Das

Article

Journal of Asian and African Studies45(2) 146–169

© The Author(s) 2010Reprints and permission: http://www. sagepub.co.uk/journalsPermission.nav

DOI: 10.1177/0021909609357778http://jas.sagepub.com

Corresponding author:Runa Das, Department of Political Science, University of Minnesota Duluth, 303 Cina Hall, 1123 University Drive, Duluth, MN 55812, USA.Email: [email protected]

State, Identity and Representations of Nuclear (In)Securities in India and Pakistan

Runa DasUniversity of Minnesota, Duluth, USA

AbstractA plethora of theoretical perspectives have explained India and Pakistan’s nuclearization. Such arguments, while partially correct, offer little that incorporates how the constitutive nature of states’ identities explain their perceptions of (in)securities and nuclear policy choices. In this article, I offer an interpretive analysis of India and Pakistan’s nuclear trajectory by exploring the representations of (and the connections between) their nationalist identities, perceptions of insecurities and nuclear policy choices. Following the critical constructivist premise, I argue that while India and Pakistan have justified their nuclear policies on the basis of certain geo-strategic (in)securities, the interpretation of what constitutes their national selves and (in)securities have been driven by their historical legacies, economic or developmental anxieties, and their political leaders’ (or states’) ideologies. Seen from this critical constructivist perspective, I particularly draw attention to a conjectural moment of South Asian politics, where, following India’s nuclear detonation under the BJP in May 1998, the nuclear (in)security discourses of India and Pakistan have drawn from cultural re-articulations of their nationalist identities and (in)securities to justify their nuclear policies. I conclude by suggesting the need to engage realism (i.e. the material realm) with critical constructivism (i.e. the interpretive realm) to comprehend cultural productions of identities and (in)securities in inter-state politics.

Keywordsidentity, insecurity, nuclearization, representations, South Asian politics

On 11 and 13 May 1998, India, under a coalition government led by the Hindu-Right Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), exploded five nuclear devices followed by Pakistan’s testing of five nuclear devices on 28 and 30 May 1998. These events marked the emergence of India and Pakistan as declared nuclear weapon states and started an era of South Asian nuclearization. The logic of pro-liferation in International Relations/Security Studies is based on the structural desire of states to acquire nuclear weapons. This argument flows from the precepts of realism where the search for national security privileges nuclear weapons as the ultimate source of security.

While national security is a global phenomenon it also has a time- and place-dependent rele-vance. The modular form of national security imported into Third World countries is a part of their

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post-colonial state-building projects which gives national security in these contexts a distinct form. In such contexts, the post-colonial states’ nationalist projects and national security converge around these states’ or their leaders’ ideologies of what constitutes their nationalist identities. The two, that is, nationalist identity and national security, are institutionalized in complementary ways such that this complementarity also constitutes a drive on the part of the post-colonial states to consolidate their nationalist identities as parts of their state-building projects. State power in this sense is directed towards ensuring the permanence of boundaries; establishing irrevocable differences between the inside and the outside; and sovereignty of what is within (Walker, 1993). Moreover, this process is endless: states’ boundaries are in flux, determined by their historical memories, and recreated con-stantly through representation. Given this complex task of defining a state’s identity, the concept of national security becomes handy for political leaders in legitimizing their states’ security policies.

In this article, I analyze India and Pakistan’s nuclear trajectory by exploring the representations of (and linkages between) their nationalist identities, perceptions of insecurities, and nuclear policy choices. In doing so, I argue that while India and Pakistan have justified their nuclear policies on the basis of certain geo-strategic (in)securities, the interpretation of what constitutes their national selves and (in)securities has been driven by their historical legacies, economic or developmental anxieties, and their political leaders’ (states’) ideologies.

I develop my argument on the basis of three premises (or hypotheses). First, unlike the conven-tional International Relations (IR) theories’ assumption that insecurity is given, I argue, following the critical constructivist framework (Weldes et al., 1999) that insecurity is socially/culturally con-structed (i.e. what is real is also a form of ideological representation). Second, unlike the conven-tional IR theories’ assumption that the state is an objective entity and distinct from its insecurity, I argue that the prevailing ideological and power relationships of decision-makers and the institu-tions into which they are organized, mostly the state, may interact to constitute a ‘field of knowl-edge’, whereby the insecurity (the Other) and that which it threatens (the Self) are mutually constituted (Weldes et al., 1999). These two premises lead to my third premise, that is, that one needs to follow a ‘how-possible’ approach rather than a problem-solving approach1 in analyzing security in international politics. This requires paying attention to the production of (in)security as discourses in international politics, that is, how states’ discourses of constructing the Self/Other as self-interested ‘ideological-cultural sites of representations’, enacted through ‘narratives, collec-tive memories, and imaginaries’ make security practices possible (Weldes et al., 1999:14).

Before elaborating my argument based on the above premises, I must clarify that, unlike post-colonial India’s identity as a state, within which has contested, with the coming of the BJP to power in 1998, secular-modernity and a Hindutva identity, the identity of post-colonial Pakistan has been that of an Islamic Republic. Furthermore, the legacy of partition has also enabled the post-indepen-dent political leaders of India and Pakistan to interweave political and religious/cultural factors in articulating their nationalist identities, which, reflective of these states’ boundary-making exer-cises, have projected their Other vis-à-vis their own nationalist identities and (in)securities. In this sense, both India and Pakistan have accepted the realist premise of international relations that require the mapping of a sovereign territorial space, which includes ‘feelings of (in)security … requiring a them–us … identity’ (Dijkink, 1996: 11). Following this logic, (in)securities from its Other have historically constituted India and Pakistan’s nation-making, although these insecurities from the Other were by nature political/military. In contrast, my paper points to a conjectural moment in South Asian politics, where, at the eve of May 1998, (in)security representations of India and Pakistan have drawn from cultural re-articulations of their nationalist identities and (in)securities to justify their nuclear policies. Comprehending this shift in India and Pakistan’s re-articulations of nuclear insecurities requires attention to a shifting (and mutually constituted)

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relationship between the representations of these states’ identities and their perceived (in)securities.

To explain this phenomenon, I pursue an interpretive analysis of the region’s nuclear trajectory. This approach is in line with Campbell’s (1992: 7) logic of interpretation, which acknowledges the incompleteness of considering real danger, and instead, concerns itself with ‘the manifest political consequences of adopting one mode of representation over another’. According to this logic of interpretation, real danger exists but neither the sources of danger nor the identity that it threatens (the state) are static. They keep changing according to the political/cultural milieu of the state, which, reflective of a state’s temporality and spatiality, develops certain discourses (or statements)2 that articulate notions of state identities, sources of (in)securities, and choices of nuclear policies. A key element of such discourse would also include the usage of modes of reasoning, which, drawing from a multiplicity of historical processes, may project a phenomenon to appear as natural, self-evident, and given. This logic of interpretation applied in the context of India and Pakistan’s nuclear phenomenon would imply exploring how a shifting relationship between the Indian and Pakistani states’ identities and their perceptions of (in)securities have drawn from realism (i.e. geo-strategic threats) and other subjective factors (such as historical legacies, post-partition history, religion, cul-ture, and political leaders’ ideologies) to explain India and Pakistan’s nuclear trajectory.

For this analysis, I have collected data by consulting the following primary documents: India and Pakistan’s Parliamentary Debates; foreign policy speeches by the countries’ political leaders; election manifestos, journals, newspapers, news magazines, and pamphlets of the countries’ ruling political parties/governments; and interviews with selected government and political party officials of India and Pakistan (although attaining governmental documents and interviews from Pakistan has been limited for security reasons).

The article is divided into the following parts. Part I introduces theoretical approaches to India and Pakistan’s nuclear proliferation. I show their contributions, limitations, and suggest how Campbell’s (1992) concept of ‘representations of danger’, which is appreciative of an interpretive realm, may explain South Asia’s nuclear trajectory. Part II introduces Campbell’s analysis of ‘rep-resentations of danger’ and links this analysis to the critical constructivist premise of the cultural construction of (in)securities (since both will be relevant in explaining India and Pakistan’s cultural discourses of nuclear (in)securities). Part III introduces India and Pakistan’s state formations in the context of post-partition politics. It then analyzes India’s nation-making in the context of secular-modernity (under the Congress Party) and Hindutva ideology (under the BJP) and how in this process the state has engaged in representational practices to define the Indian Self, its (in)securi-ties, and nuclear policy choices. Part IV explores the connections between the Pakistani state’s Islamic identity, its nuclear (in)securities, and nuclear policy choices, and argues that Pakistan’s nuclear (in)securities, mainly political in nature in the pre-1998 years, had become ‘cultural’ by the eve of May 1998. I conclude by suggesting the need to engage realism (i.e. the material realm) with critical constructivism (i.e. the interpretive realm) to comprehend the ‘cultural’ production of iden-tities and (in)securities in international politics.

