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Guest column
Touchstones |
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The long shadows the Bomb cast on India M Rasgotra
The intention to go for the tests had been mentioned in the BJP manifesto, which foreign missions ignored
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the Foreign Secretary in 1984, I was engaged in talks with Pakistan to negotiate a peace treaty. The Indo-Israeli plan to attack Kahuta is one of those implausible canards Pakistan’s strategists keep inventing now and then to brag about their country’s nuclear valour. There were no tensions and no occasion for Pakistan to threaten India with a nuclear attack. Friendly visits were taking place between the two countries, though Pakistanis were enjoying India’s discomfiture in
Punjab. In October 1984, President Zia-ul-Haq came to Delhi to attend Indira Gandhi’s funeral and to extend friendship to Rajiv Gandhi. We knew that Pakistan was at it, but did not yet have all the wherewithal of the Bomb in 1984. It had it in 1986. In 1987, there was concern in Pakistan about India’s Brasstacks exercise involving the movement of a large body of Indian armour close to the Pakistan frontier. But Rajiv Gandhi had personally allayed Zia-ul-Haq’s fears. And while the General had alerted his army as a cautionary measure, there was no threat from him of a nuclear response in the event of Brasstacks ending in an attack on Pakistan.
Souring relations In 1990, relations with Pakistan were beginning to sour because of the Kashmir insurgency planned and supported by the ISI. The Indian Army had gone into Kashmir in strength. Pakistan had also moved some additional forces to the PoK. In such situations, Americans are always fearful of an outbreak of a major war between India and Pakistan. Hence, the Gates Mission. I do not believe India had contemplated an attack on Pakistan. Pakistan might have bragged about its nuclear weapons and missiles, but I recall no threat that was taken seriously by Delhi.
Nixon’s Pak tilt In 1971, I was Deputy Chief of Mission in Washington DC. President Nixon had ordered the nuclear armed 7th Fleet to the Bay of Bengal, much against the advice of his Naval chief. Nixon’s orders to him were to do “something” in support of Pakistan and deter India, interdict Indian Navy’s movements, or even interfere in the IAF operations. The US fleet reached the Bay of Bengal three or four days after the war was over. It was meant to intimidate India. Nixon’s action had attracted severe and widespread criticism from the Congress, the US media and the public. There was no question of a nuclear attack on India, but the US action helped make up Indira Gandhi’s mind to go in for a nuclear deterrent. An additional factor in the timing of the Peaceful Nuclear Explosion (PNE) was Zulfiquar Ali Bhutto’s decision in 1972 to develop his “Islamic Bomb”. But the basic motivation behind the 1974 explosion was to counter China’s acquisition of the Bomb in 1964, two years after its invasion of India. In 1974, Prime Minister Indira Gandhi wanted a series of tests and our scientists, I believe, were ready to conduct the explosions. But the Prime Minister’s advisers dissuaded her because of the US threat to cut aid worth about $2 billion a year. And in panic, the advantage of the explosion was squandered by nicknaming the Bomb as a PNE!
Homi Bhabha snubbed Homi Bhabha was keen on doing a test, or initiating preparatory work for it in the late 1950s or early ’60s. In the course of an evening at a friend’s house after the Chinese invasion in October 1962, Bhabha had mentioned to me that on several occasions he had sought Prime Minister Nehru’s permission to bore a hole in Ladakh and conduct an underground explosion, but on a recent suggestion, Nehru had virtually thrown him out of his office. The solo PNE failed to confer on India the credibility and stature of a nuclear weapon power. The period of seven or eight years, following the Congress’ defeat in the 1989 elections, was marked by much indecision in this regard.
The Vajpayee factor Vajpayee and his principal adviser Brajesh Mishra had long been in favour of India going nuclear. A couple of years before he became Prime Minister, Vajpayee had said to me that to be recognised as a power, India would have to go demonstrably nuclear and face the consequences. The intention to go for the tests had been mentioned in the BJP manifesto, which foreign diplomatic missions in Delhi, including the US and Chinese Embassies, either did not read or chose to ignore as empty bravado. The Bomb had been in India’s possession since 1974. The tests of 1998 were not a response to any threat, but a well-considered policy to claim India’s rightful place in the front ranks of world powers. It had the desired effect. And it reinforced the country’s security. The writer is a former Foreign
Secretary of India
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Touchstones
As parents, we must share the blame for not having taught the younger generation to care for those less privileged.
