repaired by the
US, is built on hypocrisy. America aided Britain in producing
nuclear weapons and acquiesced when France followed suit. It
looked conveniently the other way when Israel (still an
undeclared nuclear weapon State) put together an atomic arsenal.
When China exploded its own bomb, the US quietly co-opted Beijing
into the nuclear club. And now, having tasted sin, the US and the
other four nuclear powers (Russia, Britain France and China)
demand that everyone else pledge nuclear chastity. They are in no
position to cast a stone at India or anyone else.
How maturely has India reacted to the drumbeat of criticism in
the US, both natural and trumped up? It must be admitted that the
response by the Indian Embassy in Washington has been a lot more
impeccable than in New Delhi, where euphoria over the impressive
achievement led at times to jingoistic statements by those who
ought to know better. There were some initial apprehensions in
the Embassy about denial of access.
Fortunately, these turned out to be baseless; Ambassador Naresh
Chandra and second in command T. P. Srinivasan were able to meet
a whole host of members of Congress, at first to stem the tide of
anger and disquiet. and gradually to turn the tide of criticism
into better perspectives of India's compulsions.
Ambassador Chandra also participated in an unprecedented number
of television talk shows in which his reasoned arguments and air
of quiet dignity won many converts to India's side. At one of the
programmes, he was asked to react to a news story which painted.
a scenario in which Pakistan, worsted in conventional warfare,
resorts to a low level nuclear blast over Mumbai, resulting in
millions of deaths. "It makes good reading," the Ambassador
commented. "But like the dramatic radio programme by Orson Welles
based on H. G. Wells' tale of a Martian invasion, it is just
interesting fiction. "The Ambassador also pointed out that China
had been able to derive a great deal of advantage from the US
system that had been clamping down on India. The administration
also appeared to be blind to the fact that there was a large
segment of American public opinion which tended to view China as
a current and potential adversary. In fact, American public
opinion is definitely at variance with declared official policy.
Judging by the hundreds of telephone calls, taxes and E-mail
messages received at the Embassy, there was the recurrent theme
that a democratic America should support a democratic India
protecting itself against an axis between "red" China and a
militarised Pakistan.
A word must also be said about American media reaction to the
tests. It is a strange fact that the media here can be fiercely
independent about domestic issues, aggressively going after
everyone from the President down. But when it comes to US
differences with third world countries, the media invariably tag
along tamely with the official line. Almost without exception
there were references in all the newspapers to the "Hindu"
Government in India as the perpetrator of nuclear perfidy. That
was akin to talking about the "Catholic" administration of
Kennedy. The newsmen were obviously not aware of the fact that
several of India's Presidents have been Muslim, that several of
its top brass, senior journalists, film stars, popular singers
and musicians are Muslim. The reference to the Hindu Government
would have been taken as deliberately mischievous, but for the
known fact that it was spawned by sheer ignorance.
Meanwhile, the realisation is gradually sinking in here that
sanctions will not deter India from its nuclear path. Unlike
South Korea and Taiwan, which were brazenly arm-twisted by the US
on the nuclear issue, India had never been a US client. On the
contrary, India maintains far closer relations to other nuclear
powers such as Britain and Russia, with other European nations
like Germany, oppose economic retaliation. The US is also
beginning to realise that American firms will be the biggest
losers in any regimen of unilateral sanctions, as European
companies cheerfully pick up the extra business. Many analysts
have pointed out that even strategically, antagonising India is a
bad policy as it will damage relations with a nation that in the
coming years could act as an important counterweight to China.
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