BJP sets speculation to rest on nuclear doctrine
BJP president Rajnath Singh's recent clarification that, should his party come to power, it will not change India's more than a decade old ‘no first use' nuclear policy, must end the incessant scare-mongering that has been undertaken by his party's critics. Ever since the BJP announced in its manifesto, released earlier this month, that it will “study in detail India's nuclear doctrine, and revise and update it, to make it relevant to challenges of current times”, its opponents have interpreted the statement as an abandonment of the ‘no first use' principle. Detractors of the party, especially those opposed to its prime ministerial candidate Narendra Modi, have used the revision clause to fuel fears of a nuclear war, possibly against Pakistan. This has helped them add some colour and spice to their alarmist discourse about the ‘hardline' and ‘muscular' foreign policy that a Government led by Mr Modi, who has been variously described as a ‘nationalist' and a ‘Hindu strongman', is expected to craft. But that apart, the commentariat's loose talk of the BJP discarding the ‘no first use' principle, and re-modelling India's nuclear policy into one that is needlessly aggressive and on the offensive, was hardly grounded in facts. And the party president has now established this in no uncertain terms. On Monday, he took the sting out of the anti-BJP campaign by dismissing any possibility that a Government led by his party will remove the ‘no first use’ clause.
Mr Singh also did well to use the opportunity to bring to the people's attention that the ‘no first use’ principle was, in fact, introduced into India's nuclear doctrine by a BJP Prime Minister — Atal Bihari Vajpayee. Many forget that after the landmark Pokharan tests in 1998, it was Mr Vajpayee who cemented India's position as a responsible nuclear power when he committed the country to a distinct, unilateral and global no-first-use nuclear strike policy. Under his leadership, India vowed that neither will it be the first to use nuclear weapons against another nuclear state nor will it ever use them against a non-nuclear country. The principle was primarily designed to put Pakistan at ease. On that count, it has had only limited success as Pakistan has nearly doubled its nuclear arsenal in the years since then. But the principle was also key to containing the flood of brickbats that India was receiving from the international community for supposedly deserting the path to disarmament. The ‘no first use’ pledge helped calm New Delhi's detractors who were already raising red flags over a potential arms race. In the years since then, India's dogged commitment to the policy has also brought it much goodwill in the comity of nations and has overall served national interests. India has always been a peace-loving nation with a long tradition that goes far beyond a Congress-BJP turf war, of not attacking its neighbours unless provoked. There is no reason to believe that the country will deviate from that path now.