AFTER PRIME MINISTER NARENDRA MODI CAME TO POWER IN 2014, a more authoritarian atmosphere enveloped India and several activist organizations like Prayas found it more difficult to operate. Some Western multinationals who were donating withdrew funding because of government pressure. These charities and nongovernmental organizations are a key element of the developing world because they fill vacuums created by an inadequate state usually for health care, education, and other basic needs. In India, with its corruption and inadequate regulation, they had undoubtedly got out of hand. At a count in 2009, India had a staggering 3.3 million registered—one for every four hundred people. Of those, forty-three thousand were registered as getting money from foreign donors. Yet despite this, India’s development figures remained more comparable to Uganda than to its neighbors in Southeast Asia.
Modi planned to change this. To succeed, reform would be needed within government institutions, the police, the judiciary, and health care so they could move in to do the work. And if that were to succeed, he needed not the general muddle through that encapsulated India’s development but a strong hand with a clear vision.
A populist leader governing with a large mandate, Modi headed the Bharatiya Janata Party whose roots lay in religious fundamentalism. For many years he had been denied a visa to the United States, which believed that, as chief minister of Gujarat, he had contributed to lethal Hindu-Muslim riots in 2002 during which more than a thousand people—mostly Muslims—died, with twenty thousand homes and businesses destroyed and up to 150,000 people made homeless. The Indian Supreme Court completely cleared Modi only in 2014, a month before he took office.
India has long suffered communal tension, particularly between Hindus and Muslims, and the election of Modi has exposed more of this fault line. “I do not know when it happened but gradually over the years people around me began to identify me as Muslim,” writes Saeed Naqvi in his book Being the Other: The Muslim in India. Naqvi describes as a charade the belief that all was well with India’s secularism and politics. “As an Indian Muslim who loved his country and was fully invested in it, I felt betrayed,” he notes.56
Neither of India’s two main political parties has succeeded in stepping away from its narrow base. The Indian National Congress has been overshadowed by the ruling dynasty of the first prime minister, Jawaharlal Nehru whose daughter, grandson, granddaughter-in-law, and great-grandson have been party leaders. Drained of ideas and paralyzed by corruption, Congress lost heavily to Modi in 2014.
Founded in the 1950s and claiming to represent all Indians, Modi’s Bharatiya Janata Party has been defined over the decades by its support for Hindu nationalism, emboldening grassroots violence against Muslims that has included killings for violating the sacred status of cows and punishing Hindu-Muslim couples for falling in love. In March 2017 Modi put down a marker seen to endorse such behavior by naming a hard-line Hindu priest, Yogi Adityanath, as chief minister of Uttar Pradesh, India’s most populous state with more than two hundred million people, 20 percent of whom are Muslim. Adityanath has a number of criminal charges registered against him, including attempted murder. He also controlled a youth organization accused of instigating anti-Muslim violence.
Little of this bodes well for India’s future role in global affairs. Since its 1947 independence, the country has mostly been governed either by a party locked in a family dynasty or one defined by religious extremism. Against China’s disciplined determination, India—with its corruption, poverty, weak government, human rights abuse, insurgencies, and poor infrastructure—stands little chance. Despite strong arguments in Washington, DC, advocating the building up of the US-India Strategic Partnership, India’s character speaks of it not being able to take on a substantive leadership role either within the region or globally.
Island building in the South China Sea may have been the visible lightning rod, but, as America discovered in the 1970s, South Asia cannot be ignored even though this is where clarity blurs, loyalty shifts, and things get messy and riddled with contradictions.
Through one Asian prism, the strengthening alliance between India, Japan, and the United States upholds international law and democratic values. Therefore, China’s solid alliance with India’s enemy, Pakistan, is a threat to Western interests. Through another, China’s influence in Pakistan has stabilized a nearly failed state torn apart by Islamic extremism and military rule. The collapse of Pakistan would unleash for Islamist terrorism that domino effect so feared with Soviet communism in the 1970s. It would create a swath of unbroken territory—Syria, Iraq, Iran, Afghanistan, Pakistan—only stopping at India which itself is wracked with insurgencies, the most enduring being with the Pakistan-sponsored Islamic unrest in Jammu and Kashmir.
India is the world’s third largest Muslim country after Indonesia and Pakistan, with more than 175 million Muslims comprising 15 percent of the population. As a group, Indian Muslims suffer the country’s lowest living standards. Would it not be more prudent, an argument goes, for the United States to welcome, even encourage, a stronger Sino-Pakistan alliance? But if so, where else in the world should China’s influence be emboldened for the cause of stability and, if there are many more such locations, what is the point of picking a fight with Beijing over the South China Sea?
Tensions within South Asia now stem from the same causes as those in the 1970s. The difference now is that both India and Pakistan have nuclear weapons.
