NEW DELHI, 13 October 2003 — Prime Minister Atal Behari Vajpayee yesterday said India had not triggered an arms race, as alleged by Pakistan, with the recent deal with Israel to buy the sophisticated Phalcon airborne early warning radar systems.
“Whatever steps India has been taking, it is for self-defense. We are not in any arms race with anybody. Those who are themselves acquiring weapons are blaming us,” Vajpayee told reporters here. India and Israel last Friday signed an estimated billion-dollar deal for three Phalcon radar systems. The following day, nuclear arch-rival Pakistan said it would spare no effort to maintain military balance in the region.
“We’ll exploit all our resources to maintain this balance for which we should not be blamed because this arms race has been launched by the Indians,” Pakistan Foreign Minister Khurshid Mahmud Kasuri said.
The South Asian neighbors launched peace overtures in April but the process appears to have become bogged down in differences over their long-running dispute over the Himalayan state of Kashmir, split between the two and claimed by both.
India, China Turn Traditional Rivalry Into Space Race
India is pushing ahead with its ambitious space program while casting an envious eye at neighboring China, which is on the verge of becoming the third nation to put a man into orbit, analysts say.
The two Asian giants have taken their traditional rivalry into space; India, which fought a border war with China in 1962, may be behind in terms of space technology, but is eager to catch up.
Just a few days after China said in January that it would send a human into orbit in the second half of 2003, Indian Prime Minister Vajpayee publicly urged his country’s scientists to work toward sending a man to the moon. Last month the Indian Cabinet approved a proposal by space authorities to send an unmanned mission to the moon by 2008.
Critics have slammed the Indian mission, called Chandrayan-I, which will cost 3.86 billion rupees ($83 million). They argue the project is unrealistic, adding the cash-strapped nation should use its funds for social welfare and restrict its space program to satellite launches.
But the space frontier has touched a nerve here — the country deeply mourned the loss of Indian-born US citizen Kalpana Chawla when she died in the Columbia disaster in February. She was regarded as a hero by many Indians and after her death Vajpayee announced that the country’s newest weather satellite would be renamed the Kalpana-1.
