Half - Lion: How P.V. Narasimha Rao Transformed India

by Vinay Sitapati

  ‘Saamagri tayyar hai,’ Rao had said. (‘The ingredients are ready.’) ‘You can go ahead.’

  The conventional narrative at the time was that prime minister Rao had wanted to test nuclear weapons in December 1995. The Americans had caught on, and Rao had dithered—as was his wont. Three years later, prime minister Atal Bihari Vajpayee fulfilled his party’s campaign promise by ordering five nuclear tests below the shimmering sands of Rajasthan.

  Vajpayee’s revelations unsettled this narrative with new questions.

  How closely was Rao involved in India’s nuclear programme? What prompted his decision to test in December 1995? Why did he change his mind? Was it US pressure or something altogether more mysterious? Why did he pass on the baton to Vajpayee six months later?

  The journalist Shekhar Gupta asked Rao these questions months before he died. The former prime minister patted his belly. ‘Arrey, bhai, let some secrets go with me to my chita [funeral pyre].’2

  These secrets are so delicate that this chapter avoids the footnoting and source attribution present in other parts of the book. It also takes a cautious view of what might impact national security, exercising restraint while letting the reader into the missile silos and underground bunkers of India’s nuclear programme. Here, for the first time, are the secrets that Rao kept within his belly.

  A credible nuclear deterrent requires two ingredients: nuclear technology to build atomic bombs and missiles (or aircraft) to deliver it to the enemy. In India, the Atomic Energy Commission (AEC) was tasked with developing nuclear technology, while the Defence Research Development Organization was charged with missile building.

  Through most of the early years, India’s research focus was on using nuclear energy from uranium and plutonium for civilian electricity, not for military weapons. This research was shrouded in secrecy, with the AEC and DRDO reporting only to the prime minister of the day. The lack of transparency, the Princeton physicist M.V. Ramana argues, created a civil nuclear energy programme that was wasteful and unable to fulfil India’s electricity needs.3 It did, however, create indigenous capability to refine the plutonium into ‘weapons-grade’—the essential ingredient for an atomic bomb.

  This became evident on 18 May 1974 when prime minister Indira Gandhi authorized the testing of a nuclear fission device in the deserts of Pokhran in the western state of Rajasthan. Great care was taken to classify the test as a ‘peaceful nuclear explosion’ for civilian energy purposes only. What lent plausibility to this claim was that the detonated bomb was mammoth and unwieldy, and India did not have the missiles or aircraft to deliver the bomb to enemy targets.

  This strategic ambivalence—of having nuclear technology without a deliverable weapon—continued through the 1970s and ‘80s. The 1974 test had triggered some western sanctions, and the Indian political establishment felt the heavier sanctions that overt nuclear weaponization would attract could damage the economy. Meanwhile, the team of scientists running India’s nuclear programme discreetly worked on a smaller bomb, one that could be launched by missile or plane. In 1989, these scientists felt that the time had come to put bomb, missile and plane together to make India a nuclear weapons state.

  They met prime minister Rajiv Gandhi, by then a lame duck hobbled by corruption charges. The meeting was attended by DRDO chief V.S. Arunachalam, a gaunt man who spoke in careful whispers. No log was kept of the meeting. When Arunachalam told Rajiv what the scientists wanted, the prime minister gave them permission to go ahead with weaponization. ‘But I have to be informed. Every step you have to inform and seek approval.’

  The land of the Mahatma had decided to pursue a nuclear deterrent.

  As the scientists queued out of his office on Raisina Hill, Rajiv Gandhi mulled over the fact that the entire programme was being run by scientists. Since politicians would come and go, Rajiv wanted a civilian bureaucrat to permanently monitor the programme.

  After conferring with Arunachalam, Rajiv called for the defence secretary, Naresh Chandra, who was sworn to secrecy. ‘The thing about Naresh,’ a colleague remembers, ‘is that he knows how to keep his mouth shut.’

  The nuclear weapons committee—so secret that no official record of it exists—would eventually consist of Naresh Chandra as chairman and A.P.J. Abdul Kalam as member secretary. The other members were V.S. Arunachalam, P.K. Iyengar and R. Chidambaram from the AEC, and the nuclear technologists Anil Kakodkar and K. Santhanam. K. Subrahmanyam—the doyen of Indian strategic experts—advised from the outside. The diplomat Ronen Sen had counselled Rajiv Gandhi on nuclear issues; he would continue to independently confer with the prime minister of the day.

