Exodus of Foreigners From India Heightens Nuke Fears

by Ranjit Devraj

"Somehow I am glad that my children are away on an extended summer holiday," said Teji Khanna, a worried resident of Delhi's fashionable south district. Khanna said she found front page pictures and television footage of departing foreign families today disturbing.

British foreign secretary Jack Straw, after visiting Islamabad and New Delhi to counsel peace between the nuclear-armed neighbors, was prompted on May 31 to urge the estimated 20,000 resident Britons in India to leave immediately.

Reacting to an aborted "jihadist" attempt last December to blow up India's Parliament using a car laden with explosives, New Delhi ordered more than 700,000 of its troops to the Pakistan border backed by missiles, tanks and its air force.

Pakistan denied involvement in the attack, which resulted in the deaths of 14 people. Islamabad responded to the military build-up by matching deployments on the other side of the border.

Even before Straw's evacuation announcement, the United States had asked all its non-essential diplomatic staff and the 60,000 Americans residing in India to pack up.

On May 31, following discussions with Indian Foreign Minister Jaswant Singh, Japanese Vice-Minister for Foreign Affairs, Seiken Suguira was convinced that India was prepared to carry out punitive raids into the Pakistan-controlled side of disputed Kashmir and destroy "jihadist" militant camps that are known to exist there.

Suguira called a press conference to warn of any dangers. "The Japanese people know the serious damage that can be caused...more than 100,000 people died instantly in Hiroshima and Nagasaki while another 500,000 people became "prolonged victims of illnesses caused by the bombs and some are still suffering after more than 55 years," he said, referring to the U.S. atomic bombings of the Japanese cities in 1945.

By June 1, France had joined the United States, Britain, New Zealand, Australia Germany and the UN agencies in advising "non-essential" diplomatic staff and citizens to leave. Asian countries like Malaysia and South Korea followed suit.

Travel agents reported a rush in outward bookings with more than 100,000 people expected to leave over the next two weeks, while the cancellation incoming traffic and hotel bookings is casting gloom over the travel and tourism industry. Business analysts said the exodus and travel advisories were bound to have a negative impact on the economy.

Former career diplomat and commentator on international affairs G. Parthasarathy suspected that the evacuation move, unprecedented in India, could be part of subtle, concerted diplomatic efforts to encourage India and Pakistan to move towards de-escalation.

He said these efforts may already have begun to work with Pakistani President Pervez Musharraf, who said in a television interview on the weekend that his country would not be the first to start a war.

A U.S. embassy spokesman said the decision to evacuate its citizens was purely because "the Department of State takes its duty to look after the safety of American citizens abroad very seriously."

The seriousness of the situation can be gauged by Washington's decision to send both Defence Secretary Donald Rumsfeld and his deputy Richard Armitage to South Asia to convince the two countries to call off the confrontation and resume diplomatic dialogue.

For local residents like Teji Khanna, even more scary than the images of foreigners crowding the departure lounge of the international airport were the apocalyptic reports from the Pentagon which estimated that an all-out nuclear war between the South Asian neighbors could kill as many as 12 million people and maim six million more.

Calculations announced by nuclear researchers at Princeton University said even a limited war with nuclear bombs exploding over the crowded principal cities of each country could result in the instant deaths of more than three million people. Although well-informed people like Khanna seemed aware of the dangers of a nuclear strike on Delhi there is reason to believe that most ordinary citizens have little idea of the devastation that can be caused by a nuclear blast or of the radiation fallout.

After India tested nuclear devices in May 1998, fanatical members of the pro-Hindu, Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS) or National Self-service Organization, to which Prime Minister Atal Bihari Vajpayee and Interior Minister Lal Krishna Advani owe allegiance, demanded that "sacred soil" from the test site in western Rajasthan be distributed around the country.

The fanatics had to be persuaded that sands could be radioactive rather than sacred. The RSS, long-committed to turning India into a nuclear power pushed its political affiliate, the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), to "weaponize" an existing nuclear capability within three months of its gaining national power.

But after Pakistan retaliated with a series of its own tests and even mounted incursions across the LoC (line of control) in disputed Kashmir, leading to the Kargil war, attempts to educate ordinary people on the horrors of a nuclear strike and on basic precautions in such an event came from peace groups rather than the government or the RSS.

The Kargil war ended after the intervention of President Bill Clinton, whose special assistant Bruce Riedel recently revealed in a published monograph that the Pakistan military, unknown to former prime minister Nawaz Sharief, had plans to use nuclear missiles against India.

A spokesman at the sprawling All-India Institute of Medical Science admits all it has is a sketchy disaster management manual printed more than 30 years ago. "We are not equipped to handle the fallout of a nuclear strike -- that is the defence ministry's responsibility."

Confronted by journalists over the situation, India's health minister C.P. Thakur said last week that his ministry was in touch with the Department of Atomic Energy. But so far, no attempt has been made to instruct the general public on what to do in case of a nuclear strike.

According to well-known commentator and analyst Prem Shankar Jha, the threat of nuclear war in South Asia essentially lies in the "rock-solid belief in each country that the other is bluffing."

Jha thinks that a Pakistani first-strike would almost certainly be aimed at Delhi, wiping out India's nuclear command control system, thereby pre-empting a second strike by India.

India is committed to a "no-first-use" of its nuclear weapons and Musharraf said at the weekend he didn't think "either side is that irresponsible" to launch a nuclear strike.

Analyst and former air officer N.K. Pant said it is nothing short of folly that India's political rulers have pursued a nuclear policy which had not taken into account the vulnerability of Delhi where vital government installations are located and is home to 12 million people.

Doomsday scenarios in newspapers speculate on the effects of tremendous heat and high-speed nuclear winds unleashed by a nuclear device exploding in Delhi, flattening high-rise buildings, crippling communications, electricity and water supplies and spreading radioactive contamination down the river Yamuna all the way to Bangladesh.