ABSTRACT
This chapter seeks to answer the following questions: Why did India and Pakistan become overt nuclear states one after the other in 1998? More specifically, why did India suddenly shed its former ambiguous nuclear posture on 11 May 1998 only to be followed by Pakistan after barely two weeks? The nuclear rivalry between India and Pakistan is often studied with the realist approach of IR which looks at the nuclear discourse of a state in an environment of the ‘survival of the fittest’. Without assigning any major role to these materialistic premises or minimising their scope, I will explain this rivalry based on the ideational components of both states’ identities. I will argue that it was the ideologically based routines or the social practices of both states’ elites which contributed to their decision to conduct nuclear tests in 1998. If we assume ‘security as practice’ and believe that the identity discourse of a state is directly related to the social practices of a state’s elites, then the argument can be made that these practices can influence and change the security discourse of a state (Lene 2006).