Theoretical Approaches to India and Pakistan’s Nuclear ProliferationCommitted to structural realism, the mainstream scholars of Security Studies in India and Pakistan argue that the world comprises dangers that are given and it is the task of these states to preserve their realms from such dangers. In terms of this argument, the case of a nuclear India is primarily to counter the nuclear threats posed to it by China and Pakistan. It was contended that nuclear developments in China and Pakistan, Sino-Pakistani nuclear transactions, and a special American

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tilt towards Pakistan and China implying a tripartite coalition against India, justify India’s nuclear-ization (Ganguly, 2000; Rajagopalan 1999; Singh, 1998a). For Pakistan, the realist justifications for its nuclearization point mainly towards its regional adversary India (Ahmed, 2000; Cheema, 1992; Kapur, 1987). It is also significant to mention that these realist justifications of India and Pakistan’s nuclearization also draw on the portrayal of the Other as ‘inferior’, which enables their security practitioners to blend realism with India and Pakistan’s identity constructions to justify their nuclear programs. These realist explanations focusing on the material/observable realm, and valid to a certain extent, are, however, devoid of analyzing how issues of culture, ideology, and history may influence states’ security policies.

The Indian and the Pakistani governments have also used a nuclear-apartheid argument to jus-tify their nuclear detonation. This logic points to the inequalities in the distribution of global nuclear resources institutionalized through the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT) and the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty (CTBT) (Ahmed, 2000; Hasan, 1998; Malik, 1998; Singh, 1998b). However, some mixed sentiments exist in Pakistan’s perception of a global nuclear-apartheid. This is because although Pakistan’s governmental spokespersons have claimed that Pakistan would sign the NPT only if its discriminatory provisions are amended and Pakistan is included as a nuclear armed state, this perception of apartheid has been moderated since both the US and China (except for occasional US embargoes on Pakistan) have been strategic partners supplying Pakistan with sophisticated military and nuclear-capable technology (The News Monitoring Desk, 1999). The nuclear-apartheid argument overcomes the objective biases of the realists and provides some nor-mative understandings of India and Pakistan’s nuclearization, but missing from this analysis is how state identities and (in)securities discursively re-constituted may also explain India and Pakistan’s nuclear policies.

Scholars have also highlighted an identity-logic in explaining India and Pakistan’s nucleariza-tion. This analysis needs to be taken at two levels: first, paying attention to India and Pakistan’s identities as post-colonial states; and second, how the relations between secular-modernity, Hindutva identity, and an Islamic identity and their respective imaginations of nation-states have resulted in the glorification of nuclear science by India and Pakistan’s policy-makers and the pursuit of nulear-ization (Abraham, 1998; Nizamani, 2000; Prakash, 1999). Nizamani (2000), through an analysis of India and Pakistan’s nuclear rhetoric based on such identity-logic shows how the dominant nuclear security discourses pursued by these states have drawn significantly from the portrayal of the Other as ‘inferior’. An expression of this identity-making in the case of Pakistan has been equating all Indians with Hinduism (a religion which they consider inferior to Islam) and, for India, stereotyping Pakistan in contrast to its own democracy and secularism. The identity-logic is akin to my interpre-tive approach in explaining how the territorial criterion of nation-making has interacted with iden-tity-politics to explain India and Pakistan’s nuclear policies; however, it does not consider how cultural constructions of (in)securities may justify India and Pakistan’s nuclear policies.

Finally, the bureaucratic-institutional argument claims that a technological-scientific momentum culminated in India and Pakistan’s nuclear tests of 1998. This explanation suggests that key mem-bers of the Indian and Pakistani Atomic Energy Commissions have pursued surreptitious paths to the acquisition of nuclear weapons in a quest for technological mastery (Abraham, 1998; Nizamani, 2000). Although there is some merit to the argument, it is an incomplete explanation for India and Pakistan’s nuclearization. This is because even though members of the scientific community of any state can proffer technological choices, the ultimate decision to test rests in the hands of political authorities. Going nuclear ‘demands an act of political will’ (Ganguly, 2000: 37). Consequently, attributing India and Pakistan’s nuclear choices to technological imperatives overlooks the primacy of other subjective and ideological factors that may guide a country’s nuclear policies.


Given the relative silence in the preceding explanations in proffering an interpretive analysis, I proceed below to address India and Pakistan’s nuclear policy-making from an interpretive angle, that is, how the constitutive nature of states’ identities, which Campbell (1992:11) argues are ‘never finished entities’, may re-articulate (in)securities to support their security policies.

State, Identity, and Representations of Danger: A Critical Constructivist PerspectiveCampbell in his work Writing Security (1992) undertakes an analysis of how the boundaries of the United States’ identity is made secure by manifestly linking American identity to a ‘danger’ (be it the Amerindians, the Communists, or immigrants). In this representation of danger, threat does not merely exist, rather it emerges from certain context-bound judgments made by policy makers where a ‘historical mode of representation’, which self-consciously adopts an imagination of the Self and the Other, is adopted to define danger. In this dynamic of projecting the Self/Other, iden-tity becomes an inescapable dimension of being. It is not fixed by nature but constituted in relation to difference. As Campbell (1992: 8) argues, ‘Whether we are talking of “the body” or “the state”… the identity of each is performatively [read: discursively] constituted’. The constitution of a state’s identity is achieved through the construction of boundaries which serve to demarcate an ‘insider’ from an ‘outsider’, the ‘self’ from the ‘other’, and the ‘domestic’ from the ‘alien’. In this sense, a state, as a sovereign entity in world politics, has no ontological status; but is constituted by a dis-course that is ‘tenuously constituted in time … ’ (Campbell, 1992: 9). Thus, ‘states are never fin-ished entities; [since] the tension between the demands of identity and practices that constitute [it] can never be fully revealed’ (Campbell, 1992: 11).

In this context, one may raise the following questions. If there are no primary or stable identities then how can International Relations speak about concepts like state, war, security, danger, and sovereignty? After all, is not security determined by the presence of a sovereign state and war con-ducted in its name before an identifiable anarchy? Questioning the conventional assumption that international relations is in a state of anarchy, critical constructivists view (in)security as what Campbell (1992) calls ‘representations of danger’. For critical constructivists, insecurities rather than natural facts are social and cultural productions; ‘that is, in contrast to the received [conven-tional] view which treats the objects of insecurity and insecurities … as pre-given or natural … [critical constructivists] treat them as mutually constituted cultural and social constructions … ’ (Weldes et al., 1999: 10). Viewing culture ‘ … as encompassing [a] multiplicity of discourses or “codes of intelligibility” … through which meaning [identity] is produced’, critical constructivists view, ‘ … insecurities [as] cultural in the sense that they are produced in and out of “the context within which people give meanings to their actions and experiences and make sense of their lives” … ’ (Weldes et al., 1999: 1–2). Operating within frameworks of meanings, assumptions, and dis-tinctive social identities, the representation of the Other and what constitutes (in)securities are left open to the dynamics of interpretation, whereby relations of identity/Otherness may be produced, enforced, and reified in a conflicting manner. When construction of identity takes place through such inter-subjective processes of subscribing meanings, then this constructed identity itself becomes a source of insecurity. Thus, an Other is considered threatening not only by the actions that it takes but also by its very constitution through certain discourses or ‘codes of intelligibility’, thereby making (in)securities a cultural construction of danger.

Furthermore, countering the conventional security studies conception of the state as a natural fact, the critical constructivists view the state as a cultural entity. This means that by virtue of its identity the state becomes the self/subject that defines security and is simultaneously an object that

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faces threat from its constructed insecurity. This ‘discursive constitution and interpellation’ of the subject/object position of the state produces a set of state-centric discourses where state officials, leaders, or members of political parties ‘describe to themselves and others the world [as they understand it and] in which they live’ (Weldes et al., 1999: 14). In this sense, states play a privi-leged role in the production and re-production of reality. By authoritatively defining what they perceive as real, state-centric representations naturalize what are, in fact, self-interested construc-tions of (in)security such that both their constructed nature and sources of origin are obscured (Weldes et al., 1999). In this sense, states and their (in)securities also represent mutually constitu-tive entities.

The importance of the above perspectives is that they allow us to understand states as paradoxi-cal entities which do not possess pre-existing stable identities. As a consequence, a state is marked by an inherent tension in terms of adjusting to the ‘many axes of [its] nationalist identity’ to repre-sent an imagined community (Campbell, 1992: 11). Central to this process of constituting a state’s identity is its foreign policy and its construction of danger, which serve to consolidate the state’s identity. This is because if a state faces no dangers then it would implicate a movement via stasis and wither away. Accordingly, a state’s security policy by inscribing certain ‘codes of dangers’ helps to contain and reproduce the state’s boundaries, and guarantees for the state an impelling identity. In this sense, ‘the drive to fix a state’s identity from constant re-production of danger(s) cannot absolutely succeed’ (Campbell, 1992: 11). How the drive to ‘fix’ India and Pakistan’s nationalist identities is discursively undertaken by their political leaders by interpreting their national (in)securities on the basis of realpolitik, historical legacies, and developmental anxieties, is undertaken in the rest of my analysis.

