SOUTH ASIA'S NEW NUKE ASYMMETRY

AFTER CHINA, PAKISTAN IS THE SECOND MOST CAPABLE NUCLEAR POWER IN SOUTH ASIA, PUSHING INDIA TO THIRD PLACE

- Raj Chengappa

Twenty-five years after India and Pakistan conducted a series of nuclear tests in May 1998 and declared themselves as nuclear weapon states, it’s a good time for stocktaking. There is no better expert than Ashley J. Tellis, senior fellow at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, Washington DC, to do that. Tellis has been involved in the evolving nuclear scenario in the greater South Asian region for over four decades. His book, Striking Asymmetries: Nuclear Transitions in Southern Asia, goes beyond the nuclear dyad of India and Pakistan and rightly brings in the China factor. For it was China, not Pakistan, that drove India into developing its own nuclear arsenal after its defeat in 1962. By juxtaposing the two dyads, Tellis reveals fascinating parallels. As he puts it, in each case, the weaker state—Pakistan vis-àvis India and India vis-à-vis China—is far more concerned about the stronger one, yet the stronger entity is compelled to keep the weaker in its strategic view. In both dyads, the disputes involve struggle over territory, besides ideological antagonisms and a quest for parity or primacy. These get further complicated by the larger geopolitical contest between China and Russia vis-à-vis the US.