The house they all built

The Bharatiya Janata Party would not be itself if it stopped playing politics with history. As the real intentions of the BJP in raking up a controversy about an American “mole” in P.V. Narasimha Rao’s PMO become clear, Sonia Gandhi and Prime Minister Manmohan Singh must stand up and defend the Congress Party’s proud nuclear record.

The BJP’s opposition to the current Indo-US nuclear deal is no longer about the personal egotism of either Jaswant Singh or Brajesh Mishra, the two principal interlocutors with the US and the world on India’s nuclear policy after Pokharan II in May 1998.

There is no doubt that Jaswant Singh and Brajesh Mishra would have been more than happy to sign the nuclear deal with the US that was negotiated by Manmohan Singh. History, however, does not stop when individuals, even exceptional ones like Jaswant Singh and Brajesh Mishra, move out of government. It marches on, even if it means disappointment for some.

The July 18, 2005 deal between India and the United States is a logical conclusion of the nuclear negotiations conducted by Jaswant Singh and Brajesh Mishra during 1998-2004.

The BJP’s latest line of attack is not merely about the natural opportunism of a party in opposition. Nor is it about picking nuclear nits. The NDA’s negotiating record will show that Jaswant Singh was proposing that India sign the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty. And Brajesh Mishra was willing to put a large number of nuclear reactors under safeguards in return for only uranium supplies from the US. Today both of them are making outlandish charges against the government, which has got a far better deal than Jaswant Singh or Brajesh Mishra did.

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.

... contd.

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