State Formations in India and PakistanWith the geo-political visions of state formations3 that unfurled in the post-partition era, the idea of India and Pakistan’s shared security as envisaged by Jinnah in the mid-1940s became an illusory concept (Waheed-uz-Zaman, 1969); as was Jinnah’s vision of Pakistan as a secular, democratic state – which ended with his premature death in 1948. A newly born Pakistan (self-identified as an Islamic state) inherited a weak divided Muslim League leadership that neglected democratic gov-ernment and a military-bureaucratic apparatus that came to control the state’s decision-making. While the bureaucracy governed the state, security policy became the domain of the anti-Indian military.

In contrast, India’s civilizational moorings, heightened by its colonial experience, caused India’s post-independent leaders to circumscribe India’s geo-political vision as a strong, sovereign, secu-lar, democratic state – to be pursued through the principles of idealist nationalism. In pursuing this line of strategic thinking known as Nehruvianism, the dominant mode of international relations, that is realpolitik balancing, was forsaken by India in favor of non-alignment. India’s faith in Panchsheel (peaceful co-existence) was a reflection of this ideal. Concomitant with this view of national security through peace was Nehru’s benevolent attitude towards non-Hindus, especially Muslims in India and his reiteration that ‘it was for the Hindus to make the Muslims in India feel at home and not see themselves as second-class citizens’ (Parthasarathi, 1987: 8). This aspect of his perception symbolized the secular ideology of sarvadharma samabhava (equal respect for all reli-gions), which for Nehru, unlike the Hindu nationalist BJP, was an attribute of the modern Indian state.

However, as Krishna (1996: 82) explains, geo-political visions go beyond the mere territorial mapping of a country’s boundary, and include ‘representational practices’, which have ‘in various


ways attempted to inscribe something called India [or, for that matter, Pakistan] with a content, history, meaning, and trajectory’. This is because the central attribute of nation formation in inter-national politics not only requires the existence of a particular configuration of territorial space, that is ‘territorially disjointed, mutually exclusive, and functionally similar to other sovereign states’, but also requires that this space be constantly ‘guarded, re-made, and re-secured’, by the production of an Other in the international system (Ruggie, 1993: 144). Seen through these com-plexities of boundary-making, the mapping of India and Pakistan’s geo-political visions (reflective of secular-modernity, Hindutva ideology, and an Islamic identity) have duly constituted the identi-ties of their national selves and in the process have also engaged in certain representational prac-tices to re-articulate their national (in)securities and nuclear policy choices.

In the next section, I analyze these representational aspects of India’s nation-making and nuclear policy choices. I offer this analysis in three phases: the Nehru years (1947–1962); the post-Nehru years (1962–1998); and the BJP years (1998–2004). I incorporate how the Indian state has simul-taneously drawn from realpolitik, historical legacies, developmental anxieties, and secular/cultural ideologies to shape India’s identity, (in)security, and nuclear policies.

Modernity, Insecurity, and Nuclear Energy: The Nehru Years (1947–62)While India was forging towards a modern state in terms of territorial integrity, it also debated the uses of atomic energy. Explained by Abraham (1998: 19), this pursuit of the atom should be seen in the context of India’s emerging identity as a modern state, that is, a state moving towards ‘a specific moment of [the] global condition of modernity’. If the project of modernity was at its best secular and committed to the application of science for the betterment of human condition, then India’s quest for atomic energy became a ‘new’ state ideology to epitomize India’s identity as a modern state.

Before going into that analysis, I digress briefly to recall the geo-strategic significance of China and Pakistan vis-à-vis India’s early quest for the atom. This is for two reasons: first, to assess if the Indian state’s identity perceived under the Nehruvian years as a secular-territorial entity, perceived China and Pakistan as a threat to the Indian state; and second, to explore how the representation of a Pakistani danger was articulated in the national security discourses of the Indian state (the repre-sentation of which, as I will argue, becomes ‘cultural’ under the BJP). One finds that although India did have some political disputes with China and Pakistan, neither of these assumed dimensions to warrant a nuclear project by India as defense against these states. Rather, one notices that Nehru took recourse to Panchsheel to settle differences with these states. The Sino-Indian border disputes of 1950, which Nehru saw as reflecting the ‘expansionist tendencies’ of the Chinese nation over Tibet, were dealt with by Nehru by recognizing Chinese control over Tibet (Manekar, 1968).

However, given the historical context of India and Pakistan’s partition, India’s political disputes with Pakistan4 were perceived by the Nehruvian Indian state as more critical. Yet, reflecting Rosenau et al.’s (1976) comments that policy makers’ ideological perceptions define a country’s foreign policy, one finds that Prime Minister Nehru’s strategic thinking, based on a secular inter-pretation of India’s nationalist identity, offered a proactive foreign policy towards Pakistan based on the following. First, in the aftermath of partition, it was time for India and Pakistan to deal with each other on the basis of respecting the territorial status quo; and second, their common sub-continental history and culture should draw India and Pakistan closer together. Accordingly, peace and good neighborly relations with Pakistan constituted India’s Pakistan policy under Nehru (Parthasarathi, 1987). Although one must agree that the historical legacy of partition did constitute Pakistan as an ‘Other’ to India (and vice versa), revealed in Constituent Assembly Debates of India

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(1947–1952) with regard to the ‘Recovery and Repatriation of Abducted Indian Women from Pakistan’, such ‘othering’ of India vis-à-vis Pakistan was political in nature. It did not invoke for Nehru a cultural re-writing of the India–Pakistan partition legacy to formulate India’s Pakistan policy. Rather, Nehru viewed India’s Pakistan policy as one ‘inherent in the past thinking of India’, that is, the ancient Hindu philosophy of tolerance (Nehru, 1988: 10). In his words:

the partition which gave rise to bitterness of feelings between India and Pakistan … has no ancient roots … Therefore, there was no reason why India should … champion … the animosities and past history … which has bred quarrels … between India and Pakistan. (Nehru 1961: 60, 83)

If the political disputes between India, Pakistan, and China were largely settled on the basis of idealist nationalism, then how can one situate the Indian state’s identity, its national (in)securities, and its pursuit of atomic power in these early post-independent years of Indian politics? I argue that, the ‘shroud of post-colonial modernity [that] defined the ambitions and fears of [its] … politi-cal class trying to come to terms with a global condition [of modernity] …’ (Abraham, 1998:19) constituted the (in)security dilemmas for the early Indian state. Before such dilemmas, the articula-tions of India’s nationalist identity and (in)security were structured around the acquisition of scien-tific power and the pursuit of atomic technology was justified in that context.

Nehru was not pro-nuclear. Yet, a developmentalist at heart, Nehru had the vision of India as a self-reliant and modern nation. To that extent, he did not dismiss the option of pursuing an atomic program for India’s national development. In his Presidential Address to the Indian Science Congress (1947), Nehru spoke of the relationship between science and development as part of the larger objectives of India’s nation-building project, in which the power of atomic science could be harnessed for national development (Nehru, 1947). Shortly after independence, Nehru upon the recommendation of Bhahba (the Chair of the Board of Atomic Energy Research), sponsored the Atomic Energy Bill in the Constituent Assembly. In 1948, an Atomic Energy Commission was established that controlled all activities relating to atomic energy (Constituent Assembly of India, 1948). Nehru’s rationale for sponsoring the Atomic Energy Bill was not militaristic; rather it relied on a developmental trajectory where the atom represented a new era of human civilization. This developmental rationale is evidenced in Nehru’s claim (at the eve of introducing the Atomic Energy Bill) that:

we are on the verge … of a tremendous development in some direction of the human race. Consider the past few hundred years of human history: the world developed a new source of power, the steam engine … India with all her virtues did not develop that power. It became a backward country because of that … Now we are facing the atomic age; we are on the verge of it. And this is something infinitely … powerful. (Constituent Assembly of India, 1948: 3334)

Thus, despite a variety of opinions facing Nehru, with some of his closest friends and confidants, such as Krishna Menon, publicly opposing nuclear weapons and others claiming an open nuclear policy,5 Nehru granted Bhabha a free hand in the development of India’s nuclear infrastructure should a political decision to acquire nuclear weapons be made in the future. All through the rep-resentation of this event, the atomic program represented ‘national pride’ (Abraham, 1998: 85).

It is through this exegesis of India’s identity as a secular, developmental state (as represented through the lenses of Nehruvianism) and its quest for modernity that one understands the (in)secu-rity dilemmas that underscored the newly born Indian state. The (in)securities of ‘catching up’ as a modern nation constituted the dominant national identity and insecurity of the Indian state, and


coming to grips with this legitimized the atomic quest. It was an insecurity that was derived not so much from threats perceived from China or Pakistan but from an (in)security of the Self, that was ‘located in direct confrontation with history … a colonial history and the urgency of [creating] a post-colonial modern state’ (Abraham: 1998: 105). In this context, the nuclear program was repre-sented as a project that could resolve certain anxieties of the newly-born nation, which only super patriots like Nehru could undertake by using their political authority to solidify the sense of Indian nationhood and identity. In this projection of post-colonial India’s nationalist identity and (in)secu-rities, real geo-strategic threats as faced regionally were nominal.