  Sen would go on to become one of the architects of the Indo-US nuclear deal as ambassador to the United States in 2005. So discreet was he that the then US national security advisor, Stephen Hadley, famously—and possibly apocryphally—described Ronen Sen to President George W. Bush as a ‘bikini’. ‘What he conceals is more important than what he reveals.’

  What was remarkable about the nuclear weapons committee was that, except for Chandra, it was run almost completely by scientists. As a former nuclear official put it, ‘One thing we learned is never to allow the military or the bureaucrats to have a role in the nuclear programme.’4

  There were also no politicians involved. ‘No one on the political level should know,’ Rajiv had insisted.5 The members of the nuclear weapons committee were bothered by this. They suggested two other politicians they wanted told. One was the President of India, R. Venkataraman. The other politician they wanted informed had spent nearly a decade as a Union minister. As defence minister in 1985, he had worked closely with Arunachalam. In the words of K. Subrahmanyam, he had previously been ‘among the few in the decision-making loop on nuclear weapons’.6 He was then foreign minister of India. His name was P.V. Narasimha Rao.

  It was thus providential, what Machiavelli called ‘fortuna’, that when Rao became prime minister in 1991, he was one of the few politicians who knew of the existence of the nuclear weapons programme. Had any of his competitors—N.D. Tiwari, Arjun Singh or Sharad Pawar—become prime minister instead, the programme might well have taken a different turn.

  Rao became prime minister at a time when India’s policy of strategic ambivalence on its nuclear capability was under threat.

  On the one hand, the Pakistanis were pursuing their own weapon, with help from the Chinese. Arunachalam estimated in 1991 that Pakistan had the capability to produce ten atomic bombs.7 The BJP’s hawkish president Murli Manohar Joshi declared that India ‘must waste no time to go nuclear’.8 Narasimha Rao, running a minority government, could ill afford to ignore the BJP’s bluster.

  On the other hand, changes in the global disarmament regime were narrowing India’s options. In January 1992, the United Nations Security Council recognized the threat that the proliferation of nuclear weapons constituted to international peace and security.9 The Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT) of 1970 had allowed the US, China, Russia, UK, and France to keep their weapons; all other countries (including India) were banned from possessing them. India had resisted this treaty for decades, alleging that it legitimized ‘nuclear apartheid’. But with the collapse of the Soviet Union and end of the Cold War, the United States renewed efforts to limit the spread of nuclear weapons—the one threat to its unipolar hegemony. Rao could not disregard this American pressure to cap India’s nuclear programme. His economic reforms hinged on working with the US, and the collapse of the Soviet Union had weakened India’s global alliances.

  Narasimha Rao thus became leader at a time when India was being egged on to test nuclear weapons as well as being browbeaten into giving them up. The prime minister needed to be both ferocious as well as conciliatory. He needed to be half a lion.

  A few days after he became prime minister, Rao’s appointment diary shows that he met with Arunachalam.10 ‘The prime minister asked me some technical details,’ Arunachalam remembers.

  ‘I gave him a page of drawings, a sketch. H
e immediately read and understood, saying aloud, “So this is where the reaction takes place.”’

  Arunachalam told Rao that the bomb was ready for testing. But India was in the midst of a financial crisis, and Rao counselled patience, saying, ‘We should wait for the economy to improve.’11 Rao also understood that while India had the technology to detonate the bomb, its delivery systems were still in infancy. India was far from being a nuclear weapons state in 1991.12 Time and funds were in short supply.

  A few days later, Rao spoke to his Cabinet secretary who, fortuna again, happened to be the chairman of the nuclear weapons committee.

  Naresh Chandra approached Manmohan Singh. The finance minister had just devalued the rupee, and was busy preparing for the 24 July 1991 budget—the most important of his life. Manmohan had earlier served as the finance member of the Atomic Energy Commission and had a low opinion of the commission’s financial discipline.13 Chandra asked Singh for additional funds under an innocuous budget category. ‘What is it for?’ Manmohan Singh asked.

