Former Prime Minister of India Inder Kumar Gujral was late with his criticism of the Indian nuclear tests. But when he did, he blew a hole in the theory being proffered that it was the Chinese threat that forced India to take the extreme step. "[Playing the] China card is wrong and undiplomatic," said Gujral emphatically.
It is time India's politicians realised that their country has, for long, ceased to matter in China's defence plans. Going back some decades, while it is true that the 1962 war left India with psychic scars, for China it was but a border skirmish, now nearly forgotten. Chinese military officers today say that for decades they have not done any contingency planning for a war with India. Even if they ever did, it is unlikely that nuclear weapons would have figured in those plans, since these weapons are of little use in border wars with limited aims.
At a meeting of American, Chinese, European and Russian nuclear scientists in Sichuan in 1996, none of the Chinese scientists thought India figured in Beijing's nuclear policy. Interestingly, at the meeting (held jointly with the Ninth Academy – China's equivalent to Los Alamos, the American nuclear facility), a participant from China's Institute of Systems Engineering came up with a revelation: China's last project to develop a medium-range ballistic missile – the DF-25 – stood cancelled for lack of funds. (The 1700-km-range missile is similar in many ways to India's Agni, and was meant to have been deployed on the Tibetan plateau.)
Given China's booming economy, that explanation was disingenuous, to be sure. According to a report by Eric Arnett for the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute (SIPRI), the real explanation probably lay in Beijing's lack of military interest in India. Arnett also noted that the DF-3A, the missile that the DF-25 would have replaced, is obsolete, and no other Chinese missile can reach major targets in India – the M-9 and M-11 would fall short of most Indian targets even if based in Tibet, and the strategic missiles would all overshoot.