(In)Security and the Nuclear Option in the Post-Nehru years (1962–98)The Sino-Indian war (1962) in which India was defeated by China provided the Indian leaders with the space to re-articulate India’s strategic thinking from a Hobbesian context. In this re-articulation, the focus of analysis came to rest on the preservation of national security from geo-strategic threats and the Nehruvian norms of peaceful coexistence were perceived as unrealistic to respond to the anxieties facing the Indian state. Following Weldes et al.’s (1999: 1) assertion that ‘insecurities [are] cultural in the sense that they are produced in and out of “the context within which people give meanings to their actions and experiences and make sense of their lives” … ’, one locates a discursive shift in the articulation of India’s insecurities and its quest for nuclear power from a peaceful to a military option. In 1962, the government passed another atomic energy bill in the Indian Parliament delineating that the state develops a nuclear military option, which attained elite support in October 1964 when China conducted its first nuclear test (Government of India, 1962). Mr Baday, a Congress Party Member of Parliament from Khargaon, stated in his constituency:

Apna raksha karne ke vaste yadi ‘atomic energy’ se apne ‘defense’ aur ‘military weapons’ tiyar karen, to useman kaun sa gunah hai. Kaise veh shanty ke khilaf hai … [If we develop atomic energy for our defense and military weapons in order to keep us secure, what’s wrong with that, how can it be antithetical to peace … ] (Government of India, 1962: 2914)

Shastri, India’s then Prime Minister, succeeding Nehru, was cautious about the increasingly growing security concerns emanating from China’s recent nuclear development and had two stra-tegic options to provide for nuclear security for India’s defense: first, to obtain nuclear protection from another state, and, second, to build an Indian bomb. Less enthusiastic about the atomic energy program, Shastri opted for the first option, looking to the USA. When this option failed, he agreed to allow the Atomic Energy Committee to begin studies on the feasibility of under-ground nuclear explosions. In September 1965, nearly a fifth of MP’s from all parties urged Shastri to begin an open nuclear weapons program (Singh, 1971: iii). In addition, Bhabha reas-sured the government concerning India’s technological capability to make the bomb at that time (Abraham, 1998: 126). But the political leadership showed restraint in proceeding in that direc-tion. Careful diplomatic statements were crafted so that while India could, if it so chose, become a nuclear power, though the country’s current policy was not to take that step. Such diplomatic statements also reflected the Nehruvian ideological mindset rooted in global peace and non-violence. Stated by the then Indian Foreign Minister, Swaran Singh in the Indian Parliament: ‘The government still feels that the interests of world peace and our own security are better achieved by giving all support to the efforts for world nuclear disarmament than by building our own nuclear weapons’ (Jain, 1974: 178). No Indian bomb followed. In January 1966, Shastri died, followed shortly after by Bhabha.

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Indira Gandhi, who succeeded Shastri, proved to be an astute realist and a proponent of militant nationalism in re-interpreting India’s nationalist identity. Indeed, at that point, India was facing nuclear (in)securities regionally and globally, which included ongoing nuclear modernizations in China (such as Inter-Continental Ballistic Missiles and an anti-nuclear radar network that could be used against India); an active rearmament program by Pakistan under ZA Bhutto (with assistance from the USA, China, Western Europe, and West Asian nations) and finally, US interference in the South Asian region, namely with Pakistan and China, which was perceived by India as potentially developing into a tri-partite anti-Indian coalition in the region. Accordingly, India’s (threatened) nationalist identity was re-aligned alongside such (in)securities and these (in)securities tailored to fit the nation’s nuclear agenda. This re-thinking was further re-enforced by Sethna and Ramanna – Bhabha’s successors to the AEC – who asserted that India’s atomic energy project invariably spilled to India’s national security agenda. This explains why the Indian leaders (who were at that point fighting a great deal on the global front to frame a free and fair disarmament policy) refused to sign the NPT and why India under Prime Minister Gandhi conducted the Peaceful Nuclear Explosion (PNE) in 1974 (which was justified by her on developmental grounds) (Jain, 1974: 327). Subsequently, as India’s (in)security concerns vis-à-vis Pakistan and the USA further amplified in the 1980s following the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan, which even led Indira Gandhi during her second term to authorize a whole set of missile development projects, she did not include nuclear weapons in India’s national security policy framework. Rather, she kept India’s ‘Nuclear Option Open’ and continued to emphasize that the most important strategy for India was economic devel-opment and not nuclear deterrence. Moreover, India’s Pakistan-based nuclear (in)securities which by the 1980s had constituted a significant (in)security concern for India were perceived by Prime Minister Gandhi, even in her, otherwise, militant strategic thinking, as (in)securities that were political (and not communal) in nature. According to the Congress Party’s Election Manifesto, India’s national security/nuclear policies were to ‘protect India’s vital security interests in the con-text of the threat posed by the induction of large scale sophisticated weaponry in Pakistan’ (Indian National Congress, 1984: 22).

It was under India’s next Prime Minister, Rajiv Gandhi, that India decided to form an effective nuclear deterrent. Such decisions may be situated vis-à-vis increasing nuclear threat perceptions faced by India from Pakistan following comments by Pakistani state officials that by January 1987 Pakistan had succeeded in producing weapons grade uranium (such nuclear-related developments were further re-confirmed by Pakistani state officials in 1989 and in 1993) (Hussain, 1989). These regional insecurities coincided with certain global developments, namely the 25-year review and extension of the NPT (1995) and the introduction of the CTBT. On grounds of nuclear sovereignty and national security, India found the indefinite extension of the NPT and Clause XIV of the CTBT unacceptable.6 Furthermore, the above developments when seen against the fall of the Soviet Union (that had provided India with military and technological assistance and thus a counterweight against China and Pakistan) and China’s nuclear testing in 1993 explain why India under Prime Minister PV Narasimha Rao, in December 1995, made attempts to conduct a nuclear explosion. By 1996, while threats from China had subsided considerably following the Peace Agreements signed between the two states, the testing of the Ghauri missile by Pakistan in April 1998 amplified India’s nuclear insecurity concerns; and, if reports are to be believed, a decision to overtly test a nuclear weapon in India was taken a few days later. As commented by a Congress Party spokesperson on the eve of India’s 1998 detonation:

Pakistan’s unremitting concern for the past five decades to correct the imbalance of power in South Asia, when seen in the context of nuclear China, is of grave concern to India. These concerns have been further


aggravated by Pakistan’s recent test-firing of Ghauri. (Ramji, General Secretary, All India Congress Committee, Personal Interview, 5 May 1999)7

As evidenced from the above analysis, there has indeed been a gradual evolution in India’s nuclear trajectory – one not unfounded given the geo-strategic (in)securities facing the polity. In this context, one comprehends why India conducted the PNE in 1974; why it proceeded to conduct a nuclear test in 1995; and that these developments under the pre-BJP governments created a space for the BJP to go nuclear in 1998. Despite such an evolution of India’s nuclear trends, I contend that Nehruvianism constituted the dominant representation of India’s nationalist identity in the pre-BJP years, where India’s nationalist identity – rooted in terms of a political/territorial Self – represented the nation’s (in)securities through developmental and/or military lenses. In this con-text, I am not arguing that the pre-BJP governments in India were not realists; that post-colonial India did not face geo-strategic challenges; or that the violent memories of Indo-Pakistan partition were any less painful for India’s post-independent leaders in forging their task of nation-making. Instead, I am arguing that despite realism being a constant challenge facing the post-colonial Indian state, the pre-BJP governments’ secular-ideological perceptions of India as a political/territorial nation-space, enabled them to articulate and socially represent certain forms of developmental and/or military (in)securities to define this territorial space. Seen from these representational practices of India’s nationalist identity and (in)securities, nuclear ambiguity best represented their political leaders’ attitude towards the use of nuclear defense in inter-state relations.

However, as Vanaik (1990) argues, if we are to assume that the Indian state’s national interest is an ideological relation, we must accept that the projection of national self and its interests are not reflections of pre-existing categories but must emerge from an interplay of certain historical and social relations that reflect its leaders’ ideological pre-dispositions. Following this observation, I proceed in the next section to show how a different re-articulation of India’s nationalist identity under the BJP, guided by the ideology of Hindutva, has re-inscribed different representations of India’s (in)security to securitize the Hindu nation.

BJP, Hindu Rashtra and the (Cultural) Re-writing of Nuclear (In)Security (1998–2004)The BJP government that came to power in May 1998 seeks to re-invent a pan-Indian identity based on the notion of ‘one nation, one people, and one culture’ (BJP, 1998a: 6).8 It identifies India as a Hindu rashtra (nation). The ideology of Hindutva is seen by the BJP as the unifying factor in the creation of a Hindu rashtra. Thus, the BJP conceptualizes India’s identity in cultural terms, that is, a land for the Hindus, as opposed to the Congress’ conceptualization which was territorial/politi-cal. Under it, ‘Muslims, Christians, Jews, and [those] whose ancestral land lay outside the territo-rial boundaries of punyabhoomi (the holy land of India) were by implication excluded from both Hindutva and from their citizenship of India’ (Chowdhry, 2000: 101). As claimed by a BJP ideo-logue, Rithambara, ‘Hindus, who can never be communal, are today being branded as communal. They [Muslims] murder with impunity and people are silent. But we [Hindus] are defamed when we cry out in pain’ (Banerjee, 1998: 179). This quote illustrates that for the BJP Hindutva acts as an exclusionary force, where Indian Muslims become ‘aliens’ to the Hindu land. Referring to Islam in this context, Jaswant Singh (Minister of External Affairs under the BJP) reiterates that ‘Professor Samuel Huntington is not wholly wrong in talking about the clash of civilizations. It has always been there in history (Singh, 1998a: xiv). Drawing from this exclusionary basis of Hindutva and the BJP’s articulation of India as a Hindu rashtra, I show below how the party has also re-articulated India’s nuclear (in)securities along a cultural production of danger.

