Ex-foreign secy’s claim appears to distort history

NEW DELHI: The assertion by former foreign secretary MK Rasgotra that Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru rejected US President John F Kennedy’s offer of helping India detonate a nuclear device much before China has raised many hackles. But Rasgotra’s claim appears to be in contradiction with certain established narratives of the era.

The seasoned diplomat has reasoned that had Nehru accepted the offer, India wouldn’t have had to scurry from pillar to post for a membership of the exclusive nuclear suppliers group (NSG). It is another matter that the NSG was founded in 1975, primarily as a response to India conducting the nuclear test a year before.

Accepting Kennedy’s offer, reckons Rasgotra “would have deterred China from launching its war of 1962 and even imparted a note of caution to (Pakistan’s) Field Marshal Ayub Khan’s plans for war in 1965.”

But these assertions seem to challenge the well-articulated positions of both Nehru and Kennedy on nuclear disarmament.

Unlike it is often made out to be, Nehru’s disarmament ideals were more rooted in pragmatism than anything else. He was unwilling to commit India to be part of any international regimes that he found discriminatory—a position all his successors earnestly followed since then.

“Alas, we have only Mr Rasgotra’s version available today. Nonetheless, I am afraid his version doesn’t sound credible. The fact of the matter is that the US and the (former) Soviet Union had been engaged in extensive negotiations for more than eight years before signing the Nuclear Test Ban Treaty,” says former diplomat and writer MK Bhadrakumar. That, he insists, would have amounted to “undercutting the work of the American diplomats at that time”.