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ARTICLE |
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Changing N-scenario in S. Asia
The likely implications for India
by Harsh V. Pant
Pakistan’s giant aeronautical complex at Kamra came under attack from the Tehrik-e-Taliban Pakistan (TTP) last week. The Minhas base, in the town of Kamra, houses the Pakistan Aeronautical Complex, the manufacturing division of the air force. It builds French-designed Mirage fighter planes and, with Chinese support, JF-17 fighter jets. This latest attack on the air base came amidst reports that the Pakistani military was preparing for a new military operation in the restive tribal region of North Waziristan. What have been particularly troubling are the reports that the base contains components of Pakistan’s nuclear-weapons programme, although the Pakistan government was categorical in its denial. But the reassurance had to come from Washington that the nuclear arsenal in Pakistan remains safe. The world doesn’t really believe anything that comes out of Islamabad anymore. According to the most recent estimates by US intelligence agencies, Pakistan has doubled its nuclear stockpile over the last few years with the nation’s arsenal now totalling more than 100 deployed weapons. Pakistan is now ahead of India in the production of uranium and plutonium for bombs and development of delivery weapons. It is now producing nuclear weapons at a faster rate than any other country in the world. Pakistan will soon be the world’s fourth largest nuclear weapon state ahead of France and Britain and behind only the US, Russia and China. It is investing heavily in plutonium production capacity with work reportedly underway on a fourth plutonium-producing reactor at Khushab nuclear complex. The danger is that this expansion is happening at a time of great internal turmoil in the country and the rise in religious extremism. The fears of proliferation and possible terrorist attempts to seize nuclear materials are real and cannot be brushed aside. Along with the defeat of Al-Qaeda, the Obama Administration’s Afghan War Review had mentioned Pakistan’s nuclear security as one of the two long-term strategy objectives in Af-Pak. In State Department cables released by WikiLeaks, concerns about the vulnerability of Pakistan’s nuclear material were evident. As the Obama Administration was starting to review its Af-Pak policy, an intelligence report suggested that that while Pakistan’s weapons were well secured, there was deep, continuing concern about “insider access,” meaning elements in the military or intelligence services. The then US Ambassador to Pakistan, Anne Patterson, wrote in a separate document that “our major concern is not having an Islamic militant steal an entire weapon but rather the chance someone working in GOP (Government of Pakistan) facilities could gradually smuggle enough material out to eventually make a weapon.” But any attempt by the US to force Pakistan on the nuclear issue will only generate further suspicion that the US favours India and wants to control Pakistan’s nuclear weapons. This, despite the fact that throughout the Cold War years, it was Washington that was critical in giving a boost to Pakistani nuclear programme by wilfully turning a blind eye to nuclear developments in the country. Pakistan already has more than enough nuclear weapons for an effective deterrent against India. Around 110 nuclear weapons will not make Pakistan’s nuclear deterrent more effective as compared to a deterrent based on 60-odd weapons. Nuclear deterrence doesn’t work like that. The higher number will just be used by the military to enhance its prestige by claiming that Pakistan is ahead of India, at least in this area. For long, the US and the rest of the West have viewed nuclear weapons in South Asia with dread because of the possibility that a conventional war between India and Pakistan might escalate into a nuclear one. Former US President Bill Clinton called the Kashmir conflict “the most dangerous flashpoint on earth” precisely because of this fear of a nuclear holocaust in the Indian subcontinent. Indian and Pakistani officials, on the other hand, have continued to argue that just as the threat of mutual assured destruction resulted in a “hot peace” between the US and the former Soviet Union during the Cold War, nuclear weapons in South Asia will also have a stabilising impact. They point out the fact that despite several provocations, India and Pakistan have behaved “rationally” during various crises by keeping their conflicts limited and avoiding escalation. But since September 11, 2001, the nature of the problem for the West has changed insofar as the threat is now more of Pakistan’s nuclear arsenal being used against the West by radical Islamists if they can lay their hands on it. There is little hope that the rational actor model on which classical nuclear deterrence theory is based would apply as much to militant Islamist groups as it would to the Pakistan government. The present turmoil in Pakistan has once again raised concerns about the safety, security and command and control of its nuclear stockpile. The command and control arrangements continue to be beset with some fundamental vulnerabilities that underline the reluctance of the Pakistani military to cede control over the nation’s nuclear assets to civilian leaders. Moreover, senior civilian and military officials responsible for these weapons have a problematic track record in maintaining close control over them. The US has suggested that there are contingency plans in place to deal with the possibility of Pakistan’s nuclear weapons falling into the hands of militant groups, but it remains far from clear as to what exactly the US would be able to do if such an eventuality arose. This poses a serious challenge to the Indian credible minimum deterrent nuclear posture. While India has little to worry about Pakistan’s desire to have more than 100 nuclear warheads, the possibility of leakage from the state to non-state actors is a serious threat as it will undermine India’s ability to maintain peace in the region. A dangerous new nuclear matrix is emerging in the region. India needs to be aware of the potentially catastrophic implications of the collapse of the governing authority in Pakistan. A boost to fundamentalist forces in India’s neighbourhood will have some serious consequences for the utility of nuclear deterrence in the subcontinent. Irrespective of India’s other problems with Pakistan, Indian decision-makers had little doubt so far in trusting that their Pakistani counterparts would take rational decisions insofar as the use of nuclear weapons was concerned. That assumption might soon need revisiting if the present trends in Pakistan continue for much longer. The present turmoil in Pakistan and all its attendant consequences in the nuclear realm point to the long-term costs of short-sighted policies — the politics of proliferation — followed by the West in countering
proliferation. The writer teaches at King’s College, London.
