Ramanna, 73 then, was the father of Pokharan I and also sometimes referred to as the bombmeister, and an outspoken one at that. As my reporter’s luck would have it, he was indeed in town, and as I later realised, I was fortunate to get through to him in just one attempt.

“The phone has just not stopped ringing all evening,” he said, as he opened the door to his RT Nagar bungalow and rushed inside to answer another call. The living room was dimly lit and somewhere in the distance, a stereo was playing Mozart or Beethoven. “I was about to open a bottle of red wine to celebrate. Will you have a glass?” he asked.

“These tests are only ornamentations but necessary in the modern world,” he said, sounding ebullient as he settled down with his glass. Uncharacteristic remarks, I thought, coming from a firm believer in the power of nuclear weapons and the benefits of nuclear energy. “They can’t kick us around, especially Pakistan... the way they talk about us all the time.”

What followed was a two-hour lecture, frequently interrupted by the phone, on India’s nuclear programme, the politics of weaponisation and the indignation at having to fight the sanctions imposed after Pokharan I as director of Bhabha Atomic Research Centre and chairman of the Atomic Energy Commission, among others.

“Producing a hydrogen bomb is no simple thing and it seems to have worked. The tests were done one after the other, which is tremendous. And the secrecy was maintained,” the grand old man of India’s nuclear programme said, sounding triumphant even though he had no obvious direct role in Pokharan II. The symbolism of nuclear power too seemed to matter equally for him.

Having faced the worst of the technology denial regimes post-1974, and having struggled to keep the nuclear programme afloat, May 11, 1998, seemed like an appropriate occasion to ventilate for the scientist-pianist who was almost forced by Saddam Hussein to stay in Baghdad and help build the Iraqi bomb.

“It took us time to recover from the Western world’s sanctions after the 1974 tests,” he said, adding that he was bitter about India’s nuclear energy not being allowed to be harnessed productively to generate electricity. “But we’ll have to face the consequences again,” he said matter-of-factly.

Much heavy water has since flowed under the bridge. From facing several more years of sanctions and almost having the CTBT thrust down its gullet after Pokharan II, New Delhi seemed set to manage the unmanageable and emerge from its nuclear winter with a historic nuclear deal with the United States few experts have found fault with.

Since he died less than a year before President George W. Bush and Prime Minister Manmohan Singh agreed in principle to the nuclear deal in July 2005, the country is that much unfortunate in that it does not know how Ramanna would have reacted to it.

Eight of his contemporaries and successors came together in 2006 and formed what was sometimes cheekily referred to as the G-8 — a group of renowned scientists who raised the red flag against the deal and wrote to Singh cautioning him against compromising India’s nuclear security and sovereignty in exchange for American nuclear fuel and equipment.

The scientists were eventually convinced and won over by the prime minister who even went as far as agreeing to involve them in the process of negotiating crucial aspects of the deal, including the IAEA safeguards. While the scientist-politician in Ramanna may have been tempted to join this bandwagon, those who knew him closely feel the pragmatist in him would have carried the day.

In a 2001 newspaper interview, he was asked about his thoughts on India’s democracy and its leaders considering he had also been a minister of state for defence and a Rajya Sabha MP. “Both are maturing,” was his glib reply. Seven years on, as the politicians make a meal of the landmark nuclear deal,

Ramanna is probably wincing somewhere in the skies, wondering if he had spoken too soon.

yp.rajesh@expressindia.com