In another world, in Europe or East Asia, the highway that runs between India’s Amritsar and Pakistan’s Lahore would be flowing with traffic alongside a parallel high-speed rail link. But, the India-Pakistan border crossing at Wagah along the Grand Trunk Road is more famous for its daily ceremony when, in full parade dress, troops from India’s Border Security Force and the Pakistan Rangers perform elaborate circus-like dance maneuvers, kicking their boots high, inches from the others’ faces, on either side of a thick white line painted across the road. The gates are shut at night and traffic is a trickle. The Wagah border is sold as a tourist attraction. In reality, it is evidence that the threat of war is never far away. Yet a confrontation now in South Asia would directly involve five nuclear powers: China, India, Pakistan, Russia, and the United States.
India conducted its first nuclear weapons test in 1974 using plutonium taken from the Canadian-built reactor at the Bhaba Atomic Research Center, ten miles south of Mumbai. It followed three wars with Pakistan, a war with China, and a standoff with the United States in 1971 over Bangladesh. The UN immediately put it under international sanctions, and the test prompted seven governments, including the Soviet Union and the United States, to form the Nuclear Suppliers Group aimed at preventing nuclear proliferation. Twenty-four years later, in May 1998, less than two months after a Bharatiya Janata Party government came to power, India carried out a series of five tests at the same site. Two weeks after that, Pakistan conducted its first tests and South Asia’s nuclear arms race began. While developing its nuclear weapons program, Pakistan had also been breaking all international protocols by selling weapons technology to rogue states around the world.
INDIA’S DECISION TO forge its own nuclear weapons path and its refusal to sign the Treaty on the Non-Proliferation of Nuclear Weapons left it an outcast for more than thirty years. But after 9/11, faced with a new and unpredictable political landscape, the United States moved to change this. It needed India on its side for two reasons, one tacit and one public. First, America was beginning to understand the challenge of China and its alliance with Pakistan. An India with nuclear muscle would be a good counterbalance, and the policy was being crafted long before the South China Sea had become a live issue. Second, India was a democracy, and the administration of President George W. Bush needed to talk up shared values with the developing world as it attempted to install its style of democracy in Afghanistan and Iraq.
“We think it is in America’s interests for India to become a great global power,” Robert Blackwill, the US ambassador to India, told me at the time. “This is a great democracy. It has our values. Our long-term relationship with India is very stabilizing for Asia.”
The United States, therefore, needed to diminish India’s image as a rogue nuclear state and prioritize its role as a democracy. To achieve this goal, it had to bend the rules on who could and could not possess nuclear weapons. India agreed, but with conditions. Nuclear sanctions had to be dropped, and it would not sign the Non-Proliferation Treaty. It would also continue to develop its nuclear weapons under its own control, although it agreed to refrain from future nuclear tests.
America’s somersault regarding its own policy on nuclear proliferation punched a hole in all that it had been preaching before, but it worked. In October 2008, despite opposition among elected representatives of both countries, a deal was signed. Strategically, it made sense. But it also delivered an unfortunate side-effect in that other governments feeling insecure began to eye the nuclear weapons option. After all, if India could go nuclear and get away with it, what would stop other countries following in its path?
Pakistan’s development of nuclear weapons was carried out in a far more dangerous and irresponsible way. Its prompt was after its loss in 1971 of East Pakistan, which became Bangladesh. While India intervened on the side of Bangladesh, the Pakistani president at the time, Zulfikar Ali Bhutto, declared it a matter of the nation’s survival that his country should be armed with the bomb. Pakistan ended up not only with its own nuclear weapons, but it also became the world’s greatest nuclear proliferator. The man who gave it the bomb was Pakistani scientist and con man A. Q. Khan, who went on to sell nuclear weapons material essentially to whichever government was willing to buy. The Khan story highlights why the frequent attempts by the United States to make a reliable ally out of Pakistan have mostly failed.
Khan was the founder of Pakistan’s nuclear research center at Kahuta, thirty miles east of the military cantonment city of Rawalpindi. He had contacts and protection that allowed him to steal and buy the wherewithal for Pakistan to build nuclear weapons. He began in October 1974, six months after India’s first nuclear test. While working for a Netherlands company Khan stole classified details on centrifuge technology that enriched uranium. As he gathered more and more nuclear material, he peddled his know-how and information through the global nuclear black market. The Pakistani government allowed Khan to continue until 2003, when US and British intelligence presented evidence that Khan was selling to Iran, Libya, North Korea, and Syria. Without Khan’s proliferation, there may have been far fewer of the nuclear threats that have defined so much of US foreign policy in recent years. Dozens of countries hankered after the bomb. Khan sold a few of them the means to begin developing it. But it wasn’t Khan alone; India believes that China helped Pakistan with fissile material, missile production facilities, and uranium enrichment equipment.