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MIDDLE |
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Renewed contacts
by Harish Dhillon
My
work with newspapers is very dear to me: the occasional articles because they never fail to draw praise and reassure me that there is some merit even in my mediocre writing; the editorial work that comes my way, because it gives something productive to fill up the empty post-retirement hours. This work has also, on occasion, re-established contact with my past.A lady named Kiran Dhami rang me up to say how much her mother-in-law and she loved my articles and then she added that her mother-in-law belonged to my village. I spoke to her and she told me that she was Sarup Singh’s daughter. My branch of the family was one generation behind the others, and though Sarup Singh was probably as old as my father, he took pleasure in always addressing me as “Veer,” with a mocking gleam in his eyes. This never failed to arouse laughter among any adults who were present. I didn’t mind because at the end of each visit he filled my pockets with roasted ‘makki’ and specially made ‘gur’. We moved away and my visits to the village became fewer and fewer and soon ceased altogether. I lost contact with him and now across the chasm of the years, in a tenuous way, he had reached out to me. While reading news-stories from Kashmir, I would often come across a particular surname that was the same as that of my political science teacher, Manzoor Sahib. I would push the thought away but one day it came back so strong that it would not be denied. I mailed to the Editor of the paper concerned and got the writer’s number. My instinct had been right — he was Manzur’s son. He gave me Manzur’s number in Bandipore. As I waited for the phone, he came back to my mind, young, enthusiastic, a teacher whose lectures went well beyond the scope of his subject to embrace life itself. He came on the line. He didn’t remember me, of course, but it was good telling him how much knowing him had mattered to me. I spoke to the son as well. I told him that his father had not remembered me but could he please tell him that I was the only non-Kashmiri in his class. I added for good measure: “Tell him, I was the boy whose bus fell into the Chenab.” Sure enough, Manzur did remember now. It was not what I would have liked to be remembered for, but under the circumstances, I was grateful to be remembered at all. It is true that the past is finished and done with, that people like co-passengers in a train have travelled with us some distance and then moved on and gone their separate ways. All that remains are memories. But sometimes, one catches a glimpse of some of these once fellow-travellers, always truncated, fleeting and miniaturised, like an image in a rear-view mirror, and yet a glimpse which leaves us happier and richer and warmer than
before.
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OPED
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Framing the debate on death penalty
Arguments for and against capital punishment have revolved around details of specific cases. What needs to be established is whether the State has the ability to be absolutely sure of a person’s guilt, or even has the right to take life at all
Ruchi Gupta
 Former
President Pratibha Patil’s decision to grant clemency to as many as 39 death-row convicts brought the issue of the death penalty to the centre stage. President Pranab Mukherjee has inherited 16 pending mercy petitions, including the highly politicised case of Afzal Guru. Unfortunately, given the nature of public response, as steered by the media, the issue is likely to be put on the backburner till after the furore dies down. However, with the relationship between the State and people being renegotiated around the world (with varying degrees of success), it is important to evaluate the justification for the death penalty in the Indian state’s arsenal before pushing the topic out of the public discourse.Media coverage on the topic has followed a set pattern: a focus on the grisly specifics of some of these crimes, and interpreting clemency as “mercy to mass killers and rapists and killers of children”. Consequently, the public debate too has oscillated between the twin themes of “retribution” and “reform”. On the one hand, there is the victim’s (and kin’s) right to retribution (justice) for the undeniably horrible crime, and on the other hand, the perpetrator, and his/her capacity for reform (on a somewhat tangential note, it is noteworthy that the current legal agitations on this subject pivot on altogether separate issues). While these are both important considerations, they are irrelevant to the death penalty debate. Both these criteria are too mired in the specifics, which however horrific, are transient and subject to the vicissitudes of public opinion. The only pivotal issue of enduring significance in this debate is the extent to which such power should be vested in the State. Arbitrary judgments The State is an abstraction — of powers vested in the name of the citizens to be exercised by designated state functionaries. However, the different socio-economic backgrounds and attendant prejudices of these functionaries, and the inherent fallibility of human nature, render the application of state power arbitrary and susceptible to misjudgement. To minimise this, the State’s powers are defined and constrained by institutional and legal processes. Nevertheless, every day government departments yield egregious examples of subversion and overreach. The death penalty too is awarded arbitrarily. While this is true of all State power, it is unconscionable where the consequences are all-encompassing and irreversible as in capital punishment. Much has been made of the fact that these death row convicts committed exceptionally heinous, “rarest of the rare” crimes. However, this thesis advanced in Bachan Singh (1980) was never explicitly defined. Four of the five judges on the bench held that “real and