After the NSG

The national security adviser M.K. Narayanan’s visit to Beijing this week, for yet another round of the border talks, is an appropriate moment to start assessing, with an open mind, China’s next moves in the geopolitical chess-board. That in turn demands getting a handle on China’s deeper concerns that made it act the way it did at the NSG.

India’s self-referential internal debates generally prevent New Delhi from appreciating how other nations see its moves and anticipating how they might respond to its actions. Take for example, India’s affirmation in May 1974, when it declared that its first nuclear test was a ‘peaceful nuclear explosion’.

The rest of the world viewed it as a demonstration of India’s nuclear weapon capability. Although India did not proceed down the road of nuclear weaponisation for many years after Pokharan I, the world saw India as a proliferation threat and mounted a technology denial regime against it. Beijing saw Pokharan I as part of India’s determination to consolidate its ‘hegemony’ in South Asia after its decisive military intervention to divide Pakistan in 1971.

Indo-Pak parity

After Prime Minister Manmohan Singh and US President George W. Bush unveiled the nuclear deal in July 2005, the initial Chinese reactions were indeed focused on getting Pakistan a similar deal. That objective remained in play right until the very end of NSG’s extended deliberations.

If Islamabad was not in such a bad shape, as it is today, Beijing would have had a lot more room to either sustain Indo-Pak parity or deny the international acceptance of India’s nuclear exceptionalism. Having failed to achieve either, Beijing’s real concern, it is not unreasonable to assume, might be about the changing balance of power between India and Pakistan.

Without an NSG approval, which is all but impossible, Beijing cannot match the Indo-US deal with a similar Sino-Pak civil nuclear initiative. Having become part of the NPT, China cannot legally assist in the expansion of Pakistan’s nuclear weapons programme either. Legal assistance which might be possible in the missile arena is unlikely to alter the military balance between India and Pakistan. That might leave China with two options: one is to accept the impossibility of sustaining Pakistan’s parity with India; the other is to extend its nuclear umbrella over Pakistan.

... contd.