Donald Trump’s menacing threat to Iran that “A whole civilisation will die tonight, never to be brought back again” has unintentionally brought to light Rajiv Gandhi’s genius in anticipating that India and Pakistan might do just this to each other unless protected from such an eventuality in times of tension and war.

After the unspeakable horrors of World War II, the international community decided to newly codify humanitarian law through four conventions adopted in August 1949 in Geneva, including the fourth relating to the “protection of civilian persons in time of war,” because casualties were no longer confined to combatants on battlefields. It was hugely destructive and damaging to civilians caught up in war.

However, as the realisation grew that it was more proxy wars, civil wars and terrorism than openly declared inter-state wars that were causing asymmetric death and injury to civilian life and property, it became apparent that the Fourth Geneva Convention was not adequate to meet the catastrophic humanitarian consequences of these new kinds of inhuman war — labelled “indiscriminate” wars.

Accordingly, additional protocols relating to “civilian persons and objects” in all types of armed conflict were adopted in 1977, but not before the nuclear weapons powers, particularly the United States, had leached these “protections” of practical significance by inserting codas into the text and interpretations to legitimise their right to attack civil nuclear facilities, whatever might be the damage caused. Thus, for example, Ronald Reagan denounced the humanitarian provisions of the additional protocols as “unacceptable and thoroughly distasteful”. Meanwhile, India under Indira Gandhi refused to accede to these dodgy additional protocols.

It was at this time of crisis in........

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