abiding concern for the dignity of human life postulates resistance to taking a life through law’s instrumentality. That ought not to be done save in the rarest of rare cases when the alternative option is unquestionably foreclosed”. They did not define “rarest of rare”; nor are there any legislative guidelines. The fifth judge, Justice Bhagwati, dissented, questioning the validity of such “exceptional” cases, and noted that without legislative guidelines, “the task of the judges becomes much more arbitrary and the sentencing decision is bound to vary with each judge”. The former President’s record on mercy petitions has been criticised in some quarters as a politically motivated administrative dilution of the judicial process. However, the lack of unanimity in the above Supreme Court judgment itself shows that the judiciary is not a neutral arbiter of law. Nor is it a monolithic institution — individual judges are motivated by their own ideology — there are abolitionist judges, there are retentionist judges. The outcome of a case is thus contingent not just on merits, but also on who hears their case. This is evident in the case of Harbans Singh versus Uttar Pradesh (1982), where three people were held equally culpable for the murder of four people, and sentenced to death by the trial court. The High Court confirmed their death sentence, as part of the legal process. Yet in the Supreme Court, appeals of two were dismissed, while one was commuted to life imprisonment. There are other anomalies of treatment in this instance, and other cases. Miscarriage of justice There is further incontrovertible proof that the judicial process is itself no guarantee of consistent application of standards and rule of law, as admitted by the Supreme Court itself. Bachan Singh mandates that mitigating circumstances pertaining to the criminal be accorded due weightage while deciding to award the death penalty. However, in Ravji Rao (1996), the Supreme Court held that “it is the nature and gravity of the crime but not the criminal, which are germane for consideration of appropriate punishment in a criminal trial.” This logic was then used to award the death penalty to 14 more persons in eight judgments. Subsequently the Supreme Court (Bariyar, 2009) admitted that these judgments had been “rendered per incuriam” (in ignorance). Shockingly, even though the Supreme Court is cognizant of this egregious lapse of due process, it has not taken any corrective action such as setting up a new Bench to review these cases afresh. The individuals concerned continue to languish on the death row. Tragically, two such prisoners have already been executed: Ravji Rao (1996) and Surja Ram (1997). In an unprecedented move, 14 former judges of the Supreme Court and state High Courts have recently written to the President expressing their distress at this “gravest known miscarriage of justice in the history of crime and punishment in independent India” and requesting commutation of the remaining 13 death sentences. They write, “Executions of persons wrongly sentenced to death will severely undermine the credibility of the criminal justice system and the authority of the state to carry out such punishments in future. This matter goes to the very heart of our Constitution and the system of democratic government because it involves the taking of lives by the State on the basis of judgments admitted to be erroneous by the Supreme Court.” Given this judicial arbitrariness, it is not evident that the individual on death row is any more culpable than the individual with a life sentence or vice versa. However, there is also no certitude that the individual is culpable at all. Take the example of Carlos Deluna. In an investigation spanning six years, a Columbia University law professor, James Liebman, and his students have painstakingly documented that Carlos Deluna, executed by the State of Texas in 1989, was innocent. Their investigation uncovers shocking callousness and lax standards in the original investigation, which ultimately led to the execution of an innocent man. The Professor observed, “It was an obscure case, the kind that could involve anybody. Maybe those are the cases where miscarriages of justice happen, the routine everyday cases where nobody thinks enough about the victim, let alone the defendant". It is not a large leap of logic to see that there are abundant such “routine everyday cases” in India too, and an innocent person being sent to the gallows, primarily because of his poverty, is not outside the realm of possibility. State overreach Finally, there’s the question of the State itself. The State is a construct, which draws its legitimacy and powers from shared normative standards of its constituents. The State enjoys a monopoly on violence by the very fact of these shared norms. Yet public opinion on the issue of capital punishment is highly polarised, with a significant section against its use. If the State still persists in the use of this disputed power, it is akin to the majoritarian tendencies of a mob. A democratic State should at the very least guarantee that collective acts of irreversible destruction enjoy consensus. State violence in the face of dissent is a sign of authoritarianism, and lacks democratic legitimacy. Moreover, the State at its core is purposed to maintain security and ensure development — the power to kill is clearly an overreach since incarceration alone is adequate to meet the demands of security (the argument that the death penalty serves as deterrence is mere rhetoric without any empirical proof). It is important to debate the place of the death penalty in Indian society once again. Moreover, the debate must move beyond the adversarial lens of the rights of the victim versus the perpetrator, and evaluate the legitimacy of power of the State to kill one of its own constituents. The writer is an independent
researcher on issues of democracy and state accountability;
gupta.ruchi@gmail.com
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