The Bharatiya Janata Party's (BJP's) proposal to "revise and update" India's nuclear doctrine to "make it relevant to challenges of current times" (sic) in its election manifesto, which was released on Monday, has rightly attracted disquiet at home and abroad. Despite the carefully innocuous language, the statement has been interpreted as an intention to dilute the "no first use" policy that was adopted after India conducted its second nuclear tests in 1998. Given that the BJP might well come to power soon, and with it its overtly muscular brand of Hindutva politics, there is good reason to suspect that it will jettison this pledge. A hardening stance against Pakistan has been indirectly articulated by the party's prime ministerial candidate, Narendra Modi, at several fora.
On the face of it, there may be practical arguments for doing away with the "no first use" pledge - not least of which is the fact that Pakistan, which has targeted its nuclear deterrent solely against India, does not subscribe to this doctrine and in recent years it claims to have developed miniaturised nuclear weapons capabilities, thereby lowering the threshold of nuclear use. It could also be argued that the intrinsic value of the doctrine is weak in any case since, as National Security Advisor Shivshankar Menon clarified in a speech at the National Defence College in 2010, the "no first use" doctrine applies to non-nuclear weapon states (and thus, not to Pakistan). But on the whole, jettisoning it would be an ill-advised move. Quite apart from the obvious permanent security threat in South Asia, the "no first use" pledge gives India a unique and useful moral standing within the international community, especially when juxtaposed against the unprincipled nature of Pakistan's nuclear programme and technology transfers to rogue regimes.
It is worth noting that the nuclear doctrine, with its emphasis on minimal deterrence and direct linkage to nuclear disarmament, was adopted by a former BJP government under Atal Bihari Vajpayee after the nuclear tests and earned India plaudits. The tests themselves, although projected as a strategy to protect India's security interests against Pakistan, imposed on India the unnecessary weight of sanctions from the global community and raised the temperature locally - culminating in the Kargil War in Kashmir the next year. Then, the value of India's "no first use" pledge became evident: it acted as a brake on what could well have escalated into a nuclear conflagration and certainly played a role in encouraging a US president to pressure Pakistan to back down. It also put India on a stronger ethical footing and made it easier for the US and India to negotiate the Indo-US nuclear deal, which did much in signalling the end of the country's isolation in the global community.
The saffron haze that currently envelops the BJP leadership may have blinded it to the fact that discarding the "no first use" doctrine would, ironically, put India on a par with the "Islamic Republic" next door. Since the BJP's manifesto talks of India getting its "rightful place in the comity of nations", the party might look to the emerging superpower, China, which adopted the doctrine in 1964. As Cold War history has demonstrated, the balance of peace can be achieved by voluntary restraint as well.