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The BJP government’s decision to detonate in May 1998 has been justified by the government on grounds of international and regional geo-strategic factors which share many of the insecurities perceived by the previous non-BJP leaders. In terms of the international scenario, the BJP has argued (and continues to argue) for a free and fair global disarmament treaty which has not been taken seri-ously by the nuclear powers. Furthermore, the CTBT, as flouted by the nuclear powers, if accepted by India, would close India’s further nuclear options (BJP, 2000a). In terms of the regional factors, the BJP has cited Pakistan and China as growing nuclear threats for India and the official explana-tion for the 1998 tests were threats from these regional powers (BJP, 1999a). In fact, some leading BJP politicians, such as LK Advani, have recognized China as the ‘No.1’ threat to India (BJP, 2000b). Even if they have identified Pakistan as a threat to India (as done by some spokespersons of the party like Arun Shourie and Venkaiah Naidu), they have situated their case in the context of geo-strategic insecurities (BJP, 1999a). As stated by the then party President, LK Advani, ‘the BJP has consistently advocated India exercising the nuclear option … because we believe that neighbors and superpowers must never be in a position to intimidate us’ (BJP, 2000a: 153).

Despite such a realist projection of (in)securities that the BJP perceives from China and Pakistan, which to a great extent is true, I argue the BJP’s nuclear (in)security requires scrutiny in the context of Hindutva, which may have served as the ideological foundation for the party to simultaneously draw from history, religion, and cultural identities of the Self/Other to re-write a new form of Pakistani danger that viewed Pakistan as a more serious threat to India than China. To that extent, a public opinion poll conducted among Indian elites found that the perceived threats to India from China which had been officially named by the BJP government as the ‘No.1’ justification for India’s nuclearization, ranked well below their unofficial concerns about the Pakistani threat (Ahmed and Cortright, 1998).

Most BJP members identify the cultural history of Indo-Pakistan partition as a factor in India’s nuclear concerns about Pakistan. These members, from their communal calculations rooted in the cultural biases of the two-nation theory, view the history of partition as a ‘living nostalgia’, which according to them, despite having occurred 60 years ago, still has the potential to affect the con-temporary national security of India (BJP, 1999c: 3). Recalling India’s ‘fractured past … which began with the Muslim invasion and the grinding of the Hindu-Buddhist cultures in India’, some BJP members consider Pakistan as a ‘cultural’ threat to India (BJP, 1999b: 34). Based on such cultural perceptions of India, most of the BJP members also perceive India as facing a threat from Pakistan which also relates to India’s nuclear security concerns. This may be explained by the fact that the historical-cultural animosities between India and Pakistan, represented currently in the Kashmir issue as a ‘continuing legacy of the unfinished agenda of partition’, are perceived by BJP members as a factor that may cause Pakistan to resort to a ‘nuclear blackmail’ of India to settle this unfinished agenda (BJP, 1999c: 3). Accordingly, as revealed in the BJP newspaper Swastika, the Islamization of a Pakistani nuclear threat posed to India reached its height following Pakistan’s testing of Ghauri in 1998 (BJP, 2002). Interpreting this test-firing, the Swastika claims ‘The Ghauri signifies a spatial direction and qualitative connotation. Through its testing, Pakistan has tried symbolically to re-instate history where the Hindu King Privthiraj Chauhan was defeated by the Islamic King Muhammad Ghauri’ (BJP, 1998b: 8).9

While from a realist perspective, the Ghauri indeed poses a threat to India (as was also acknowl-edged by a Congress Party member), what makes this otherwise acceptable assertion problematic and communal is the party’s interweaving of history, culture, and religion to interpret the Ghauri. It may be important to note here that the BJP leaders do not explicitly claim that India’s nuclear policy is in defense of the rashtra. Yet, its members simultaneously draw from religious/Hindu scriptures to remind the nation of the impending nuclear danger they face from Pakistan, which is


suggestive of Pakistan as the cultural enemy of India. The BJP Today states: ‘In our [Hindu] scrip-tures, there is a provision to worship shakti [good power or sat-guna] to crush the wrong doer [dur-guna]. As practitioners of Hindutva we uphold sat-guna’ (BJP, 2003: 17). On the contrary, the party considers China (which in a real strategic sense is a greater nuclear danger to India than Pakistan) a key interlocutor in India’s diplomatic ventures – defined from the perspectives of what the party sees as India’s ‘established [Hindu] culture’. Accordingly, the BJP deems that ‘it is possible to reach an accommodation with China’ (BJP, 2000c: 13).

While in the above section I do not claim that the BJP’s rise to power constituted the only expla-nation for India’s 1998 nuclear detonation, yet from the critical constructivist perspective that ‘insecurities are cultural in the sense that they are produced in and out of “the context within which people give meanings to their actions and experiences and make sense of their lives”’ (Weldes et al., 1999: 1), the above section argues that the BJP’s ideology of Hindutva has served as the ide-ational lens for the party to ‘culturally’ re-write the nation’s history, its identity, and (in)securities to facilitate its decision to test. In this sense, much like the Congress years, the BJP has also taken recourse to certain forms of representations to construct the Indian national self and its (in)securi-ties; but, unlike the Congress years, where such representations of the Self and its (in)securities were political/military, these representations under the BJP have become culturally rearticulated. In this context, I further argue following the premises of critical constructivism that the BJP’s Hindutva has served as an ideological underpinning for the Indian (Hindu) state, whose culturally guided representations of the Self/Other have produced certain discourses, where ‘an established commonsense, made real … [has] fore-ground[ed] some dangers [such as Pakistan] while repress-ing … others’ (Weldes et al., 1999: 12). Yet, these discursive representations were contextualized by the party by simultaneously drawing from the external (threat) environment that India then faced – namely: an assertive, unpredictable, and rising China; increasing Sino-Pakistani nuclear transactions; and a nuclear-strong Pakistan under nuclear patrons like China and the USA. I proceed in the next section to analyze how post-colonial Pakistan’s identity as an Islamic Republic has enabled the state to articulate its (in)securities and nuclear policy choices.

Pakistan: National Identity and (In)SecurityIn the nationalist discourses of the Pakistani state, which following the demise of Jinnah became the domain of the anti-Indian military and the bureaucratic apparatus, Pakistan’s identity was con-stituted by drawing from dual aspects of religion/culture and realpolitik to define the Self and its Other. In such articulations of Pakistan’s identity, its ‘threats were located in [terms of a] so-called objective incompatibility of Islam against the Hindu psyche’, and commonsense understandings propagated the idea that ‘India with its Machiavellian designs will destroy Pakistan … and is con-stantly scheming and conniving to … incorporate Pakistan back into its own territory’ (Khattak, 1996: 334; Nizamani, 1998: 320). Such perceived insecurities that have accompanied the configu-ration of Pakistan’s territorial boundaries have meant that Pakistan’s national security policies must strengthen and protect its territorial sovereignty vis-à-vis India; bring Kashmir into Pakistan to complete the unfinished agenda of partition; and strive to build the foundations of an Islamic Ummah (community) in world politics against India’s Hindu identity.

Following this connection between Pakistan’s Islamic identity and its India-centric national (in)securities, I discuss in the following section how the Pakistani state has perceived its nuclear (in)securities, which, mainly political in nature (despite some religious/cultural references to an Islamic bomb), have became cultural by the eve of May 1998. I offer this analysis in three phases of Pakistani politics: 1947–1977 (Pakistan’s formation until the Bhutto years); 1977–1998 (the Zia

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years until 1998); 1998–2004 (Pakistan’s detonation and thereafter). I also incorporate how Pakistan’s external environment, its domestic-institutional factors, and the logic of nuclear-apart-heid have configured in shaping Pakistan’s nuclearization process.

Pakistan’s Nuclear (In)Security in the Formative Years (1947–77)Unlike India, Pakistan’s security planners did not embark on a nuclear program immediately after independence. The early death of Jinnah, depriving Pakistan of a nuclear patronage, the lack of a nuclear scientist of Bhabha’s caliber, and the outbreak of the Cold War that resulted in Pakistan’s joining of the US sponsored SEATO and CENTO (which enabled Pakistan to counterbalance India’s regional standing) are factors that explain the lack of Pakistan’s early pursuit of atomic technology. Nonetheless, in 1955, the Pakistan Atomic Energy Commission (an indigenous nuclear scientific establishment) was formed with Dr Nazir Ahmed as its Chair. Although some internal debate had emerged in Pakistan by the early 1960s about the potential of atomic power, there was no significant development in Pakistan’s nuclear infrastructure at that point. Nonetheless, even in those early years both Ayub and Bhutto justified the atomic program in the context of Pakistan’s national security vis-à-vis India. This India-centric rationale is evidenced in Ayub’s claim that ‘We will buy the bomb off the shelf if India goes nuclear’ (Kapur, 1987: 26).

