What we see today is an egregious attempt by the BJP to project the Congress as being weak on national security. To suggest that Narasimha Rao pulled back from ordering nuclear tests in 1995 because of a mole in his office. And to imply that anything that the Congress Party negotiates with other nations, including the nuclear deal with the US, must be suspect.

India’s nuclear history, however, is a little more complicated than it appears to be in the BJP script.

India’s nuclear programme was founded by the nation’s first PM, Jawaharlal Nehru. India’s first nuclear test was conducted by Indira Gandhi in 1974.

The BJP’s record is mixed. As the first evidence on Pakistan’s nuclear weapons came through in the late 1970s, Atal Bihari Vajpayee, then external affairs minister, was not among those in the Janata government demanding a credible response. For all the tall nuclear talk of the Jan Sangh, Vajpayee was seen by many to be soft on nuclear issues in the late 1970s. He, along with the then prime minister, Morarji Desai, must also take some of the blame for slowing down India’s nuclear weapons programme in the late 1970s.

Vajpayee also accepted the establishment of a joint safeguards panel with the US, which would have severely undercut India’s nuclear weapons programme. That decision was only undercut by bureaucratic and political backlash.

The real credit for ending India’s political vacillation on nuclear weapons goes to Rajiv Gandhi, who ordered the Department of Atomic Energy to build nuclear weapons in early 1989. If Rajiv made India a nuclear weapons power, Rao’s challenge was to preserve India’s nuclear deterrent from hostile international pressures which dramatically escalated after the Cold War.

... contd.