NEW DELHI, 3 June 2004 — By calling for a “common nuclear doctrine” with Pakistan and China, India is adopting a non-aggressive tone toward two neighbors with which it has had uneasy ties, analysts said yesterday.
But they said the new Indian government’s proposal was still in its initial stages and it would take time to flesh out any three-way dialogue among Asia’s declared nuclear states.
Natwar Singh, the foreign minister in India’s new left-leaning government, said Tuesday that India and Pakistan “are now nuclear powers and so is China.”
“The three countries should get together and work out a common nuclear doctrine. This is a matter that needs to be discussed at the highest level,” Singh said.
The remarks are a change in tone from the early statements of the previous government led by the Hindu nationalist Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP). The last administration called China the top threat that justified India’s controversial 1998 decision to test nuclear weapons and responded angrily when the United States urged a role for Beijing in easing tensions with Pakistan.
But a year ago, then Prime Minister Atal Behari Vajpayee visited China and the world’s two most populous countries agreed to step up dialogue to resolve their border disputes, which triggered a war in 1962.
“Both the BJP and the new Congress government pursue a policy that those Americans who would hope to use India as a strategic balance to China would find troublesome,” said Stephen Cohen, an expert on South Asian military affairs at the Brookings Institution in Washington.
Singh, a 73-year-old career diplomat and stalwart of the ruling Congress party, also said Tuesday that India and Pakistan would hold discussions on June 19-20 on easing nuclear tensions. In Pakistan, Foreign Ministry spokesman Masood Khan told AFP that Singh’s statement on a three-way nuclear dialogue “looks like a new and innovative proposal which needs further and deeper examination.”
Riffat Hussain, head of the strategic studies department at Quaid-e-Azam University in Islamabad, said Singh seemed to suggest that Pakistan was an equal player in the “trilateral nuclear equation.”
“It is significant because so far the Indians have been arguing that their security concerns go beyond Pakistan and they have refused the effort by the international community to have India, Pakistan and China sit together and talked about nuclear issues,” Hussain said.
But while India has historically been concerned about the nuclear arsenal of China, the opposite does not seem to be the case, with Beijing’s nuclear strategies built around Russia and the United States.
The Indian proposal “will help in China’s efforts to improve relations between India and Pakistan,” said David Zweig, a China watcher at the Hong Kong University of Science and Technology. “China wants to become a regional player, and it’s a region where it can have some influence,” he said.
