Why India balked at Israel's plans to do to Pakistan what Israel has done to Iran
Chidanand Rajghatta is The Times of India's US-based Foreign Editor, long-time Washington DC scribe and sutradhar, and author of The Horse That Flew: How India's Silicon Gurus Spread Their Wings. LESS ... MORE
Assessing and possibly admiring Israel's strike against Iran aimed at denuclearising the country, hawks in the New Delhi establishment would be reflecting with some regret of a time in the early 1980s when Israel offered India plans for a similar operation to take out Islamabad's then incipient nuclear program. Peaceniks would be relieved it did not come to that.
According to accounts from that time, related most notably in Deception: Pakistan, the US, and the Global Weapons Conspiracy by Adrian Levy and Catherine Scott-Clark, Israel proposed a joint operation to destroy Pakistan's nuclear capabilities, particularly the Kahuta nuclear facility, motivated by concerns over the development of what was termed the 'Islamic bomb.' The plan involved Israeli aircraft such as F-16s and F-15s using Indian airbases and refueling facilities in Jamnagar and Udhampur, to bomb Kahuta, acting with support from India's Jaguar deep-strike aircraft. The operation was intended to mirror Israel's 1981 airstrike on Iraq's Osirak reactor.
India's then Prime Minister Indira Gandhi is said to have initially approved the plan. But weeks before the strike, she put it on hold for a host of attributed reasons before Rajiv Gandhi canned it completely when he succeeded her as Prime Minister. More of that soon.
Israel was sensitized to Pakistan's nuclear program and was nervous about it even before India, which was still smug in its 1965 and 1971 victory over Pakistan (which spurred Islamabad to accelerate its sketchy nuclear program 'even if it has to eat grass' to paraphrase its them PM Zulfiqar Ali Bhutto). New Delhi became even more complacent after its 1974 'peaceful' nuclear tests before Indira Gandhi imposed Emergency in 1975 following domestic strife. The Janata Party, which ousted her in the 1977 elections, and elected the pacifist Morarji Desai, had no ear for matters nuclear and national security, as it meandered towards a collapse in 1979.
All this time, Pakistan worked at the rate of knots in its march towards what was called the 'Islamic bomb.' This worried Israel more than India. In 1979, even as the Morarji Desai government was collapsing and Charan Singh was emerging as the new leader, then Israeli Prime Minister Menachem Begin wrote to his British counterpart, Margaret Thatcher, to express concerns about Pakistan's development of nuclear weapons. Pointing to the close ties between Pakistan and Libya, then under the rule of colonel Muammar Gaddafi, Begin warned of Libya getting his hands on Pakistan's 'Islamic Bomb' and its consequences for Israel. It was a prescient observation because years later, Pakistan's nuclear mastermind AQ Khan did try and pass on nuclear knowhow to Libya.
It was the Menachem Begin government that eventually took out Iraq's Osirik nuclear facility to prevent Saddam Hussain, its other great bogeyman, from potentially making nuclear weapons. And it was the Begin dispensation that proposed taking out the Kahuta nuclear facility in Pakistan, also ruled by an Islamist dictator Zia-ul Haq.
But Indira Gandhi balked. Why?
The 1980s was a time of great unrest in India. Punjab was festering with the Bhindranwale rebellion. Pakistan was cosy with Reagan's America because of the help it was providing to oust Soviets from Afghanistan, which in turn emboldened Zia-ul-Haq to stoke unrest in Jammu and Kashmir. J&K itself was starting to boil, particularly after the execution in Delhi of Maqbool Bhat, co-founder of the Jammu and Kashmir Liberation Front (JKLF), following the murder of Indian diplomat Ravindra Mhatre in Birmingham.
On top of all these, deep in the icy background, there was a face-off with Pakistan in the Siachen Glacier.
Debate in the Indian establishment also centred around the possible fall-out, nuclear and beyond on India. While Tel Aviv would do the grunt-work with the strike, India would bear the consequences, being geographically closer to Pakistan than distant Israel. Unlike Israel, India would also have to deal with Washington, which was dependent on Pakistan for access to Afghanistan. According to some accounts, the CIA tipped off Islamabad of a potential attack, leading Pakistan to warn India of counter-strikes on Indian installations with F-16s, which the US had begun to supply in 1982.
The assassination of Indira Gandhi in 1984 and the death of Zia ul-Haq in 1988 effectively put a lid on the plan. Rajiv Gandhi succeeded his mother as prime minister. Zia was succeeded by Benazir Bhutto. By then Pakistan had made significant advances in developing nuclear weapons; India too, after holding back for more than a decade after its 1974 nuclear tests, had resumed its weaponisation program. In 1988, the two countries signed an agreement prohibiting attacks on each other's nuclear installations.
Since then, on January 1 each year, the two nations have exchanged lists of their nuclear installations as part of their adherence to the Agreement on the Prohibition of Attack against Nuclear Installations and Facilities, taking such strikes out of the equation.
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