Remember Homi, Vikram

In less than ten days, Japan will fire its first space vehicle ‘Selene’ that will orbit the moon. China’s own lunar satellite ‘Chang’e 1’ will be launched soon after. Both Japan and China now have massive military space programmes that are fully integrated into their national security strategies. In pursuing an ambitious manned space programme, building a large network of military satellites, and developing weapons for use in outer space, China is way ahead of India.

India’s problem is not one of resources. The Indian space scientists, who have performed so well with limited finances, are capable of doing a lot more. The problem has been the lack of a national strategic imagination for outer space. While Beijing stunned the world last January with its test of an anti-satellite weapon and Tokyo relentlessly develops missile defence technologies, our political leaders mouth vacuous slogans about keeping outer space free of weapons. Vacillation at the highest political level pushed the Indian nuclear programme into the doldrums from the 1970s. When outer space is fast becoming an arena of great power contestation, a failure to define clear objectives could turn out to be as costly for India.

In imparting a grand strategic vision to its space programme, New Delhi confronts two major challenges — intensifying international cooperation and restructuring the national space programme. Like Homi Bhabha, who founded the atomic energy establishment, Vikram Sarabhai, the father of the space programme, was an internationalist to the core. Their genius lay in leveraging the liberal environment for international cooperation during the 1950s and 1960s and their wide-ranging contacts with the Western scientific community to lay the foundation for expansive nuclear and space programmes.

While they were driven by the immediate imperative of mobilising technology for national development, Bhabha and Sarabhai were fully aware of the security dimensions of the nuclear and space programmes and were determined to create future military options for India. Our communists, who swear by “anti-imperialism”, might not want to let facts come in the way; but cooperation with the US and the West was critical to the vision of Bhabha and Sarabhai. India’s early reactors and satellites were built with American collaboration. Until the 1970s in the case of the space programme and the 1980s in the case of nuclear energy, the Soviet Union had few contributions to make.

As non-proliferation concerns mounted from the 1970s, the US chose to cut off all cooperation and began to impose ever tighter sanctions on our nuclear and space programmes. Thanks to the strong foundations laid by Bhabha and Sarabhai, India has survived an extended period of international hostility.

India’s isolation from global high technology flows will soon come to an end with the implementation of the Indo-US nuclear deal. As the world acknowledges that New Delhi is no longer a proliferation risk, India’s atomic and space programmes have the great opportunity to return to their internationalist roots and emerge as strong players in rapidly globalising nuclear and aerospace industries.

International cooperation is especially critical for the effective pursuit of India’s civilian and military space objectives. New Delhi is already negotiating with Washington an agreement to permit the launch of US built satellites on Indian rockets. Once in force, it would significantly expand the market penetration of India’s commercial space programme.

For its lunar programme called ‘Chandrayaan’, India has tied up with the US and Europe for some collaboration. Given the increasing convergence of political interests between Tokyo and New Delhi, space cooperation with Japan is an exciting new possibility. India does not expect international cooperation for that part of the space programme focused on developing rockets for the delivery of nuclear weapons. But there are many other areas of international military space cooperation that are open to India.

On missile defence, for example, the UPA government has shunned opportunities for accessing US technologies afraid as it was of the CPM leader Prakash Karat pulling the plug. It is not that India is uninterested in missile defence. New Delhi conducted its first missile defence test last November. It is also well-known India is working with Israel on missile defence. Yet, the government has refused to offer a serious national perspective on missile defence, which is so important to sustain India’s nuclear doctrine of minimum deterrence.

The ministry of defence has been equally dithering on the question of establishing an aerospace command, which brings together the national space assets and integrates them into nation’s military strategy. Despite three successive chiefs of the air force, including the present one, demanding an aerospace command, the political leadership has allowed the civilian bureaucracy to delay the decision.

Although it has sanctioned some important projects, such as building spy satellites, the government has been reluctant to create a full-fledged military space programme that brings a long overdue synergy with the armed forces. Having engineered India’s nuclear liberation, the Prime Minister Manmohan Singh must now order the drafting of a national space strategy that outlines a comprehensive set of civilian and military goals in outer space and proclaims the political will to pursue them.

The writer is a professor at the S. Rajaratnam School of International Studies, Nanyang Technological University, Singapore