The Indo-Pakistan war over Kashmir (1965) and the Bangladesh war (1971) were critical events that enabled Pakistan’s decision-makers to situate Pakistan’s identity and nuclear policy vis-à-vis a Hobbesian domain of India-centric military (in)securities. The 1965 war, in which Pakistan lost against India, was followed by a US embargo against Pakistan (and India) which deprived Pakistan of US weapons (a consequence not suffered by India because of the indigenous nature of its atomic industry). Although in the temporary absence of American supplies Pakistan had consolidated its relation with China, which became a major supplier of conventional arms to Pakistan, ZA Bhutto, who had then become the Foreign Minister under Ayub, took this opportunity to publicly renew his call for Pakistan’s nuclear weapons capacity against the Indian adversary – expressed in his famous quote:

[T]he nuclear threat is real and immediate … In our own region, India … is reported to be on the threshold of becoming nuclear … It is for this reason that … I warned the nation sometime back that if India acquires nuclear status, Pakistan will have to follow suit even if it entails eating grass. (Bhutto, 1973: 19, 21)

Interestingly, one also notices that such discourses of Pakistan’s nuclearization also combined real-ism with cultural notions of a Self/Other identity in justifying Pakistan’s bomb. Referring to Pakistan’s bomb as an Islamic bomb, Bhutto subsequently claimed that ‘We know that Israel and South Africa have full nuclear capability. The Christian, Jewish, and Hindu civilizations [read: India] have this capability. The Islamic civilization was without it but that situation was about to change’ (Bhutto, 1979: 137–138).

In this context, Saba Gul Khattak (who has written extensively on the religious and gendered underpinnings of Pakistan’s nuclear security discourse) observes that:

Pakistan’s … nuclear discourse in order to gain wide acceptance … [from Pakistanis] relies on two ideas in tandem: that of a beleaguered Islam and that of masculinity. This discourse asserts that the Muslim Ummah (community) must possess the nuclear bomb for reasons of power, status, and equality with non-Muslims. (Khattak, 1996: 346, 351)


This observation by Khattak is important to understand Bhutto’s earlier quote, where the discursive intersection of an Islamic bomb with culture/religion was representative of the honor and insecu-rity of the Pakistani nation. However, I argue that although this concept of an Islamic bomb alludes to a cultural understanding of a (Hindu) Indian nuclear adversary and (in)security, this discourse was not situated specifically vis-à-vis an Indian (Hindu) bomb. Rather, this discourse was situated broadly vis-à-vis the ‘Western, Jewish, and Hindu’ adversaries, which, as I argue subsequently, gets explicitly situated in terms of a Hindu India in May 1998. However, these early nuclear (in)securities explain why Pakistan refused to sign the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NTP) in 1968 – following a similar refusal by India.

Following Pakistan’s defeat by India in the Bangladesh war (1971), Bhutto (who had by then become the President of Pakistan) continued in his resolve to adopt a nuclear weapon program to counter India. Once again one notices in Bhutto’s statements a fusion of realism and an identity-logic based on culture/religion to justify the Pakistani bomb. At the Multan meeting of Pakistan’s nuclear scientists on January 20, 1972, Bhutto supposedly asked the nuclear scientists to deliver Pakistan the ‘Islamic bomb’ (Weissman and Krosney, 1981: 44). While scholars like Cheema (1992) have highlighted some ambiguity on the part of Bhutto regarding Pakistan’s nuclearization, yet the India-centric rationale for Pakistan’s nuclear development is quite evidenced. Following India’s Peaceful Nuclear Explosion (PNE) in 1974, Bhutto (by then Prime Minister of Pakistan) asserted that ‘nobody will be able to stop us from pursuing this course of action now’ (Sunday Telegraph, 1970: 2). Furthermore, some use of cultural/religious symbols also become evidenced in Pakistan’s nuclear discourse at that time, when, in response to India’s PNE, which some sectors in Pakistan (as well as in India) have seen as a ‘smiling Buddha’, Bhutto is said to have claimed that ‘Back home, we have the statue of a starving Buddha’ (meaning Pakistan is not developing a nuclear weapon) (Ghauri, 1976: 37). By the time Bhutto was ousted in a military coup in July 1977, Pakistan’s decision-makers were committed to pursuing a nuclear weapons program and the Pakistan Atomic Energy Commission (PAEC) under Dr Qader Khan had reportedly started acquir-ing and enriching uranium to weapons grade in a clandestine manner. This explains the US imposi-tion of the Glenn-Symington Amendment Act on Pakistan in 1977.

Nuclear (In)Security (1977–98)The military regime under Zia continued to use the Indian threat to enhance Pakistan’s nuclear weapons capability. However, an important development at this point was that the Pakistan Atomic Energy Commission began to operate more directly under the military’s directives (with Pakistan’s bureaucracy supporting Pakistan’s nuclear weapons program). Heading the Pakistan Atomic Energy Commission, Dr Khan supported General Zia’s cause for a nuclear deterrent, which, despite some ambiguity as to whether Pakistan was pursuing nuclear weapons, saw a speedy development in Pakistan’s nuclearization process.1 0 President Zia even acknowledged to an Indian news maga-zine in 1981 that ‘We are amongst the five countries in the world [that] know and practice this technology [i.e. the conversion of natural uranium into enriched uranium]’ (Ali, 1984: 62). Zia’s nuclear weapons program also had a military-institutional component as it was domestically pro-jected by his regime as a symbol of national prestige and to re-enforce the military’s position as the ultimate guarantor of Pakistan’s security. The Soviet invasion of Afghanistan boosted the course of Pakistan’s nuclearization when billions of dollars in military and economic assistance was sent from the US to Pakistan. Although the US Congress, concerned with Pakistan’s nuclear trend, passed the Pressler Amendment (1985), the Reagan administration exempted Pakistan from the Act and

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continued to certify the passage of US aid to Pakistan. In an interview with Time magazine (Doerner and Munro, 1986), Zia to deter a potential Indian conventional threat declared that ‘Pakistan has the capability to build the bomb whenever it wishes’ (Spector and Smith, 1990: 95). Relations between India and Pakistan deteriorated over Brasstacks crisis in 1987 and the Pakistani nuclear scientist, Dr Khan, commented to the Indian journalist Kuldip Nayar in 1987 (and in 1989) that Pakistan had the ability to assemble a nuclear weapon (Nayar, 1987).

Under the successive civilian governments of Prime Ministers Benazir Bhutto and Nawaz Sharif, the military continued to control Pakistan’s nuclear decision-making. Rapid developments in Pakistan’s nuclearization continued over these years (Samad, 1994). Although following Soviet withdrawal from Afghanistan, the Bush administration imposed the Pressler amendment on Pakistan, the cost of the US sanctions were limited since nearly a decade of US assistance had enabled Pakistan to enhance its nuclear capacity. In January 1992, Pakistan’s Foreign Secretary, Shahrayar Khan, declared that Pakistan possessed ‘all the elements which, if hooked together, would become a nuclear device’ (Ahmed and Cortright, 1998: 3).

In October 1993, Benazir Bhutto, during her second term with a fragile parliamentary majority accepted the military’s nuclear preferences with India-centric justifications. Referring to the failed attempt by India under Prime Minister Rao to conduct a test in 1995, Prime Minister Bhutto claimed that ‘Pakistan’s aim was to tell the Indians that their move will be matched’ (Ahmed, 2000: 7). Simultaneously, concerned about the ongoing Pressler sanctions against Pakistan (which Pakistan perceived as discriminatory legislation by the US against it), Pakistan, to appease the USA, pledged to join the NPT and the CTBT only in the event of Indian accession. While one can argue that Pakistan’s public statement to accept the NPT and the CTBT with the stipulation that India must sign these treaties first was an empty gesture (since India had already asserted that it would not sign any global discriminatory treaty), nonetheless, two factors, namely nuclear apartheid (vis-à-vis the Pressler sanctions) and perceptions of real danger (vis-à-vis India) provided the Pakistani leaders with the strategic space to justify Pakistan’s nuclear policies.

Prime Minister Sharif’s second term (from February 1997) saw some possibilities of rapproche-ment in India–Pakistan relations given Sharif’s belief that improved relations with India (including trade links) would better serve Pakistan’s national interests. India, which had by then changed its policy vis-à-vis its other traditional rival, China, through the Peace and Friendship Treaties (1996), reacted positively to the Pakistani overtures. However, these gestures were offset by two issues: first, the Pakistan army’s anti-Indian attitude, which, under the then Army Chief Pervez Musharraf, continued to view Kashmir as an ‘unsettled score’ between the two states; and second, Pakistan’s detonation of an intermediate range missile – Ghauri – in April 1998. Although, the Ghauri was justified by Pakistan’s Foreign Ministry as ‘a part of Pakistan’s indigenous missile research and development program’,1 1 it caused concern among Indian security sectors since this missile could carry a nuclear warhead (payload of 1500 pounds) within a range of 900 miles – bringing in its purview any northern cities of India (Center for Defense and International Security Studies, 1998). What followed Pakistan’s testing of Ghauri was the 1998 nuclear detonation by India under the BJP.

