The ground for India’s nuclear diplomacy was laid on May 13, 1998, when Vajpayee announced the second round of Pokharan II and a moratorium on further testing of nuclear weapons. Vajpayee understood nuclear defiance was not an end in itself; it must be followed by reconciliation. He recognised the urgency of finding an accommodation with the global nuclear order and reclaiming India’s access to civil nuclear energy.

Without Vajpayee clearing the underbrush, there was no way that Manmohan Singh could have clinched an agreement with the US that liberates India from three and a half decades of nuclear bondage.

A true celebration of the tenth anniversary of Pokharan II would have involved the demonstration of national unity on implementing the remaining steps of the Indo-US civil nuclear initiative. As our political classes quarrel, public focus has largely been on the Communist opposition to a nuclear deal.

While CPM General Secretary Prakash Karat’s threat to pull the plug on the government is the proximate cause for the current nuclear stalemate, it is Advani’s opposition to the nuclear deal that takes one’s breath away. That the CPM might want to dismantle India’s civilian and military nuclear programmes does not surprise anyone familiar with the tragic history of the Indian communist movement.

Having never been part of India’s mainstream national security thinking, the CPM is free to take outrageous positions. After all Karat attacked Pokharan II as a sellout to the United States, at a time when the Clinton administration was imposing sanctions on India and mobilising the rest of the world to punish Vajpayee’s defiance of the international system. It may be surreal but not shocking that Karat thinks the nuclear deal which fully reverses American position in 1998 is also a sellout to Washington.

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