Today, when Bihar is acquiring the image of a progressive state with an impressive record of growth on all frontiers of human and economic development, I cannot help recalling a special Bihari, Arvind Das, historian, journalist and filmmaker, who died tragically young in 2000. How he would have crowed with delight, saying: “I told you so long ago and you would not believe me!” As an obituary tribute to him, Dileep Padgaonkar, the distinguished journalist, had written then: “Arvind’s real obsession, the one that shaped his thinking, guided his written output and nourished his conversations, was his native Bihar. It can be said without exaggeration that no contemporary Indian thinker has spoken and written about the glorious past, the dismal present and the potential for a great future of this state with such lofty eloquence as he did. In his eyes, Bihar was a metaphor for India itself. At a pinch, he would have deemed it to be the very centre of the universe. While he loathed its venal, caste-ridden, ineffective governance, the violent nature of its society, its decrepit intellectual and cultural life and the slothful ways of its elite, he never missed an opportunity to recall its rich cultural and spiritual legacy, the noble character of its long-suffering people and the revolutionary potential of its youth. Two of his books — “The Republic of Bihar” and “Changel: The Biography of a Village” — bear vivid testimony to what the state meant to him.
Each year, his family holds a lecture by an eminent Indian in Arvind’s memory. This year, it was the doctor turned social activist, Dr Binayak Sen, who chose “India’s Coming Famine” as the theme for this memorial lecture. Binayak Sen looks like your typical khadi-clad jholawala. He is soft-spoken, difficult to draw out and obviously more at home among tribal and marginalised communities than among the sophisticates of a Delhi audience. Yet, his quiet enumeration and grim assessment of malnutrition and what it is doing to a large swathe of this country’s population was far more educative than all the figures and tables unleashed at press conferences by the mighty economists of our Planning Commission, who cannot seem to agree even on the basic definition of who is poor and malnourished in this country. Listening to the animated Q&A session that followed his presentation, I was struck by the lack of such passion among the youth today. What appears to have replaced the coffee house adda of yore is the nightly slugfest on our television screens, where instead of participating, we become mute spectators to problems that happen elsewhere and treat them as entertaining spectacles rather than disturbing concerns. We may blame our seniors for turning Parliament into an akhara but what we need to ask ourselves is how concerned are we and how far are we willing to stake our comfort for a life that people like Binayak Sen have chosen? If the poor in India are still able to find a voice and survive, it is not because of the charitable schemes launched with huge publicity budgets by our politicians and champions of the aam admi but by men and women who have forsaken personal gain for public good. It is supremely ironic that while our legal system can jail for ‘anti-government activities’ a Binayak Sen within a week, the goons who have pillaged public money swan around in their SUVs and go unpunished because sufficient evidence has not yet been found. Obviously, their activities are not anti- but pro-government! Displaced communities, impoverished peasants, malnourished children — do our netas and bureaucrats never encounter poverty? And if they do, how do they sleep at night? What growth is this where one-third of the population goes to bed hungry while the rest are suffering from diseases of excess consumption? Remember the well-known Kabir couplet that every schoolchild in India knows: Rangi ko narangi kahen, khare maal ko khoya; chalti ko garri kahen dekh Kabira roya… An uncle would often tell us that while a generation gap separated him from his parents, what separated him from us was a ‘degeneration gap’. The more I see the young, the more I despair of the future. As parents, we must share the blame for not having taught them to care for those less privileged. In valorising success in exams and life, we have failed to teach them how to deal with failure and treat those who are unsuccessful at earning money with compassion and care. I recommend that you search out the speech that JK Rowling (of Harry Potter fame) gave to the graduates of Harvard Business School at their graduation a few years ago. She told them she realised that she is in the presence of those who will head banks and financial institutions one day or important business houses. They are the crème de la crème and will effortlessly succeed after their Harvard degree. “I can tell you nothing about how to deal with success,” she said disarmingly, “but let me tell you how to deal with failure….” So the next time you are tempted to say, “Biharis are born lazy,” think of the rickshaw-puller covered in sweat who works in the summer afternoon to feed his family. The poor did not opt to be so and none of them — given a chance — would choose starvation as a way of life. If it is in your power to give them that chance, then do so with a sense of a pay-back to Life.