The above analysis of Pakistan’s nuclearization program from 1947 till its 1998 detonation shows that certain India-centric insecurities have primarily guided Pakistan’s nuclear trajectory. In meeting such insecurities, the Pakistani state has quite realistically relied on strategic initiatives, namely: allocating its indigenous resources for defense; acquiring conventional/nuclear technol-ogy from abroad; and alliance-building with states external to the region – namely the USA – to raise the cost of war against India. Yet, reflective of identity politics, one simultaneously notices that Pakistan has interwoven its Islamic identity with notions of a ‘beleaguered’ Islam to project its nuclear vulnerabilities vis-à-vis a ‘Machiavellian’ (Hindu) India. In this context, while it is cor-rect that the very conception of the Pakistani state’s identity and its national insecurities have


historically been guided by an assumed ‘incompatibility of Islam and the Hindu psyche’, which Pakistani defense analysts like Rizvi (2002) claim to be ‘ingrained’ in Pakistan’s strategic thinking, I argue that the representations of Pakistan’s India-centric nuclear (in)securities and discourses in the pre-1998 phase were predominantly political/military.

However, following the critical constructivist claim that ‘insecurities are cultural in the sense that they are produced in and out of “the context within which people give meanings to their actions and experiences and make sense of their lives” … ’ (Weldes et al., 1999: 1), I proceed in the next section to show how this nuclear discourse gets grounded at the eve of May 1998 in terms of Pakistan’s ‘Islamic’ versus India’s ‘Hindu’ bomb.

Nuclear (In)Securities 1998: Islamic Versus the Hindu BombThe Indian detonation of May 1998 incurred the displeasure of Pakistan’s domestic constituencies and prompted considerations of a bomb. Prime Minister Sharif was at first hesitant to test because he was concerned about the potential impact of economic and military sanctions on Pakistan (since the USA had already imposed such sanctions on India after its detonation through the Glenn Amendment). Within Sharif’s cabinet opinions differed from groups supporting or opposing Pakistan’s nuclear testing. Supporters of a retaliatory nuclear test included Foreign Minister Gowher Ayub, Information Minister Mushahid Hussain, and others whose views reflected the influential segments of the armed forces. Ignoring US efforts to prevent Pakistan from testing, which included a visit by Deputy Secretary of State Strobe Talbott to Pakistan, Pakistan tested its nuclear devices in May 1998. Pakistan’s rationale of a retaliatory nuclear testing was not only reflective of a defense mechanism grounded in realpolitik but also one that symbolized Pakistan’s prestige. Immediately after the testing, Prime Minister Sharif declared:

Today, we have settled a score and have carried out five successful nuclear tests … Our security, and the peace and stability of the entire region, was gravely threatened … Our hand was forced by the present Indian leadership’s reckless actions … Our decision to exercise the nuclear option has been taken in the interest of national self-defense. (Sublette, 2001)

Furthermore, like the Indian counterpart, Pakistan’s bomb was also justified on grounds of geo-political imperatives (News Correspondent, 1998). As claimed by a senior Pakistani official: ‘We will never be able to remove the nuclear imbalance [with India] if we do not follow suit [with] our own explosion’ (Hussain, 1998: 24). The detonation was also situated in terms of Pakistan’s status as a world power. The Pakistan Ministry of Foreign Affairs described the moment of Pakistan’s detonation as ‘Pakistan’s finest hour. Pakistan had become the world’s 7th nuclear power and the first nuclear weapon state in the Islamic world’ (Sublette, 2001).

Yet, one notices how this otherwise political discourse of Pakistan’s nuclear (in)security vis-à-vis India simultaneously and explicitly gets re-articulated along cultural lines. In this re-articulation, Pakistan’s nuclear (in)security gets projected as Pakistan’s ‘Islamic’ bomb, specifically vis-à-vis India’s ‘Hindu’ bomb. As claimed in Pakistan Today:

Pakistan … claims to be the citadel of Islam. Its armed forces are the armies of Islam … Religion is not just its raison d’etre but the guarantee of survival … There has always been a tacit understanding that Pakistan’s bomb will be to regain the glory of Islam and regain the ‘rights’ of the Muslims whenever they are persecuted [read: threatened] by infidel powers. This was truly an Islamic bomb [read: against the Hindu bomb]. (Sayyed, 2003)

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Furthermore, this cultural discourse also draws from the Islamic religion to define Pakistan’s nuclear (in)securities and justify the bomb. As reported in Pakistan Today:

The detonations … were according to the then Prime Minister of Pakistan, Mian Nawaz Sharif … the results of an inspiration he derived from the holy book – Quraa’n. After conducting the nuclear tests, he proclaimed to the nation on May 28 that in resolving the dilemma ‘to explode or not to explode’ he ulti-mately turned to the Holy Quran … for guidance and he came upon the divine commandment ‘always to keep your horses ready’. The relevant verse of the Holy Quran is as follows: Against them make ready your strength to the utmost of your power, including steeds of war, (steed of war will mean the latest war technologies in the present context … (Sayyed, 2003)

The above quote shows how Pakistan’s perceived nuclear (in)securities vis-à-vis its adversary (India) and its justifications for keeping its nuclear ‘war technologies’ ready to strike against the adversary (if necessary) draw from Islam and its scriptures – an aspect that replays similar reitera-tions by the BJP that has drawn from the Hindu scriptures on sat-guna and dur-guna to justify the Hindu bomb. Interestingly, like the BJP government officials, the Pakistani government officials too have sought to correct any religious/cultural (mis)interpretations of their 1998 detonation as an Islamic bomb. Tariq Altaf, Pakistan’s Foreign Ministry spokesperson, hurriedly corrected such discourses by saying that: ‘Nothing gives me more offense than the use of the phrase Islamic bomb. There is no such thing as an Islamic bomb. This is a weapon for the self defense of Pakistan … ’ (Warraq, 1999).

While India’s 1998 detonation may be explained through the combined frames of realism and the cultural construction of insecurities, Pakistan’s 1998 detonation was retaliatory. At its heart, from a realist perspective, was the issue of Pakistan maintaining its nuclear parity with India while revealing a continuation of Pakistan’s traditionally perceived India-centric insecurities. Yet, fol-lowing a more interpretive line of analysis, suggested by the critical constructivists, that ‘insecuri-ties are cultural in the sense that they are produced in and out of “the context within which people give meanings to their actions and experiences and make sense of their lives” … ’ (Weldes et al., 1999: 1), my point in the above section has been to show that much like the Indian political climate under the BJP, Pakistan’s nuclear insecurities at the eve of May 1998 have also been ‘culturally’ articulated. This shift in Pakistan’s nuclear discourse becomes particularly significant given that despite Pakistan’s self-declared identity as an Islamic state, its India-centric insecurities were hith-erto, until May 1998, perceived primarily through political/military lenses. In noting this shift in Pakistan’s cultural re-articulation of insecurities, I do not seek to debate whether such re-articulations have made the state any more Islamic than it was in the pre-1998 years (although this fundamental-ist shift of state identity can certainly be argued in the case of India). Rather, in keeping with the critical constructivist claim that (in)securities are social/cultural constructions, I have contended in the above analysis that the Pakistani state, depending on its temporality and spatiality (i.e. the political/cultural milieu), has produced certain discourses, which at the eve of May 1998 have ‘fore-grounded’ Pakistan’s India-centric nuclear dangers as cultural.

Conclusion: A Cultural Understanding of (In) SecurityAccording to mainstream realism, studies of nuclear policies belong to the domain of the empiri-cal. From this objective epistemology, understanding nuclear threat perceptions or detonations may be devoid of subjective issues like a nation’s history, religion, culture and ideology. Yet, in this article, I have offered an interpretive approach to India and Pakistan’s nuclear policies which,


following Campbell’s (1992) ‘representations of danger’ has analyzed the re-articulations of India and Pakistan’s nationalist identities, perceptions of (in)securities, and their nuclear policies. In rendering this analysis, I have accepted the realist premise that there exists anarchy in the interna-tional realm, which in a fundamental way adheres to these states’ abilities to articulate and maintain distinctions between the domestic and the foreign – which are taken as pre-existing and given. Once this distinction is accepted, the domain of International Relations acquires a hegemonic den-sity requiring the consolidation of states’ boundaries vis-à-vis the constant presence (or produc-tion) of geo-strategic insecurities. Despite such realist compulsions of nations’ boundary-making exercises, I have deemed it important to explore in this article how India and Pakistan, while justi-fying their nuclear policies on the basis of certain geo-strategic (in)securities, have simultaneously drawn from their national histories, economic or developmental anxieties, and their political lead-ers’ ideologies (secular or cultural) to interpret their national selves and (in)securities.

