From crisis to crisis

Fearful Symmetry: India-Pakistan Crisis in the Shadow of Nuclear Weapons by Sumit Ganguly and Devin Hagerty; Oxford University Press (New Delhi); pages 223, Rs.495.

EVER since United States President Bill Clinton described Jammu and Kashmir as "the most dangerous place on earth", much Western dialogue on South Asia has focussed on the prospect of a nuclear war between India and Pakistan. Irrational politicians, crazed clerics, religious fundamentalists, and plain and simple accidents: all these have featured in a wide array of apocalyptic narratives, both scholarly and popular.

In Fearful Symmetry, Sumit Ganguly and Devin Hagerty stand both this narrative and conventional wisdom about it on its head. There have, they note, been six military crisis of varying intensity since both India and Pakistan acquired some form of nuclear capability in the mid- to late-1980s. Yet, there has been just one war - and even the 1999 conflict in Kargil well fell short of becoming a generalised India-Pakistan conflagration as it would most likely have done in earlier decades. Why sense has prevailed, despite the expectations of many in the West and in these countries, is the subject of Ganguly and Hagerty's inquiry.

Fearful Symmetry lucidly surveys the six crises, seeking to unravel the factors that underlay their eventual resolution. Two crises, those of 1984 and May 1998, arose from Pakistani perceptions that India was, perhaps with the aid of Israel, planning to attack its nuclear weapons infrastructure. Three others emerged from Pakistan's pursuit of sub-conventional warfare against India. Operation Brasstacks, the massive exercise of 1987, carried out against the backdrop of escalating violence in Punjab, sought among other things to deter Pakistan from its support of Khalistan terrorists. In 1999 and 2001-2002, the proximate cause of the conflict was Pakistan's backing of armed groups seeking to evict India from Jammu and Kashmir.

All these crises are examined, in this theoretically-rich and empirically-nuanced work, against three fundamental propositions: that India and Pakistan, despite having good reasons to go to war, were deterred from doing so by pressure from the U.S. because of the lack of overwhelming conventional superiority; and because of the fear of nuclear escalation. All these three factors operated, they argue, in differing degrees and with various outcomes, in the six crises. While they carefully refrain from offering a mono-causal explanation, Ganguly and Hagerty conclude that "the nuclear-deterrence proposition best explains the absence of major wars in the region over the last 20 years, especially during the crisis beginning with 1990".

Given the assumption in much Western literature that Third World nuclear powers may accept levels of risk their first-world counterparts would not countenance, Ganguly and Hagerty's work will hopefully reinvigorate theoretical debate on this subject. It ought also to spark off fresh debate on some of India's recent military history. Some in India, for example, are likely to dispute their suggestion that "Pakistan's nascent nuclear weapons capabilities had little discernible impact on the outcome of crisis" of 1987. While it could be argued that India ought not to have been deterred, or, alternately, to make the demonstrably true assertion that it did not enjoy the kind of overwhelming conventional superiority that would have justified going to war, there is considerable material that suggests the nuclear factor weighed heavily on the minds of Indian politicians even then.

Similarly, it may just turn out to have been excessively harsh, in the light of recent experience, to suggest that Operation Parakram was only a "pyrrhic victory" for India. While it is indisputable that the "large-scale military mobilisation cost India dearly in wear and tear on its military equipment", and that Operation Parakram both "failed to achieve a genuine resolution of the crisis" and "undermined the morale of the armed forces", counter-effects of the crisis are starting to manifest themselves. Notably, Pakistan-backed jehadist violence in Kashmir has declined steadily since 2002, which may at least in part be the consequence of Pakistan's realisation that even a crisis-like atmosphere imposes disproportionate costs on its economy.

Either of these possibilities do not, however, undermine the argument laid out in Fearful Symmetry: that India and Pakistan have been rational actors, who have, in however fitful and bumbling a fashion, understood both the opportunities and costs presented by their decisions to go nuclear. As Ganguly and Hagerty point out in their concluding chapter, there are any number of things that could still go wrong, not the least of them being the prospect of an accidental nuclear war.

While the two global adversaries who waged the Cold War had time and resources to develop a variety of protections against such a conflagration, they came near disaster more than once. India and Pakistan, by contrast, are just a few years into their learning curve.

Nonetheless, for policy-makers in the U.S., Fearful Symmetry raises a stark question: If "a country protected by two vast oceans and the world's most sophisticated conventional nuclear technologies still requires the security insurance provided by nuclear weapons, why should India and Pakistan - with their more vulnerable geopolitical positions and technological inferiority - be expected to give up their nuclear aspirations"? "It is mainly Washington's attitude towards nuclear weapons", they argue, "not India's or Pakistan's, that promotes the continuing legitimacy of nuclear weapons as an international currency of power".

If the U.S. is indeed serious about making the world a safer place to live in, someone in Washington D.C. will have to at least start attempting to answer this question.