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Ground
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Let the Prime Minister break his silence on coal block allocations and present the facts as he sees them to the nation. Let him do so with simple arithmetic.
For
Prime Minister Manmohan Singh, silence is no more an option in facing the storm over allocation of coal blocks to private entities. Sending out emissaries of the Congress, including Cabinet Ministers, to all states to brief people about the Government’s point of view on the scam exposed by the Comptroller and Auditor General (CAG) of India is not going be of much help either. The Prime Minister's efforts to get his point of view across in Parliament failed with the BJP-led Opposition parties shouting him down and ensuring the entire session was adjourned without much business. The BJP was wrong in disrupting Parliament and not allowing a debate on the subject, despite it being the proper forum to address the controversy. The Prime Minister appeared satisfied with a tactical move of tabling his reply in Parliament so that there was some explanation from his government on record. But his reply left many questions unanswered and skirted some of the key issues. The crux of the controversy, to paraphrase former US President Bill Clinton, is all about arithmetic. With his stirring speech, Clinton wowed the Democrats Convention held last week to re-nominate Barack Obama as their candidate for the presidential polls this November. Clinton, in fact, defended Obama's track record in office more effectively than the President himself. He did so by often resorting to simple “arithmetic” to demolish the Republicans’ claims. Example, "Since 1961, the Republicans have held the White House for 28 years, the Democrats 24. In those 52 years, our economy produced 66 million private sector jobs. What's the job score? Republicans 24 million, Democrats 42 million!" Perhaps Manmohan Singh should explain the arithmetic when it comes to defending his government's action concerning coal allocation. After all, at the heart of the CAG's performance audit report is the charge that by the government allocating 57 coal blocks to private entities for mining, these companies stood to gain Rs 1.85 lakh crore. It also implied a huge loss to the exchequer. The CAG made what appeared to be back-of-the-envelope calculations to come up with the mind-boggling figure. It then punched holes in the government's claim that it had ensured "objectivity" and "transparency" in the procedures adopted for allocation of these coal blocks. Clearly, some of this was a matter of interpretation and the Prime Minister in Parliament had charged it with "selective reading" of opinions given by officials. The Prime Minister made several significant assertions in his statement in Parliament, including, "I wish to say that any allegations of impropriety are without basis and unsupported by the facts." In his concluding remarks he stated emphatically, "The facts speak for themselves and show that the CAG's findings are flawed on multiple counts." Let the Prime Minister break his silence and present the facts as he sees them to the nation. Let him do so with simple arithmetic. He does make an attempt in his statement in Parliament when he states that the computation made by the CAG to arrive at the benefits accrued to private parties "can be questioned on a number of technical points". If that be so, will the Prime Minister please come out with calculations that would expose how flawed the CAG's calculations are? Something you and I can understand. When it comes to the procedures for allocating blocks to private parties, the government needs to give a clear answer as to the rationale behind the allotment to each of the private beneficiaries named. What were the procedures that were adopted, what were the checks and balances in place to ensure that these were not misused and why wasn't action taken earlier against those who were
found wanting? Then there is the question of changing the policy from one of allotments to that of auctioning, as the CAG had advocated. There is evidence to show that the process began in 2005 and opinions were being sought. Why did it take the government almost five years to bring the legislative changes needed to make auction permissible? And if it was working towards changing the policy, why did it allot so many blocks during this period? The advantage the Prime Minister has is that when it comes to honesty and integrity, his record is impeccable. No one believes he would have made any personal gain out of the allocations. But he cannot plead that he was too busy running the country to go into policy issues concerning allotments, especially when he was holding additional charge of the ministry concerned. So he needs to present his case, in whatever manner or medium he chooses, to explain the government's point of view — by using simple arithmetic.
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Nor did it help the government's defence when Finance Minister P. Chidambaram claimed there was "no loss" to the exchequer because of coal allocations to private parties. Or when Human Resources Development Minister Kapil Sibal called for the resignation of the Chief Ministers who the government alleged were equally responsible for the mess. By that logic, the Prime Minister, as the Opposition has been demanding, should also quit, as he held the additional charge of the Union Coal Ministry during the years under scrutiny.