Khan’s international nuclear black market network collapsed, and he was put under house arrest in 2004, but also pardoned by then military leader Pervez Musharraf. When Musharraf was forced to step down in 2008, Khan claimed that he had not been working alone but with the highest levels of the Pakistani government. In his 2008 book Goodbye Shahzadi: A Political Biography of Benazir Bhutto, journalist Shyam Bhatia recounts that, before she was assassinated, former Pakistan prime minister Benazir Bhutto told him how she had smuggled data on uranium enrichment into North Korea.57
Khan was released from house arrest in 2009 and remained a revered national figure, the Father of the Bomb. Any suggestion that Pakistan should surrender its nuclear weapons has since then been met with ridicule.
From being the world’s biggest nuclear proliferator, Pakistan became a key exporter of terrorism. In the post-9/11 period, its own security services were implicated, and the country itself suffered routine terrorist attacks, taking it to a near state of civil war. Pakistan also gave sanctuary to America’s most wanted enemy, Osama bin Laden, who was living in a compound in the hill town of Abbottabad, home to the Pakistan Military Academy. After bin Laden’s discovery and killing, American support faded and Pakistan tilted even more toward China.
When it comes to reviewing military alliances, India, Pakistan, and Thailand share common ground. The United States has a reputation for turning on and off the arms supply tap according to political winds, whereas China and Russia continue to supply for decade upon decade without interruption.
Until 2010, China and the United States supplied Pakistan’s defense industry at equal levels, just under 40 percent each. By 2017 China was responsible for more than 60 percent of the weapons imports and America had dropped to 19 percent.58
Despite much debate, India has so far maintained that it has a no-first-use policy regarding nuclear weapons, implying that it would risk a strike on one of its cities before responding. There is, however, a lack of clarity with suggestions that this only applies to nonnuclear weapons states or that it does not include the first use of tactical battlefield weapons.59 Pakistan has made clear that it would initiate a first strike because in an all-out conventional war its forces would be vastly outnumbered by India’s. Its nuclear arsenal, however, may well be bigger than India’s.
The Stockholm International Peace Research Institute estimated in 2016 that Pakistan has 110 to 130 warheads compared to India’s 100 to 120, and that both countries are expanding their weapon arsenals and improving their delivery mechanisms.60 Pakistan, with four plutonium reactors against India’s one, has the capacity to build more bombs at a faster rate—twenty a year to India’s five.61 One report estimates that by 2025 Pakistan could have as many as 350 warheads, which would make it the third biggest nuclear arsenal after Russia and the United States, which have about 7,000 each. France has 300, China 260, and Britain 215.62 There are just under 15,400 nuclear warheads in the world shared among nine governments: China, France, India, Israel, North Korea, Pakistan, Russia, the United Kingdom, and the United States. More than 90 percent are owned by Russia and the United States, the only two countries that are actually cutting their arsenals. The rest are keeping what they have or making more.
Only Britain, France, Russia, and the United States have weapons deployed with warheads on missiles or on bases ready to be operational. India and Pakistan keep their warheads, with the trigger and the delivery mechanism in separate locations, meaning they would take several hours to prepare for launch.
One of India’s apparent storage places lies amid the lush tropical greenery of the Bhaba Atomic Research Center (BARC) compound near Mumbai. I was invited there in 2003 when India was beginning its rapprochement with the United States and the government was keen to show that it was a responsible nuclear player. There are two nuclear reactors, one British built, one Canadian, flanked by sea and mountains, underneath which huge laboratories have been hewn. Five thousand nuclear scientists and ten thousand technicians work there. It was from here that India gathered the means to challenge the world order that mandated that only the five big nations on the winning side in the Second World War should possess nuclear weapons. They became the five permanent members of the UN Security Council, the ultimate arbiter of international law, thus leaving India with its sense of vulnerability.
The BARC director, B. Bhattacharjee, an expert in gas centrifuge technology for uranium enrichment, made no secret that he was heading up a nuclear weapons site when I met with him. “The government asks at any time, ‘Can you help us?’ Our answer should be ‘yes,’” he said. “That’s from any sector—either the navy or the army or the air force. We are always prepared to meet any needs for the country.”
“And the weapons,” I asked. “They are here, now?”
“Yes. The nuclear weapons are designed here, manufactured here, and we keep them here.”
The nuclear bomb itself is known as the pit. It would have to be transferred from this nuclear weapons facility or others around the country to an aircraft, missile, or submarine for delivery. The process to prepare a weapon for launch would take from six to eight hours. There would then be another eleven minutes for it to impact on Pakistan. If India adhered to its no-first-use policy and absorbed a first strike, sacrificing one city, it would hit back with everything it had. Within twenty-four hours cities in both countries would be in ruins.