Vajpayee's biggest error as PM

My personal acquaintance with Atal Bihari Vajpayee was nil. The closest we ever came to a one-on-one contact was approximately 40 years ago, when he was the chief guest at a semi-formal dinner at the Administrative Staff College, Hyderabad. I was refilling the ice-buckets.

That was in the late 1970s when I was a callow teenager. I was happy to see him tucking into the excellent biryani with gusto after he had swallowed a couple of stiff ones. I knew little of politics but I dimly felt that anybody who enjoyed his meat and drink as much as Vajpayee did, couldn’t be all bad.

A year or so later, I developed a genuine fondness and feeling of brotherhood for him.  While he was External Affairs Minister for the Janata government, he declared, in a context that I don’t recall, that he was a bachelor but not a brahmachari. Once again, that gelled perfectly with my personal philosophy.

My feelings about him became more nuanced in 1992 when the Masjid was brought down. No, he wasn’t the chief instigator. But he gave that marvellous speech the day before. Taken out of context, it was a feat of oratory. Even Bengali chauvinists like yours truly had to admit that it was possible to say things elegantly in North Indian dialects. In context, well, a lot of people killed each other.

I have never been able to get my head around Pokhran II and the events that occurred organically after that. The Lahore meeting — Kargil — Agra — Kandahar and the attack on Parliament followed seamlessly. I believe India should have stayed away from any public demonstration of its nuclear capability and that this was Vajpayee’s biggest error.  

By 1998, both India and Pakistan were assumed to be nuclear powers by everybody. Indeed, this was tacitly assumed as early as 1986-87, when the war-gaming of Operation Brasstacks nearly took us to the brink of war with our western neighbour.  

The Defence Research and Development Organisation (or DRDO) wanted to carry out tests to prove thermo-nuclear capability — that is, the ability to build what is commonly called a “hydrogen bomb”.  A hydrogen bomb is a tricky two-in-one device. It requires precise design and timing to set off a fission explosion (an atom bomb) to trigger a fusion reaction (a hydrogen bomb). Every nation with demonstrable thermo-nuclear capability has got it wrong multiple times before actually succeeding. It was odds on that India would also not succeed in the first shot and it was hard to see what such a demonstration would prove in geopolitical terms.

By all accounts, P V Narasimha Rao had come within an ace of giving the go-ahead for the tests. Vajpayee did give the go-ahead as we know. The consensus of opinion is that India did not manage to trigger fusion — the seismic signatures clearly indicate that didn't happen. 

What Pokhran II did trigger was tit-for-tat tests by Pakistan, and international sanctions. A year down the line, Pakistan opted for the Kargil infiltration. Part of Pakistan's calculation was that India would not dare raise the tempo of the conflict because of Pakistan’s nuclear umbrella. Pakistan's strategists also assumed, correctly as it happens, that the prospect of nuclear conflict would lead to intense diplomatic pressure that would prevent India from hitting back offensively.

Would Pakistan have dared Kargil if it had not gone explicitly nuclear earlier? Would diplomatic pressure to end the conflict have tied India's hands if both nations had remained in a "don't ask, don't tell " mode? If India had an extra week to escalate, or the luxury of threatening to open a second front, it may just have prevented Kargil happening at all. And without Kargil, Agra, Kandahar and the attack on Parliament may not have happened either.

These are imponderables. What is certain is that India paid a large opportunity cost. Sanctions retarded economic growth then and have since forced all sorts of tortuous diplomatic manoeuvring to source nuclear fuel. India has spent years struggling to develop cryogenic engines and other dual-use technologies. And, all for a failed test, which offered no obvious payoff even if it had succeeded. 

Twitter: @devangshudatta