When she came to power in 1966, Indira Gandhi found India strategically boxed in. To the west and east were two wings of US-armed Pakistan, which had slapped a costly war on India a few months earlier. To the north was the Chinese dragon that had snatched away huge chunks of territory in the 1962 war. In the south, Sri Lanka was indifferent and often flirting with the western powers who were arming Pakistan. Further south in the deep ocean, the British and the Americans were talking of building a military base in Diego Garcia. In short, India saw only hostile elements on all sides―in the west, east, north and south. The Soviets were friendly, but were cold and distant.
Indira took three steps to break out of the box. The first was taken in the course of pursuing the second. The third came three years later. We will look at them one by one.
By mid-1971, it was clear that India and Pakistan were drifting towards a war over Pakistan’s handling of its eastern wing. The military regime based in the west had held an election but, advised by Zulfikar Ali Bhutto of the Pakistan People’s Party, it refused to acknowledge that the east-based Awami League of Mujibur Rahman had won the majority seats in parliament. The east revolted, the military regime sent troops to quell the unrest, and refugees poured into India in millions.
As war clouds gathered over the horizon, Indira grabbed a two-year-old offer of a loose friendship treaty from the USSR, and signed it in August 1971. As war with Pakistan broke out in December, and American warships steamed into the Bay of Bengal ostensibly to aid Pakistan, she invoked the treaty to get Moscow to tail them with nuclear submarines. Anyway, in 13 days, she won the war, and eliminated the threat from the east.
India thus got a strategic friend, and also secured the east. In the west, Pakistan continued to remain hostile, but enfeebled. In short, the east and west were now secure.
Next she began looking at the oceanic south, where the Lankans had refuelled Pakistani military planes and from where the American fleet had come steaming in. She soon stitched up a deal with the Lankans, conceded the islet of Katchatheevu to them, but ensured landing rights for Indian fishermen there. Soviet submarines slowly began leaving signatures in the southern oceans, signalling to the west that the Indian Ocean would not be an Anglo-American lake any longer. India could no longer be threatened from the south.
Thus having secured three of India’s frontiers, Indira started looking for a big techno-strategic breakout. The atom offered the potential.
India’s atom story had begun even before independence, thanks to Homi J. Bhabha and his good friend Jawaharlal Nehru who worshipped science. It is said Bhabha was the one who prevailed on Nehru to prevent the secession of the princely state of Travancore, which had the world’s second largest deposit of the strategic mineral thorium.
With state patronage and Tata funds, Bhabha set up the early nuclear labs in Bombay where they researched on the bomb and non-bomb aspects of atomic physics. As the British and the French, too, made bombs and joined the nuclear club, till then membered by the US and the USSR, Bhabha and his team pursued the technology, but refrained from weaponising it as the political advice was against making bombs.
But in 1964, when the Chinese tested the bomb, Bhabha thought that India, too, had to test one. By then, Nehru was dead and Shastri was the prime minister. Much as Bhabha and Co talked, Shastri was dead against going nuclear. So frustrated was Bhabha that he openly declared in an All India Radio address in October 1964 that, if given the go-ahead, he and his men could make the bomb in 18 months. But the Shastri government refused.
By now, the big powers decided that they could not allow India or any more countries to make the bomb. In 1965, they negotiated and came out with the non-proliferation treaty by which they would keep their bombs and make more of them, but all other countries would forswear the weapon. India, calling upon the big bomb-owning five to give up their weapons, objected to what it called nuclear apartheid.
Meanwhile, Shastri won the 1965 war against Pakistan, and was invited to talks with Pakistan in Tashkent where he died unexpectedly. Indira succeeded him as prime minister, but the very day she was being sworn in―24 January 1966―Bhabha was killed in a plane crash in Switzerland.
Many feared, India’s nuclear programme also would go for a toss with that plane crash.
But by then, Bhabha had put the nuclear programme on a robust foundation, having trained many of its finest scientists like Homi Sethna, Raja Ramanna and P.K. Iyengar in cutting-edge technologies. While Sethna worked on developing weapons-grade plutonium, Ramanna worked on the actual nuclear device, Iyengar developed plutonium reactors, the kind of which he had seen in the USSR.
Yet, India couldn’t go nuclear for fear of sanctions from the west from where India was importing most of its food. By the early 1970s, Indira had made much progress in making India self-sufficient in food production through the green revolution. In 1972, having triumphed over Pakistan, Indira gave the go-ahead to her scientists―just 75 of them knew―to work towards a test. The Army leadership was kept informed.
The project was headed by Ramanna, and its physics worked on by R. Chidambaram, whom Ramanna selected because he knew his physics and also “knew how to keep his mouth shut”. When asked by colleagues on the eve of the test on May 18, 1974, if it would work, Chidambaram would reply that if it didn’t, the laws of physics were wrong. Exactly 24 years later, as chairman of the Atomic Energy Commission, he would preside over the five tests with which India would declare that it was making bombs. Yet, as Ramanna had expected of him in 1974, he would keep his mouth shut even when the public went to give credit to others.
Now, what was it that was tested in 1974? Officially it was called a peaceful test of a nuclear device that was designed to yield 10 kilotons, but yielded about 8 to 10. That was about two-thirds of the yield of the bomb that was dropped in Hiroshima.
The 1974 test cocked a nuke at the big five who thought they ruled the universe. India got away with it admirably as the subsequent years showed. With the launch of Aryabhatta the very next year, India declared it was coming on to the world stage seeking a big role.