India, China and Pakistan, a volatile nuclear triangle

The floods that submerged a third of Pakistani territory in Sindh and the Indus Delta this summer, displacing some 300,000 people, ruining crops and causing damage that could exceed $20 billion, prompted a rare friendly gesture from India towards Pakistan, its historical nemesis since the partition of the British Raj in 1947 and with whom he has fought two wars and dozens of border skirmishes in Jammu and Kashmir.

After knowing the magnitude of the disaster, the Indian Prime Minister, Narendra Modi, expressed on Twitter his hope that everything would soon return to normal. His Pakistani counterpart, Shehbaz Sharif, the country’s most pro-Indian politician, thanked him for his wishes, invoking divine help (Insha’Allah) for both nations. But the thaw was short-lived.

Islamabad has received humanitarian aid from the United States, Japan, China and Saudi Arabia, among other countries, but not from India. In New York, where he was attending sessions of the UN General Assembly, Foreign Minister Bilawal Bhutto Zardari declared that Pakistan had not asked India for anything and did not expect it either.

Open wounds

The border between India’s Jammu and Kashmir provinces and Pakistan’s western Punjab is one of the most militarized in Asia. During partition, perhaps more than 14 million Hindus and Muslims were forced to leave their homes and villages to take refuge in the neighboring country where they were the majority. The wounds, in reality, never closed between two countries that are among the 10 most populous in the world, adding together almost 1,600 million inhabitants in an area of ​​four million square kilometers.

Until today, an area of ​​great natural beauty in the Himalayas is mutilated and divided by concrete fortifications and barbed wire and its population condemned to all kinds of impositions. During the partition, London considered an independent Kashmir, a way out that New Delhi could not allow. If the area, which was then 92% Muslim, ended up in the hands of Islamabad, India would lose the Hindu Kush mountains, its greatest natural defense barrier.

«The border between the Indian provinces of Jammu and Kashmir with the Pakistani western Punjab is one of the most militarized in Asia»

The national-Hinduism of the ruling Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), on the other hand, is fiercely anti-Islamic. India is home to 200 million Muslims, more than any other country outside of Indonesia. A large part of them live in urban ghettos where the limits of segregation are informal but evident. In September, the government outlawed eight Islamic organizations, including the Council of Indian Imams, and arrested two hundred of their members, accused of alleged links to terrorist groups.

Under these conditions, any friction can ignite the flames on the “line of control” of the border, arbitrarily drawn by Sir Cyril Radcliffe in the summer of 1947. At that time, Lahore, the capital of the Punjab, separated it from India’s Amritsar, holy city of the Sikhs, a journey of a few hours. In February 2019, a suicide terrorist attack in Pulwama, Kashmir, claimed by the Jaish-e-Mohammed group, prompted an Indian retaliatory airstrike on the Pakistani city of Balakot, from which the Islamists were operating.

Pakistani anti-aircraft fire shot down an Indian fighter. The release of its pilot a few days later defused the crisis, which exposed the geopolitical volatility that reigns on the roof of the world, where the borders of three nuclear powers converge, including China, which occupies Aksai Chin, a huge salt desert that unites Tibet and Xinjang and claims India on the world’s longest undemarcated border.

In 2019, Modi – elected in 2014 and re-elected in 2019 – unilaterally revoked the constitutional autonomy of Jammu and Kashmir, putting them under direct administration of New Delhi. Islamabad, however, hardly reacted.

nuclear doctrines

After the 1971 Indo-Pakistani war that ended with the independence of Bangladesh and the surrender of Pakistan, which lost a third of its army, Islamabad became convinced that only a nuclear arsenal could counter India’s overwhelming conventional superiority. In 1998 it carried out its first atomic tests.

India launched its nuclear program after the Chinese nuclear tests in the Lop Nor desert in Xinjinag in 1964. In 1974 it carried out its first atomic test. The condemnation and sanctions of the US and its allies forced India, which is not a signatory to the Treaty on the Non-Proliferation of Nuclear Weapons, to freeze its atomic development. In 1998, however, after military cooperation between Islamabad and Beijing increased, India carried out five atomic tests and Pakistan six.

In 2006 George W. Bush and then Indian Prime Minister Manmohan Singh signed a nuclear cooperation agreement that gave India access to US atomic technology in exchange for India separating its military and civilian atomic programs and accepting inspections by the International Organization. of Atomic Energy (IAEA) and that recognized de facto India as a nuclear power.

