India has strictly adhered to its ‘no first use’ nuclear policy but “what happens in the future depends on the circumstances”, Defence Minister Rajnath Singh said on Friday during a visit to Rajasthan’s Pokhran. The visit, timed to coincide with the first death anniversary of former prime minister Atal Bihari Vajpayee, is seen to be designed to be a message to Pakistan that has scaled up the rhetoric against India after New Delhi abruptly changed the status of Jammu and Kashmir.
Rajnath Singh followed up his statement to a news agency with a string of tweets to make the same point.
“Pokhran is the area which witnessed Atal Ji’s firm resolve to make India a nuclear power and yet remain firmly committed to the doctrine of ‘No First Use’. India has strictly adhered to this doctrine. What happens in future depends on the circumstances,” the defence minister tweeted.
Indian nuclear doctrine says No First Use (NFU) but warns of massive retaliation in the event of a nuclear, chemical or biological strike on its soil or on its forces anywhere.
Rajnath Singh isn’t the NDA’s first defence minister to indicate that a rethink might have been on.
Also Read: India must revise its nuclear policy and keep its strategy opaque
Back in 2016, then defence minister Manohar Parrikar too had questioned the ‘no first use’ nuclear doctrine to underline that the policy should have just said that India is a responsible nuclear power. That remark had come a couple of months after India carried out the surgical strikes at terrorist launch pads along the Line of Control.
The defence ministry had clarified the same day that the minister, speaking at a book launch, had only expressed his personal opinion and the government’s policy on ‘no first use’ hadn’t changed.
Vipin Narang, a nuclear affairs expert at MIT in the United States, tweeted that Rajnath Singh’s comments were a hint that the policy on ‘no first use’ could change.
“Make no mistake: this is by far the highest official statement — from the Raksha Mantri’s (Defence Minister) mouth directly — that India may not be forever bound by No First Use,” Vipin Narang, who has worked extensively on nuclear strategy, said on Twitter.
Also read: Why is India’s no first use policy under so much strain?
Earlier in 2013, in the backdrop of Pakistan introducing tactical nuclear weapons – sub- kilo tonne nuclear weapons for battle field use, Shyam Saran, former Foreign Secretary as Chairman of the National Security Advisory Board (NSAB) had said “India will not be the first to use nuclear weapons, but if it is attacked with such weapons, it would engage in nuclear retaliation which will be massive and designed to inflict unacceptable damage on its adversary. The label on a nuclear weapon used for attacking India, strategic or tactical, is irrelevant from the Indian perspective.”
The BJP did pledge to revise and update India’s nuclear doctrine in its 2014 manifesto but skipped the topic in 2019.
But Prime Minister Narendra Modi, responding to threats from Pakistan that it could be pushed into using nuclear weapons, hit out at Pakistan during the run-up to the national elections. “Every other day they [Pakistan] used to say, ‘We’ve nuclear button, we’ve nuclear button’…What do we have then? Have we kept it for Diwali?” PM Modi told an election meeting in Barmer, a little over 200 km from Pokhran.
First Published:
Aug 16, 2019 19:25 IST
Source: HindustanTimes