  ‘I don’t think you want to know.’

  As the nuclear programme progressed, Naresh Chandra would take ‘black’ flights out of Delhi to various ‘black’ nuclear sites so that he could give an independent report to Narasimha Rao on what the scientists were doing. Air traffic controllers were banned from recording these flight details. Chandra would be met on the tarmac by an unmarked car and driven directly to nuclear sites. He would scale down long shafts to inspect silos of weapons-grade plutonium. Technicians on site would joke that it was no easy task for a man of Chandra’s girth to shimmy his way down a narrow hole.

  Meanwhile, Narasimha Rao, along with Manmohan Singh, focused on economic growth. India would pursue nuclear deterrence, he decided, but would do so covertly without antagonizing the world. The Indian public shared its leader’s contradictory strategy. An opinion poll of the period showed that 50 per cent of those surveyed ‘would like India to sign the NPT’, but 81 per cent ‘would like India to develop nuclear weapons for defence purpose’.14

  In 1992, Arunachalam decide to leave the DRDO for an academic position in the United States. ‘Is he going there for his children to study?’ Rao asked an official. ‘If that is the case, I will help him out.’ The official replied, ‘That is not the reason. He has done the job for eleven years. He is tired.’15

  Arunachalam was succeeded as head of the DRDO by A.P.J. Abdul Kalam. A Tamil Muslim from Rameswaram with a fondness for Carnatic music, Kalam had no PhD, nor was he a nuclear physicist. But he understood rockets and was easy to work with. His childlike enthusiasm, beaming from underneath white sheets of badly cut hair, made him a natural magnet for politician and technician alike.

  There was soon a change of guard in the AEC, with the long-time head, P.K. Iyengar, being replaced by R. Chidambaram.16 Chidambaram was a geeky, thick-glassed nuclear scientist, content to focus on the science while Kalam was absorbed with the delivery technology. While Chidambaram worked on producing a smaller nuclear weapon as well as the hydrogen bomb, the DRDO under Kalam made progress on building ballistic missiles that could carry nuclear warheads.

  Rao was constantly consulted. One DRDO scientist says, ‘The usual criticism [of Rao] was “analysis till paralysis”. But I didn’t find that. He would sit and analyse with me. Once we reached a decision . . . he would go through [with it].’

  In February 1993, the Prithvi-1 missile was successfully test launched.17 It was designed to carry a nuclear load to Islamabad and other Pakistani cities. Ronen Sen says, ‘We had previously tested our nuclear [technology]. In 1993, we tested our ability to deliver. This is the day India became a nuclear power.’18

  The Prithvi-1 tests were followed by the successful Agni missile tests of February 1994.19 The Agni missile had a longer range than Prithvi-1. India was now confident that it could deliver nuclear weapons to both Pakistan as well as parts of China.

  1994 was also the year India tested a delivery system of a different kind. In the mid-1980s, India had bought Mirage-2000 planes from France (as defence minister, Rao had overseen the final acquisition). In May 1994—twenty years after India’s first nuclear test—a Mirage plane was fitted with a bomb—‘slightly longer than two adult arms stretched out’.20 This was a nuclear weapon, with the core and explosives charge inside, but without the plutonium. The plane flew to Balasore (India’s missile test site) in Orissa and successfully dropped the bomb on a designated target.21 India could now launch nuclear weapons by missile as well as from air.

  The DRDO prepared to deploy the Prithvi missile within units of the Indian Army. The United States protested. In order to buy time, Rao delayed deployment until after his visit to the United States in May 1994. Rao was keen to talk economics for the entirety of that trip. But President Bill Clinton brought up the nuclear programme and demanded that India sign the NPT. Rao reiterated the official line: India would not sign any agreement that allowed some countries to keep their weapons. A month later, Rao ordered Prithvi missiles to be deployed into the Indian Army.

  India’s global isolation on nuclear matters continued. In May 1995, over India’s loud objections, the NPT was extended in perpetuity. Discussions had also begun on a Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty (CTBT)—aimed at preventing all countries from carrying out nuclear tests. Unlike the NPT, the CTBT was superficially egalitarian: it did not contain any special privileges for the five nuclear states. But these five countries had already conducted close to 2000 nuclear tests,22 and were confident of the reliability of their deterrent. The real effect of the treaty would be to prevent India and other countries from testing and becoming nuclear weapons states.

