Asif Ali Zardari recently took over as President of Pakistan. His wife, Benazir, has been dead, assassinated, and remains buried for 17 years now. Thirty-six years ago, in 1988, not many outside Pakistan had heard of Zardari. But he had just become what Royals would call “consort”, and a figure to watch in Islamabad. His wife, the 35-year-old Benazir had just become prime minister (PM) of Pakistan. Not many in India knew much of her either except as the stunning-looking, very shy daughter of Zulfikar Ali Bhutto accompanying her father to Simla in 1972, where the then President of Pakistan signed the celebrated agreement with PM Indira Gandhi.
Neither country was nuclear in 1972, when the two heads of government signed the pact (even as Benazir scooped up all photo-ops in Simla), though there were enough bomb-walas in the policy-making lobbies of both countries. No one, least of all ZA Bhutto and Indira Gandhi, would have thought that his daughter and her son would be PMs of their countries, both having the capacity to make nuclear bombs.
Mani Shankar Aiyar’s just-out nugget of a book on Rajiv Gandhi (The Rajiv I Knew, Juggernaut, 2024) has much going for it, but what I have found to be of more than a memoir value in it is the author’s description of the former PM’s thoughts and actions on nuclear weapons. On this subject, Rajiv was his grandfather’s grandson more than his mother’s son. He loathed the idea of India disembowelling itself to make the nuclear bomb which would maim and kill millions. A nuclear war cannot be won, he believed; a nuclear war should not be fought. But if Pakistan and China have the wretched thing can India fold its hands over its chest and put a ring of olive leaves on its head? It cannot. So, must it blindly follow suit?
“He once told me”, writes Aiyar, “‘You know, Mani, if Pakistan does really have the bomb, even I cannot stop India from going down the road to nuclear weapons.’” In another telling conversation, Rajiv told him, “Well, you see, India and Pakistan both already have the bomb.” Aiyar was puzzled. Rajiv explained. “The Canadians have gifted them to us. We have the Bhabha Atomic Centre reactor in Bombay and the Pakistanis have the Candu reactor in Karachi. All that it would take for devastating nuclear explosions that would destroy both our commercial capitals would be for kamikaze pilots from either country to fly an aircraft straight into the reactor of the other.”
This was not nuclear science fiction. This was not Arthur C Clarke talking. Nor an anti-nuke activist standing on a dealwood box in Hyde Park. This was the PM of India, a grandson of Jawaharlal Nehru, despiser of all war, and, therefore, of nuclear war, thinking aloud. Not in panic, not in morbid hallucination, but in full possession of his powers of cogitation. He was, of course, a pilot; so, he knew what he was saying, aeronautically. For him, kamikaze was no frame from a Japanese animation during World War II. It was something as real as anyone sitting in a pilot’s seat on any old aeroplane can do. And we should remember this was visualised and said way before 9/11.
Reading this, I recalled with gratitude for the late PM and his visit to Islamabad over the last two days of 1988. Benazir Bhutto had just taken over. The visit to Islamabad was for a South Asian Association for Regional Cooperation (SAARC) summit. But the visitor being the PM of India and the host, the PM of Pakistan, it had to be about the two countries. Asked by Benazir “spontaneously”, but in reality after due preparations by both sides, to spend some extra hours after the summit for bilateral talks, much progress was made to improve the prospects for peace between the two sides and reduce the risks of violence. Swift action ensued.
One of these was the signing, on December 31, 1988, of the Agreement on the Prohibition of Attack against Nuclear Installations and Facilities. I see that agreement as an answer to Rajiv’s vivid visualisation of the kamikaze-type attack on reactors. Signed by Humayun Khan, Benazir Bhutto’s foreign secretary for Pakistan, and KPS Menon, Rajiv Gandhi’s foreign secretary for India, the Agreement bound both parties to refrain from “causing the destruction of or damage to” any nuclear installation or facility in the other country. The term “nuclear installation or facility” was specified to include atomic reactors. This propelled Rajiv Gandhi’s thought into intent and action. An operative part of the agreement was that both countries would exchange, on January 1 each year, a list of their nuclear installations and facilities.
Incredible for our times of suspicion, secrecy and solecisms, this exchange of lists has taken place unerringly year after year for the last 33 years. It has been done without a single year missed, under the governments of Rajiv Gandhi, VP Singh, Chandrashekhar, PV Narasimha Rao, AB Vajpayee, Manmohan Singh, and Narendra Modi. Likewise, through all the vicissitudes of politics in Pakistan from the era of Benazir Bhutto right through to the present time when her husband is the President once again. The lists were exchanged this year, on January 1, as well.
Why should one be so thankful and so happy over this? For the reason that the agreement (which I would like to think of as the Khan-Menon Agreement) shows that both countries regard their nuclear installations and facilities as something that should not form part of any designs for war. “We have the means for that dead-end war but we will not use them” is not as good as not having them, but is better than having them and reserving the right to use them in any way we like whenever we choose to. That is to say, while both countries are now nuclear weapons countries, we still do not want to become nuclear blasters-of-each-other-and-others. It is important, strategically and civilisationally, for there to be such an agreement binding the two countries to self-restraint, no less than a no-first-use agreement.
But there is another and very important reason why the Khan-Menon Agreement should be cherished. Our exchanging lists, with the latitudes and longitudes for each site being described, should be with the knowledge that each of these installations is or can at any time be on the radar of non-State players that can “destroy or damage” any of them and paralyse either or both countries, with no war happening.
“We already have the bomb,” Rajiv Gandhi told Aiyar, very rightly, when we did not have the bomb. And the Khan-Menon Agreement was the answer. Now, when Pakistan has just got a new dispensation to take control over its nuclear installations and facilities, it could well be the time for PM Narendra Modi to visualise and propose starting a new bilateral initiative for nuclear self-restraint. And thereby moving the world nearer to the goal of what Rajiv Gandhi wanted — a time-bound, phased, verifiable action plan for universal nuclear disarmament.
Gopalkrishna Gandhi, a former administrator and diplomat, is a student of modern Indian history. The views expressed are personal
Gopalkrishna Gandhi read English Literature at St Stephen’s College, Delhi. A civil servant and diplomat, he was Governor of West Bengal, 2004-2009. He is currently Distinguished Professor of History and Politics at Ashoka University ...view detail
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