In rendering this analysis, I have highlighted how both the Indian and the Pakistani states’ iden-tities, which in the case of Pakistan’s identity has remained Islamic in contrast to India’s secular-modern and Hindutva identities, have drawn from various interpretations of (in)securities ranging from developmental/economi, political/military, and cultural to justify their nuclear policies. While the transition of the Indian state’s (in)securities from economic/developmental to political/military has represented a transformation in the strategic thinking of the Indian state (that has departed from the Gandhian brand of moralistic politics to one of a defense-oriented/militarized India), which, some argue, has also laid the foundations for the BJP to go nuclear in 1998, yet the cultural re-articulation of nuclear (in)securities in India under the BJP marks a unique departure from the earlier phases that cannot be belittled. Likewise, what has been simultaneously interesting in the analysis of Pakistan’s nuclearization discourse is that unlike the pre-1998 years where Pakistan’s nuclear (in)security discourses vis-à-vis India have remained primarily political/military (despite some cultural references to an Islamic bomb), Pakistan’s nuclear (in)security discourses at the eve of May 1998 have became cultural – grounded specifically in terms of Pakistan’s ‘Islamic’ versus India’s ‘Hindu’ bomb. In exploring this discursive transition, I do not speculate whether the BJP’s nuclear security discourses guided by the Hindutva identity has spurred a similar culturally grounded re-articulation of nuclear (in)securities in the Pakistani polity. Rather, my point in the above analysis has been to show how at a particular conjectural moment of South Asian politics, that is at the eve of May 1998, the nuclear security discourses of India and Pakistan have drawn from cultural re-articulations of nationalist identities and (in)securities to justify their nuclear poli-cies. In comprehending this shift in the representations of (and the linkages between) India and Pakistan’s nationalist identities, perceptions of (in)securities, and nuclear policies, I have also noted how the two states have drawn from realism (i.e. geo-strategic threats) and cultural represen-tations of (in)securities (by re-writing national histories, religious and cultural identities) to explain their nuclear trajectories.

What does the above analysis of South Asian nuclearization as studied through the combined frames of realism and critical constructivism imply for re-reading theories and practices of security in international politics? Following the critical constructivist premise that ‘insecurities are cultural in the sense that they are produced in and out of “the context within which people give meanings to their actions and experiences and make sense of their lives”…’ (Weldes et al., 1999: 1), I suggest that an empirical reading of danger as given, as suggested by the conventional International Relations theories, is incomplete. Rather, an analysis of (in)security must consider that what is real is also a form of representation, where certain context-bound judgments made by policy-makers self-consciously adopts an imagination of the Self and Other to define danger – mostly to suit their tasks of nation-making. As I have shown in this article, both the Indian and the Pakistani states,

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depending on their temporality and spatiality (i.e. their political/cultural milieu), have socially represented various forms of their national insecurities – as economic, political and cultural – to suit their ongoing tasks of nation-making – whether in a developmental, external Hobbesian, or a culturally-defined domestic political context.

Comprehending (in)securities as cultural and social representations, also requires re-visiting conventional International Relations that views states as objective, sovereign entities in world poli-tics that are distinct from their (in)securities. Instead, I suggest that states, in addition to being sovereign political entities in world politics – as required by the logic of realpolitik – are simultane-ously social/cultural entities. As social/cultural entities, states’ identities are constituted by the ideological mindsets of their managers/political leaders who define their desired imaginations of nation-states and their corresponding perceptions of national (in)securities. Seen as a social/cul-tural entity, a state as a self/subject is not distinct from its insecurities; rather, as a self/subject it defines its insecurity, and is simultaneously the object that faces threat from its constructed insecu-rity. This subject/object constitution and interpellation of the Pakistani and the Indian states is evidenced in this case study where the ideological construct of these states – either as secular-modern, Hindu, or Islamic – have discursively interwoven corresponding representations of (in)securities – developmental, political/military and/or cultural – to consolidate their identities as ‘performatively’ constituted entities. In this sense, states and their dangers are also mutually con-stituted entities.

Finally, I suggest that an analysis of insecurity, which, as I premise in this paper, is not an empiri-cal phenomenon, requires attention to how dangers are discursively constituted. This requires a ‘how-possible’ approach to the study of security, that is, how discourses guided by codes of intelli-gibility or ideational frameworks of political leaders come to constitute a ‘field of knowledge’, where ‘an established common sense, made real in collective discourse … foregrounds some dan-gers while repressing … others’ (Weldes et al., 1999: 12). A key element of such discourse would also include drawing from a multiplicity of historical processes and engaging in ideological-cultural forms of representations to make security practices possible. How state-centric discourses of India and Pakistan guided by their decision-makers’ secular/religious codes of intelligibility have fore-grounded certain notions of dangers, namely through the discursive projection of an ‘Islamic’ versus a ‘Hindu’ bomb particularly at the eve of May 1998 has remained a key point in this essay.

This study therefore argues that the field of International Relations/Security Studies remains open to grasp the representational dynamics of securitization and that the significant yet understud-ied terrain of the cultural production of identity and insecurity in international relations merits attention. This requires engaging realism with critical constructivism to comprehend and connect the security dynamics of the local to the global (read: Western) levels.

Notes

1. According to Cox (1981), a problem-solving approach takes the world as it finds it, and accepts the assump-tion of anarchy. Instead, Cox suggests a critical approach which asks ‘how’ the world has come about.

2. Seen from the Foucaultian logic, discourses imply statements that: define a phenomenon (in this case insecurity); provide a basis for analyzing the phenomenon; and suggest actions with respect to the phe-nomenon (see Foucault, 1992).

3. A geo-political vision includes ‘any idea concerning the relation between one’s own and other places, involving feelings of (in)security and/or invoking ideas about a collective mission or foreign policy’ (Dijkink, 1996: 11). Thus, a geo-political vision also reflects a nation’s boundary-making practices center-ing on questions concerning one’s nationalist identity and requiring a them–us identity and close feelings of nationalism associated with one’s own territory.


4. The major disputes were: the Indus Water Treaty problem; the issue of disposing of evacuee property after partition; the Kashmir problem; and Pakistan’s joining of the US-sponsored alliances, SEATO and CENTO.

5. For others like the Jana Sangh Party, a leading force in Indian politics in the early 1960s, there was a more realist understanding of India’s pursuit of the atom. In December 1962, March 1963, and November 1964 (this time after the Chinese detonation) delegates of the Party made formal statements in the Parliament to reverse the government’s declared non-nuclear policy and produce nuclear weapons for military uses. But the dominant majority of the Congress Party and the strong influence of Nehruvianism neutralized the bill.

6. This is because Clause XIV of the treaty stipulated that India as a signatory of the treaty would be restricted from undertaking any further nuclear testing.

7. This quote regarding Pakistan’s testing of Ghauri is significant since it interprets Ghauri as posing a politi-cal nuclear (in)security to India. It will be interesting to analyze in the next section how the same event, in other words, the testing of Ghauri, is interpreted by the BJP which, guided by Hindutva, has re-inscribed different representations of India’s statist identity and (in)securities to justify India’s nuclear policy.

8. As mentioned earlier, the BJP represented a coalition-led Hindu Right government of India from May 1998 until losing power to the Congress-led United Progressive Alliance government in April 2004. Thus, the BJP’s political power as the national government does not represent the current state of affairs in Indian politics. Yet, the Hindutva-dominated nationalism unleashed by the BJP which continues to hold ground in certain pockets of Indian politics (such as through the Shiva Sena political party in the state of Maharashtra) and demonstrates a sharp break in terms of India’s nationalist identity politics from the pre-1998 years, enables me as an IR/South Asian security scholar to compare the discursively constituted and the performa-tive nature of India’s nationalist identity, representations of insecurity, and security policy choices.

9. Mohammad Ghauri was the first Islamic invader to attack Delhi in 1191. The then Indian ruler, Prithviraj Chauhan, a Hindu, defeated him but spared his life. Ghauri returned a year later, defeated Prithviraj and laid the foundations of the Muslim dynasty in India that lasted until the coming of the British in India.

10. An ultracentrifuge uranium enrichment plant was set up at Kahuta and Pakistan expanded its nuclear weapons program through clandestine networks in Western Europe and China.

11. Although additional sources claim that Pakistan tested Ghauri because of a perceived nuclear ‘aggres-siveness’ from India’s newly empowered BJP government – which in its 1998 Election Manifesto had declared that India would go nuclear once it came to power.

Acknowledgement

The author wishes to thank Dr Nigel Gibson (Editor) and the anonymous reviewers for their comments on this essay.

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Runa Das is Assistant Professor in the Department of Political Science, University of Minnesota, Duluth (USA). Her research areas are Constructivist International Relations theory, South Asian security, and gender. Some of her recent publications have appeared in the Asian Journal of Political Science; European Journal of Women’s Studies; Commonwealth and Comparative Politics; Journal of Development Alternatives and Area Studies; Women’s Studies International Forum; International Feminist Journal of Politics; Third World Quarterly; Comparative Studies of Asia, Africa and the Middle East, and others.

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