by Kuldip Nayar
My lunch on the following day was with Fakhar Zaman, then a minister in the Zia-ul-Haq government, and his wife, Chandi, who later became Pakistan’s ambassador to the US. Mushahid rang me at their residence during the lunch that A.Q. Khan would meet me that very evening, and that he (Mushahid) would pick me up from the hotel for the appointment. He made it plain that I would not be permitted to take down notes or carry a tape-recorder.
Khan lived on the outskirts of Islamabad on the undulating hills of Margalla. The road leading to his house was visible from where he lived. As it was dark, Mushahid had switched on the headlights. I inferred that the Intelligence was aware of our trip because just a day earlier a French journalist and a photographer had been beaten up when they had driven just a few yards along that road.
When we reached A.Q. Khan’s house, the security guard spoke to Mushahid but did not even look towards me. That convinced me that the interview was sanctioned by the government. Khan was waiting at the veranda to welcome me. As he was leading me to the drawing room he said he had been following my writings and was a ‘great fan’ of mine.
‘They treated me very badly at Bhopal,’ from where he graduated, said Khan. He was referring to his migration from India to Pakistan a few years after Partition. I told him that I came from Sialkot and had faced more or less the same privations. ‘The cake is delicious,’ I said. ‘My wife baked it for you,’ he replied.
Now that I felt comfortable, I began probing him about whether Pakistan had produced a nuclear bomb. ‘Your job must be very difficult,’ I said. Indeed it was when he had to do everything from scratch. He oozed confidence and pride.
Khan had been working on the nuclear bomb ever since Prime Minister Indira Gandhi had authorized a nuclear test in India in 1974. Her counterpart, Zulfikar Ali Bhutto, had said that Pakistan would even eat grass to acquire a nuclear bomb. Khan was the cynosure of all eyes in Pakistan, as an individual who would deliver the country nuclear parity with India.
I had heard he was very full of himself, and he matched the description to perfection. I annoyed him when I mentioned in passing that he had been hauled up before a Dutch court in a case for having ‘stolen’ information from one of their nuclear laboratories. He raised his voice to deny the charge, adding that the court had cleared him.
The question of whether India had tried to penetrate the secrets of Pakistan’s nuclear plant pleased him. Laughingly, he said that New Delhi had sent spies for the purpose, among them an Indian army major, but they had all been arrested.
My entire interview was directed towards learning whether or not Pakistan had made a nuclear bomb. He skirted all such questions, brushing me aside whenever I tried to be specific. It appeared to me that he had been permitted to give me this interview but at the same time had been told not to say anything specific. I praised him for being an outstanding scientist and the only one in the subcontinent who had two PhDs, one in metallurgy and the other in physics. I asked him whether he had any foreigner assisting him. He proudly said that his team comprised only Pakistanis.
I thought I would provoke him. Egoist as he was, he might fall for the bait. And he did. I concocted a story and told him that when I was coming to Pakistan, I ran into Dr Homi Sethna, father of India’s nuclear bomb, who asked me why I was wasting my time because Pakistan had neither the men nor the material to make such a weapon. Khan was furious and began pounding his hand on the table: ‘Tell them we have it; we have it.’ Mushahid was taken aback and looked distraught. I followed up Khan’s disclosure with the remark that it was easy to make such a claim but it needed to be corroborated. No test had been so far conducted to confirm that Pakistan possessed a nuclear bomb.
He said that they had already tested the bomb in their laboratory. ‘Haven’t you heard of a prototype plane flying with the help of a simulator? We do not have to explode a nuclear bomb to ascertain its potency. Sensitive and advanced instruments in a laboratory can show the scale of the explosion. We are satisfied with the results.’ He said he had developed ‘invaluable technology of isotope separation. We have upgraded uranium to 90 per cent to achieve the desired results.’
‘Why haven’t you announced that you have a nuclear bomb,’ I asked him point blank. ‘Is it necessary? America has threatened to cut off all its aid.’ Khan said their bomb was larger than the one we had exploded in Rajasthan on 18 May 1974. ‘The US is aware that Pakistan has a nuclear bomb,’ said Khan, ‘and what the CIA has been saying about our possessing a nuclear bomb is correct as are the speculations in the foreign media.’
Khan did not say when exactly Pakistan actually came to possess a nuclear bomb. He said that India took 12 years to make it while he took only seven. He narrated how, when he returned to Pakistan from Holland in December 1975, he had the Kahuta plant built. It took three years to complete. That meant it became operational by December 1978 or the beginning of 1979. Pakistan could be said to have acquired the bomb either towards the end of 1985 or in early 1986 (Khan stated in an another interview later that it was 1984).
Khan made no pretence that Pakistan’s nuclear programme was for peaceful purposes. ‘The word “peaceful” associated with the nuclear programme is humbug. There is no “peaceful bomb”. Once you knew how to make reactors, how to produce the plutonium, all of which Pakistan has mastered, it became easy to produce a nuclear bomb.’
Khan now spoke like a member of the ruling élite. He warned me: ‘If you ever drive us to the wall, as you did in East Pakistan, we will use the bomb.’ What he was trying to convey was that if Pakistan suffered a reverse in a conventional war against India, it would not hesitate to use a nuclear weapon. President General Parvez Musharraf said the same thing five years later.
