Daily Times

On 5th August 2019 India’s Home Minister Amit Shah introduced the bill to revoke the special status granted to Indian Occupied Kashmir. The “Jammu and Kashmir Reorganization Bill,2019” passed both the lower and upper house of the Indian parliament with overwhelming force and became law. This bill will take full effect on the 31st of October 2019 and will effectively revoke Indian Occupied Kashmir’s special status as stated in Art.370 of the Indian Constitution.

Prior to this revocation, IOK was given special status which did not allow Indians from other provinces of India to purchase property in IOK. The article also granted the IOK legislature a separate constitution and administrative autonomy. Today I will not delve into the legal aspects of this debate. I won’t confuse the reader with legal jargon and citation codes of Indian courts which allowed somewhat special protections to the Kashmiri people living in IOK. That is a debate for another day.

Today I will try to make sense of Modi’s actions. I will also be looking at whether the “gung ho” ultranationalist Modi has even the slightest of idea what his actions mean for not only the sub-continent but also the world.

Till August 5th 2019international diplomatic circles have treated the Kashmir issue as one treats an abandoned kitten, a mild nuisance which is not worth much interest. Even Pakistan’s allies treated the subject with disdain and relegated it to the dusty archives of failed diplomacy. What the world failed to understand was its own constant and empty rhetoric, that India and Pakistan must commit to meaningful dialogue in order mitigate any dangers of war breaking out between the two powers over the Kashmir issue. Pakistan and India are the worlds’ youngest declared nuclear powers and they have fought three major wars two of which were ignited by the Kashmir issue and even after conducting extensive nuclear tests both have never shied away from escalating border skirmishes. In the words of the late Li Peng, former premier of the People’s Republic of China “As a historical legacy, the Kashmir conflict has been an outstanding issue for more than half a century”. The obvious was stated by Mr. Peng but sadly no tangible action has ever been taken by the United Nations Security Council to remedy this fact. Left to his own devices Modi finally did the unthinkable, settling the Kashmir issue unilaterally.

What is more alarming is the buildup to the events of August 5th 2019. India deployed its Air Force in order to hit so-called terror camps “Deep within Pakistani territory”. Though, the Abhinandan episode quickly put Indian claims of having deep strike capability to shame. The fact that PM Modi and the Indian military establishment even considered such a dangerous and provocative move points to an innate lack of understanding of what war between nuclear armed nations will entail. What’s more, this sense of nuclear adventurism has been displayed by India’s Defense Minister Rajnath Singh in his tweet making veiled threats of nuclear strikes if need be. India’s utter lack of understanding of what the M.A.D doctrine means is worrisome to say the least. Regardless of the nuclear dimension of any future conflicts, Modi is raising the pressure on Pakistan. It is his belief that nuclear weapons will never be used and this dangerous belief may lead him to cause a chain of events that lead to full scale war between Pakistan and India. Such a conflict will inevitably end in nuclear exchange due to the sheer difference in the belligerents’ capability to field troops and equipment to the battlefield. But what is M.A.D? Is it really as crazy as it sounds?

M.A.D or mutually assured destruction is a cold war era term coined by Donald Brennan; a strategist working in the Hudson Institute during the 1960’s and postulates that both belligerents possess enough nuclear capability to utterly annihilate the other in case war erupts. This lack of survivability of a major nuclear exchange between the warring sides is enough to pour cold water on any policy makers venturing beyond sabre rattling.

M.A.D is a precarious but effective balance that has saved the world from a nuclear holocaust on multiple occasions. Both the Soviet Union and the United States of America knew the stakes when they faced off on contentious issues during the Cold War. The moment one super state developed some new delivery method or networks of nuclear shelters or a new generation of more powerful nuclear warheads, the other would follow suit in order to restore the balance and keep nuclear adventurism at bay. Though this gave rise to an unceasing arms race between the two mega powers, it still managed to save humanity from extinction. From the stressful days of the Cuban Missile Crisis to the ever escalating war in Vietnam both the Soviet Union and the United States knew that certain limits should never be crossed regardless of the consequences of inaction.

In recent years the Indian government has deluded itself into thinking they can somehow circumvent the problem posed by M.A.D. They have allegedly converted some of their mass transit railway stations into fallout shelters which they believe will protect people from the effects of nuclear blasts and the resulting fallout. They are also investing in purpose built public and VIP bomb shelters to weather a nuclear storm. India has further exacerbated the situation by working on implementing the Israeli Iron Dome short range Air & Missile defense system. Though Iron Dome has a somewhat plausible capability of stopping dumb rockets, its ability to target and successfully neutralize sophisticated ballistic missiles is dubious at best. Even if such a system of interceptors was placed the odds of just a couple of warheads getting through the missile shield are enough to knock sense into any hot heads. Considering the fact that Pakistan now has the capability of deploying sophisticated MIRV (Multiple Independently targeted Re-entry Vehicle) warheads this missile defense shield has become even more irrelevant. Furthermore the successful interception of nuclear armed missiles midflight is not a solution per se as this scenario creates problems of its own, for instance where will all the radiation go? What about the irradiated debris from the exploding rockets? Will there be total containment and cleanup after such interceptions?Is such cleanup even scientifically possible?

The Indian government also fails to appreciate the fact that missile flight times between the two countries are as low as 4 minutes. In such circumstances any protective measure taken by both sides to shelter their citizens is redundant. They also fail to realize that nuclear events leave unprecedented fallout that medical science and engineering simply cannot contain.

India’s apparent romance with T.K Jones and his mantra “If there are enough shovels to go around, everybody’s going to make it” bely a flawed mindset. They forget that the famous Duck and Cover short film was ridiculed and that the Jonsian approach to nuclear civil defense had no practical value. The only defense against nuclear war is not fighting a war to begin with. No amount of bunkers and drills will rid the earth of the radioactive fallout that will descend as a result of even a small exchange between the two countries. Moreover, a bunker is only as good as long as its kept secret. We find many historical examples of this. Whenever a nuclear bunker was inadvertently discovered by people in the US the government abandoned that facility and probably created other facilities unbeknownst to the public and the Soviet Union. Modern bunker busting nuclear missiles will target and destroy any structures or hollows perceived as hardened nuclear shelters. This tactic will eliminate the perceived advantages created by such networks.

The Writer is a practicing lawyer based out of Multan whose studies have a special focus on Blockchain Technology, Legal and Public Policy and strategic studies. He may be reached on the email address given below Email:syedalitahiradvocate@gmail.com