New Delhi Needs to Adopt Dual-Track Policy

India in crosshairs of an impending Missile Race
New Delhi Needs to Adopt Dual-Track Policy

New Delhi needs to adopt a dual-track policy to stand up to the challenge of more potent Chinese missiles in the neighborhood as a result of the fall down of the US-Russia agreement on land-based ballistic missiles. While India's military-industrial compound recalibrates its strategy and response, there is a need to dampen machismo in the global air by examining the opportunity of a fresh missile restriction proposal.

The Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces (INF) Treaty, scrapped recently by US President Donald Trump, doesn't ring a bell in India. Neither should it. The painfully-achieved Cold War-era pact was between Russia and the US and it necessary for both to obliterate their stockpiles of ground-launched ballistic and journey armaments with ranges between 500 km and 5,500 km.

By all accounts, the agreement was a success. It led to the dismantle and obliteration of over 2,500 missiles of both countries, quarterbacked by a thorough verification regime that lasted till 2001 and followed by 30 meetings of their Special Verification Commission.

The treaty was stuttering till Trump dealt a death bluster against the shade of extensive refuse in bilateral ties after Russia entered Crimea and supposedly interfered in the 2016 US presidential election. But the actual reason for scrapping the treaty was China. And once the US begins a missile race with China, India will soon feel the heat. Its only possible answer, given the mindset of narrow regionalism in South Block, would be to organize more missiles of its own.


Why does China turn into a factor and why should India get dragged in when it was a US-Russia mutual agreement that was scrapped? The logic is in the past. During the Cold War, China had no rocket force to boast of and so the center of the risk de-escalators among diplomats was to shut out the option of US-Soviet rivalry sideswiping the world with nuclear weapon-loaded armaments. Since then, China developed a nuclear and conservative missile inventory, 95 percent of which is in the INF Treaty-banned ranges of 500 to 5,500 km.

Trump feels the agreement cramp the US from setting up all sorts of armaments on the ground in its bases in Japan and Korea: a dodge prohibits armaments on earth but allows sea and space-based armaments. Trump has left no scope for hesitation by stating that his desertion of the treaty was a 'threat' to "China and whoever else wants to play that game." The hardliners in the US had been rotating the wagons for months. Xi Jinping's refrain to the People's Liberation Army to be ready for war and his gauntlet to self-government seekers in Taiwan need to be seen in this backdrop.

Once the US installs land-based missiles around China, Xi's hard-line abroad will induce him to react in the talking of disagreement, putting a huge force on India to step up investigate in hypersonic missiles and also react with more projectile systems. Pakistan will then react similarly. Trump's plan of counter China will drag India into the step up the strength and amount of its rocket forces.

The INF Treaty has located India at the interstices of a Cold War 2.0. As the recent G-20 height showed, India was the only country that held disconnect trilateral with Japan and the US and the other combination of Russia and China. It can capitalize on its location to develop both binaries budding from the fall down of the agreement. The military-industrial multifaceted can reorient to the opening up of new safety threats while South Block attempts to play the extra-regional negotiator by attempting a swelling of the treaty to reduce nuclear missile stocks worldwide.

This need not involve a change in regional policy behavior of being largely a subcontinental security seeker. Thirty years after the then Prime Minister Rajiv Gandhi's effort at a security system-reforming moment with a global disarmament plan, there is another chance to seek a turnaround of the ballistic missile race that is blighting our part of the world more than any other: of the nine states known to have both nuclear weapons and over 1,000-km-range ballistic missiles, six are Eurasian (not counting the US). Another 22 possess non-nuclear-tipped missiles with a range that does not fall within the INF Treaty limits.

All three postulates of the India-presented 'Action Plan for a Nuclear-Weapon-Free and Non-Violent World Order' remain valid: (i) ballistic missiles do not distinguish between combatants and civilians, (ii) they hold others to inhuman threats and, the most relevant (iii) India will have to divert more of its limited resources away from other pressing needs to match improved Chinese (and later, Pakistani) weapons and delivery systems. This move toward will ensure India's complete participation with the Asian system which is being attempted little by little.

The world at this stage wants to give a rest to the balance of power concept in which safety geopolitics has been marked by growth. A persuasion-based replica of politics has become predictable and India is bound to find allies in Europe that have been uncharacteristically taken to insular continentalism. Barring England and France, whose missile arsenals will come under scrutiny, other old powers like GermanySpain, and Italy, despairing of US-induced tensions on Russia's periphery, may welcome an attempt at the examination the enthusiasm of an externally-induced missile race on their territory that has the potential to consume its citizens. The proposal to globally extend the INF will also find takers in Africa and Latin America that have no missile-dependent security calculations.

International politics can't be left to its devices and the whims of strongmen. The opposing US reaction to the missile propagation issue — walking out of the treaty with Russia, worthwhile Pyongyang with talks and throwing the book at Tehran — needs an overdue correction. India needs to keep its flanks guarded, but the world needs a fresh breath of ethical ethos to keep its moral compass in place.

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