India’s nuclear doctrine is based on a credible deterrent and a no-first-use policy. Its arsenal is under civilian control and the nuclear warheads are separated from the missiles. India has not integrated such weapons into its military strategies. The official Pakistani nuclear doctrine, on the other hand, establishes as imperative the survival of the State and inflicting “unacceptable damage” on the enemy, something that in principle does not rule out preventive attacks.

indian self-confidence

Many things, however, move under the table. In February 2021, the Indian and Pakistani military commanders issued a rare joint statement to renew the ceasefire along the line of control. India has allowed, for the first time, Pakistani anti-terrorist forces to train with its own and those of other member countries of the Shanghai Cooperation Organization (SCO) on its own territory. Although Indian tariffs on Pakistani imports average around 200%, bilateral trade is slowly increasing.

As Sumit Ganguly writes in Foreign Policy, the links are heading on an encouraging path, among other things due to the growing self-confidence of India’s foreign policy, today courted by the US and its adversaries: China and Russia. The IMF expects India to grow 7.5% this year, more than any other major world economy. With its current 1.2 billion mobile lines, virtually every Indian, a sixth of the world’s population, has one. In the US, 60 of the CEOs of the 500 largest companies on the list of Forbes they are Indian, including Google’s Sundar Pichai.

“By 2025 25% of new phones will say ‘Designed by Apple in California. Assembled in India‘, according to JPMorgan calculations »

Apple is going to start manufacturing its iPhone 14 in India, in the plants that three Taiwanese companies: Foxconn, Pegatron and Wistron have in Tamil Nadu. JPMorgan estimates that by 2025 25% of its new phones will say “Designed by Apple in California. Assembled in India”. The Modi government has set a target for manufacturing to account for 25% of GDP by 2025, up from 15% today, to, among other things, reduce its imports from China.

Pakistan also has reasons to relax its relations with India. Also to mitigate its dependence on China, which has invested in large infrastructure projects such as the port of Gwadar within the framework of the Belt and Road Initiative. In addition, Islamabad is interested in rebuilding its bridges with the US, which goes through the thaw with India, a key piece of the Pentagon’s strategy in the Indo-Pacific.

Until his ouster in April, former Pakistani Prime Minister Imran Khan had conducted a foreign policy heavily tilted toward Beijing and Moscow. On February 24, the same day Russia invaded Ukraine, Putin received Khan, the first Pakistani leader to visit Moscow in more than 20 years, at the Kremlin. In one of his first statements, however, his successor, Shehbaz Sharif, said that “peace with India” would be one of his priorities.

As Tanvi Madan writes in foreign affairs, India’s initial wariness in the face of a Russian invasion stemmed from its fear that Moscow would abandon its neutrality and lean in favor of China in the event of a new border crisis. In June 2020, Indian and Chinese forces clashed in Ladakh’s Galwan Valley, in a clash that claimed the lives of 20 Indian soldiers and at least four Chinese, the first military casualties in 45 years.

At the SCO summit in Samarkand (Uzbekistan), Modi avoided meeting Chinese President Xi Jinping to make it clear that he is not willing to resume relations as if nothing had happened in Ladakh, where the “line of control” was looks more and more like the one that separates India from Pakistan.

Tibet and the Dalai Lama

Since 1951, when the People’s Republic annexed Tibet, New Delhi has perceived China as a potential military threat. In 1959, after the anti-Chinese riots in Lhasa and their brutal suppression, the Dalai Lama, leader of Tibetan Buddhism, crossed the Himalayas on foot to India accompanied by some 80,000 Tibetans.

Tenzin Gyatso, the 14th Dalai Lama, was declared head of the government in exile in November 1959 in Dharamsala, where he has lived ever since. Modi has made public his conversations with him despite the annoyance caused to Beijing by any official contact of foreign authorities with the Dalai Lama, despite the fact that in March 2011 he resigned from all political positions in the Tibetan government in exile, to remain just as a “simple Buddhist monk”.

In October 2020, India signed a geospatial intelligence agreement with the US and has been carrying out joint military exercises with its mountain troops in the Himalayas and in the Indian Ocean with its Quad partners: the US, Japan and Australia. The Indian Foreign Minister, Subrahmanyam Jainshankar, has supported the UN Human Rights Council’s critical reports on the situation of the Uyghur minority in the Chinese province of Xinjiang and criticized the militarization of the Taiwan Strait. According to Vijay Gokhale, former Indian Foreign Minister, bilateral relations will be, at least in the foreseeable future, one of “armed coexistence”.