DID President Zardari goof up on his coun-try’s nuclear doctrine when he assured Indian opinion-makers through a satellite address in November 2008 (three days before the Mumbai terror attack) that he believed in a no-first-strike nuclear doctrine?
Or was it a shrewd ploy to signal a national debate, albeit a tardy one so far, to wrest the initiative from Pakistan’s nuclear hawks to deal with an existential question his country faces?
India’s second-term Vice President Hamid Ansari has done one better this week, and probably more self-assuredly, by frontally critiquing Delhi’s nuclear clout. If left unchallenged by the deep state Mr Ansari could be the first Indian leader since Gandhi to have questioned not only the morality of nuclear weapons but their efficacy too.
Mr Zardari upset his nuclear establishment when he told the Indians: “I am against nuclear warfare altogether. Leave alone use, I don’t appreciate it.” Did this mean Pakistan would not make first use of nuclear weapons? “Most definitely,” he replied.
Mr Ansari was addressing a far younger audience of university students on Tuesday when he quoted from Mahatma Gandhi to make his case against nuclear weapons. After the destruction of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, Gandhi wrote: “The moral to be legitimately drawn from the supreme tragedy of the bomb is that it will not be destroyed by counter bombs.”
Indira Gandhi, presiding over the seventh Non-Aligned Movement summit in 1983, reminded the world: “The hood of the cobra is spread. Humankind watches in frozen fear, hoping against hope that it will not strike. Never before has the earth faced so much death and destruction.”
And though India conducted its first nuclear test on her watch, the NAM summit she headed boldly demanded that the Indian Ocean be made a nuclear weapons-free zone, which was probably a potshot at American bases in Diego Garcia but not without also pre-empting India’s own options for the future.
A lucid criticism of Delhi’s current nuclear posture came with Mr Ansari’s suggestion that the nation was perhaps less and certainly not more secure after inducting nuclear weapons.
“We cannot allow the present and succeeding generations to remain content with our having become a state with nuclear weapons, but recognise that notwithstanding this immense scientific, technological and strategic achievement, an India withnuclear weapons remains as vulnerable as a world with nuclear weapons to error, accident or deliberate decision plunging all of us — belligerent nations or innocent bystanders — into unimagined disaster.”
The former diplomat didn’t stop there. He urged the audience to join a much-needed mass awareness campaign, not an easy task in a country listing sharply towards jingoism. “There is an easy public acceptance of the need to keep nuclear weapons forIndia’s protection, but almost no awareness in the public mind of the specific consequences of a nuclear conflict.”
So was he, like Mr Zardari, going against his government’s official stance and disowning nuclear weapons as untrustworthy in providing actual security? Mr Ansari left little doubt if there was any. He asked his listeners “to imbibe the message, propagate it, enhance support for it and thereby lend a hand in the quest for a safer future”. This objective, he said defiantly, “goes beyond governmental policies and may even require some calibrated coaxing”.
Self-criticism is not known to be an Indian virtue nor is it there in great abundance in Pakistan. The rare and possibly momentary capacity for introspection displayed by Messrs Zardari and Ansari can yet find traction with an apparently uninterested people though only if the media could be stirred from their stupor.
A rare opportunity will come as early as next week for the two countries to discard their self-inflicted aloofness from an entire comity of nations that frowns on nuclear weapons, as they themselves once did. India and Pakistan could be on world centre-stage in Tehran, not to discuss their routine eight or nine points to peace or to fix a headline-catching cross-border visit.
This they should do in their respective capitals, if for no other reason than for the simple fact that their citizens need to be allowed to grasp the bigger global picture, of which they are a part though often without knowing it.
One of the features of the main global story of recent months — Iran — is that it is packed with examples of brazen hypocrisy.
Among the scandals that Iran has listed against a world that berates its quest for nuclear technology is the patronage showered on India. The country never signed the NPT and went against its own vaunted morality to build nuclear weapons.
Grudging global acceptance of Pakistan’s weapons status too sticks out like a sore thumb when the world throws a fit at the mere thought of Tehran acquiring that capability, though not necessarily the weapons.
It seems India and Pakistan, armed with the tiny sliver of contriteness that shines through the president’s and the vice president’s remarks, are better placed to influence Tehran today to help it shun its rigidity on what it portrays as technologicalself-sufficiency.
It is in this realm, unless Israel does something silly to spoil the occasion, that the Tehran summit promises to be a landmark event for the world. By taking the gavel from Egypt to assume the leadership of the largest cluster of countries after the UNGeneral Assembly, Iran is likely to generate two hugely positive outcomes for an otherwise very worried world. By assuming the presidency of the Non-Aligned Movement Iran will put itself under a moral obligation to lead by example, not unlike thebehavioural change the difficult schoolboy undergoes when he is made class prefect.
That is good news for all concerned. Iran is known for its daring political somersaults in the post-revolution years, mostly for its own good. Remember how Ayatollah Khomeini decided to “swallow the poison” of truce with Iraq after eight years of an absurdly lacerating war? Iran’s clergy holds nearly all the aces to avert a worse catastrophe today.
India and Pakistan are better placed than ever before, thanks to Messrs Zardari’s and Ansari’s point of departure, to join hands with Venezuela, Cuba and South Africa, among the countries that Iran trusts, to urgently correct a potentially fatal clerical error.
The writer is Dawn’s correspondent in Delhi.
jawednaqvi@gmail.com