Politics of Science

An absorbing account of the nuclear programme under Indira Gandhi.

One afternoon during the summer of 1976, when the Emergency was in full blast, Indira Gandhi sent for Ashok Parthasarathi — who, after serving as her special assistant for science and technology for five years, had just moved to a higher scientific post — and asked, “Ashok, what are we doing about silicon?” He gave all the necessary information, and then mustered the courage to ask, “Madam, what made you think of silicon”? She pointed to a copy of The Economist on her desk. Its main article had argued that silicon would be “to the twenty-first century what steel was to the twentieth”.

This is but one of the numerous vignettes in Parthasarathi’s eminently readable book on India’s third prime minister’s deep interest in science and technology as an essential instrument to promote national development and security.

After all, however controversial several facets of her incomparable political career be, no one can dispute that it was under her watch that India became the third largest reservoir of highly skilled technological manpower; the fifth military power; the sixth member of the most exclusive nuclear club; the seventh to join the race for space; and the tenth industrial power. The Green Revolution was her riposte to the humiliation of this country having to live from “ship to mouth” when Lyndon Johnson had put the supply of PL480 wheat on a very short leash. On returning to power in 1980, she had asked for a comprehensive briefing on developments in the S&T field during her “absence” of 34 months.

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Parthasarathi’s account (it includes fascinating details of bitter rivalries and tussles between scientists and bureaucrats, and between eminent scientists themselves) covers not just his years in the Prime Minister’s Secretariat (as it was then called) but the entire period when Indira Gandhi strode the national stage.

Of course, her own knowledge of the state-of-the-art technologies wasn’t as extensive as that of her son and successor Rajiv. But she always knew what was going on in the realm of S&T around her and what exactly she had to do to put things right. At her first meeting with her newly appointed adviser on S&T, she “expressed her particular concern” about two matters: the “continuing and serious” differences between Vikram Sarabhai, then chairman of the Atomic Energy Commission, and his eventual successor, Homi Sethna; and the “problems” the then director-general of the CSIR, Atma Ram, was “creating” in that organisation.

Parthasarathi’s chapter on atomic energy — he had worked at the AEC before moving to Prime Minister’s Secretariat — has memorable minutiae such as his own opposition to nuclear energy on the ground of its “excessive” costs. PN Haksar, the PM’s principal secretary, appreciated the younger man’s logic, but tersely told him, “there are larger objectives (behind) our atomic programme”. All in all, an absorbing read.