ISLAMABAD, August 23: Pakistan and India were Wednesday urged to work for strategic stability in South Asia. Speakers at an international seminar on “Ballistic Missiles and South Asian Security” suggested that the two countries should evolve technological and leadership structures to ensure strategic stability in the region.

Chairman of the Senate Standing Committee on Foreign Affairs Mushahid Hussain Syed however said that hawkish elements in the Indian establishment seemed to be holding back Prime Minister Dr Manmohan Singh from pursuing peace process with Pakistan by accusing Pakistan in all sorts of untoward incidents without any evidence.

He noted that India had not positively responded to President Gen Pervez Musharraf’s out-of-box thinking on Kashmir.

In his paper on the subject Dr Teng Jianqun, Deputy Secretary General China Arms and Disarmament Association (CACDA), remarked that strategic games had been witnessed in the relations between India and Pakistan for years culminating in their nuclear weapons tests in 1998. Both were pursuing missile delivery programmes concurrently.

Though he did not see an arms race delivery systems, he said “a competition” would happen in this respect.

Both sides can give a lot of reasons for the competition, he said. India might say that the launch of missiles or test of nuclear weapons was not targeting Pakistan. Former Indian Prime Minister A.B. Vajpayee had publicly declared China as “the potential threat No 1” after the 1998 nuclear tests.

For Pakistan, any movement of India, specially in military build-up, would be seen as a challenge to the security of Pakistan and follow an action to counter threat of an attack.

After India conducted its first nuclear test in 1974 the then Prime Minister Zulfikar Ali Bhutto vowed to build a nuclear bomb, even if the nation had to eat grass, he said citing reports.

“South Asia is one of the most stable regions since the ending of the cold war,” he observed. It could be argued that nuclear weapons created that balance or stability.

But he feared the competition of missiles development posed a danger to the stability. “We must pay much attention to such a trend in this region,” he said.

Dr Swaran Singh, an associate professor of Disarmament Studies at Jawaharlal Nehru University, in his presentation said the Indian ballistic missile programme, from its inception, had been part of a larger vision that spans beyond India’s military requirements.

He said the level of sophistication of Pakistan’s missiles increased dramatically since late 1990s. In April 1998 it tested the intermediate range ballistic missile called Ghauri.

“This missile is believed to be the single most decisive event in India’s security calculations. With its range of 1,500 km, the Ghauri 1 can strike deep into Indian heartland thereby finally nullifying India’s fundamental advantage of having ‘strategic depth’ against Pakistan,” he said.

“Some of these Indian strategic experts see these missiles as China’s missiles camouflaged as Pakistani and read it as China’s strategy to build-up Pakistan as a counter-weight to India,” he remarked.

Maria Sultan, Director, South Asian Strategic Stability Institute, London, said: “the current US nuclear policy is geared toward promoting nuclear proliferation and spurring an arms race in the Indian subcontinent and is being viewed as hypocritical by the vast majority of non-nuclear weapons states that are parties to the Non-Proliferation Treaty”.