  More than any other trigger, the extension of the NPT regime coupled with talks on the CTBT told India that time was running out. Added to this was wariness at China’s nuclear tests and intelligence reports that it was providing Pakistan with nuclear-capable rockets.

  Prime minister Rao had so far balanced the pursuit of nuclear weapons with the need to avoid antagonizing the West. This bluff was now being called. The man who had decided not to take a decision on nuclear weapons was being forced to make up his mind.

  On 18 September 1995, four months after the NPT extension, Bill Clinton sent Narasimha Rao a letter. ‘I understand that on some key elements of the Treaty your delegation . . . has taken positions different from ours . . . I ask that you give your negotiators the flexibility on those issues.’

  Rao refused to respond to this harrying. A month later, he travelled to Cartagena in Columbia for a summit of the Non-Aligned Movement. There he complained of a nuclear oligarchy dictating terms to others.23

  Immediately on his return to New Delhi, Rao sent a telling note to Naresh Chandra, R. Chidambaram, A.P.J. Abdul Kalam and other members of the nuclear weapons committee. He asked them to work on the assumption that their activities would be under surveillance from American satellites. The existence of this note has been confirmed by multiple sources. The ‘activities’ in question could only be one thing.

  A few weeks later, in early November, the DAE and the DRDO sent a note to the prime minister. It was for the ‘prime minister’s eyes only’—the highest possible security level. The note discussed the pros and cons of the resumption of nuclear tests. It provided a clear recommendation: that India conduct two to three tests in Pokhran between December 1995 and February 1996. It ended by listing a process by which Rao’s explicit approval would be sought at four different points: T-30 (thirty days prior to testing), T-7, T-3, and finally T-1 (one day before testing). At T-7, the bomb would be placed in an L-shaped shaft at Pokhran. Seven days later, India would be a nuclear weapons state.

  Soon after the prime minister’s eyes scanned this note, he began a series of actions indicating where his mind was headed. His appointment diary indicates that Rao spoke in person to Abdul Kalam. He also spoke to Ronen Sen—then ambassador to Moscow and previously Rajiv Gandhi’s confidant on nuclear issues.

  The diplomat Prabhakar Menon was at th
e time a joint secretary in the PMO. Rao—via his principal secretary Amar Nath Varma—asked Menon and another diplomat, Sujata Mehta, to provide a top-secret assessment on what the international response to a test would be.24 Menon remembers, ‘Within the PMO, the feeling was that if the decision was taken to test . . . we would be able to face the consequences, given our reserves.’25

  Rao even asked the finance ministry—through his Cabinet secretary—what the economic consequences would be. ‘We did say the international reaction would be very negative,’ the then finance secretary Montek Singh Ahluwalia remembers. ‘The [Indian] economy which had recovered from the crisis was still not very strong.’26

  In end November, ‘T-21’, Naresh Chandra was ordered to fly to Delhi. Chandra had since retired from the bureaucracy and had been made governor of Gujarat. But such was his importance to the nuclear programme that he continued as its chairman. An encrypted red phone had been installed in his mansion in Gandhinagar so that Abdul Kalam or Narasimha Rao could reach him immediately.

  A few days after that, in early December, Naresh Chandra made an official visit to a plasma physics institute in north India. K. Santhanam and Abdul Kalam ‘happened’ to be present. Making use of this coincidence, the three of them moved to a room that had luckily been soundproofed. Here they discussed, in hushed voices, the preparations under way in Pokhran. The tests were for a conventional atomic or nuclear fission bomb. While R. Chidambaram and his team at the AEC were also working on a hydrogen bomb—a more powerful fusion device that could flatten entire cities—it was still six months away from completion.

  On 30 November 1995, Abdul Kalam wrote to the prime minister—again for his eyes only—criticizing the international non-proliferation regime, particularly the CTBT. He suggested to Rao that India test nuclear weapons while the CTBT was being negotiated and while China and France were still testing. India could then declare itself a nuclear weapons state and sign the CTBT in that capacity.