The first remark Mushahid made in the car while we were returning was: ‘He has split the beans. What story will you do? Tell me.’ Mushahid said he had to live in the country. The story should not harm him. I offered not to write the story if it would expose him to any danger. He remained silent and did not utter another word for the rest of the journey, lost in thought. He dropped me at the hotel where I reached for a piece of paper to jot down Khan’s words, my memory standing me in good stead.
I had dinner that evening with Mushahid who was all the while saying that I had secured a scoop that would shake the world but it was he who would have to pay the price. We worked on the lead of the story, and he was agreeable to: ‘Pakistan has the bomb, Dr A.Q. Khan, father of the “Islamic bomb” claimed during a conversation with me, but he would not explicitly say so.’
I met S.K. Singh, then India’s high commissioner to Pakistan, the day after I interviewed Dr A.Q. Khan. I did not tell him anything about the interview because I wanted Khan’s sensational disclosure on the nuclear bomb to be my scoop. The only newspaper to which I offered to sell the story was Dawn. At Karachi, when I met Hamid Haroon, a friend of mine and a senior executive at Dawn, I asked him if they would like to run the interview. ‘Keep us out,’ he said, ‘it is too hot.’
I was in Lahore a day before my return to India when Shyam Bhatia of the Observer, rang me to ask about my stay in Pakistan. He knew about my visit but not that I had met Khan. I asked him if his weekly would be interested in Khan’s interview. He said that it all depended upon what I had got, and promised to check. On my return to Delhi, he conveyed to me his weekly’s interest in the story (they paid me only £200 for it).
I found the Observer a stickler for detail. Even when I had faxed the story, it wanted me to send them my notes. I had already told them that I had not been permitted to take notes, nor to record Khan on tape. I sent them by post the sheets on which I had scribbled or typed notes after the interview, all from memory. Subsequently, there were many telephone conversations between me and the Observer office on the story.
The Observer was justifiably cautious because Mushahid Hussain had already said under pressure from his government that no interview had taken place and that I had merely accompanied him to deliver to Khan an invitation to hi
s (Mushahid’s) forthcoming wedding. The Observer wanted to be doubly certain because of a report that an American newspaper had been offered the same story, but had turned it down because they doubted the veracity of the interview. I did not know who had offered them the story; it certainly hadn’t been me.
The reason I was keen to have my article published abroad was because in our part of the world people consider a disclosure appearing overseas, particularly in the UK, more authentic than if published in India. It took me an entire month to persuade the Observer to run the interview. The day they published it coincided with the day when our national budget was discussed in the press. My anticipation of poor timing proved to be true. My clients, 70-odd newspapers which bought my service, did not run the bomb story as the first lead, but even so all ran it. The disclosure attracted considerable attention.
Favourable comments on my story overwhelmed me. What touched me most was a personal letter from Nikhil Chakravarty, editor of Mainstream. He wrote:
It would be prosaic to merely say that this is a vindication of your journalistic honour. I see it first as a high tribute to you as a person of integrity and, only then, your journalistic acumen. I must say after reading your piece I feel proud of you and once again I offer my sincerest congratulations to you.
The story’s publication in the Observer, London, lent it authenticity, and provoked the controversy it deserved. Mushahid’s retraction did hurt me a little but I could understand his compulsions in Pakistan. Fortunately, he had published the story in his own newspaper and written an editorial on the interview to argue that Pakistan should tell the entire world that it possessed a nuclear bomb, which, he argued, would send a message to New Delhi.
The Pakistanis were angry and demanded Mushahid’s head for helping the ‘enemy’, and that too a Hindu. Many asked for Mushahid’s trial for ‘treason’. I could not understand why there was such a furore.
I was confident that Gen. Zia-ul-Haq must have been consulted at some stage. As I learnt subsequently, he had actually okayed the interview but did not want Khan to admit that Pakistan had assembled the bomb. Zia tried to retrieve the situation when he told Time magazine that Pakistan was only a screwdriver away from manufacturing a nuclear bomb. This did not attract much attention because by then the cat was out of the bag.
Pakistan’s predicament was that the bomb story was published during the week when its aid bill was before the US Congress for approval, and of this I had no knowledge. The timing of my story was a pure coincidence. In the meanwhile, Senator John Glenn, the first American to orbit the earth, rang me from Washington to confirm what Khan had said. Still, amidst doubt, President George W. Bush Sr cleared the way for aid to Pakistan by certifying that Pakistan did not possess a nuclear weapon. I think that politics played a role because the US president told a lie when he had with him the reports of his intelligence agencies which unequivocally said that Pakistan had manufactured a nuclear bomb.
During the controversy, someone asked Prime Minister Rajiv Gandhi whether India had conspired with Kuldip Nayar to do the bomb story on the eve of the US aid bill. Rajiv said in reply: ‘We can conspire with anyone but not Kuldip Nayar.’
Dr A.Q. Khan went to the British Press Council to allege that there was no story and that Nayar had used a social call to circulate a canard through the Observer. The weekly contested the case and both of us, the Observer and I, were exonerated. In its observation, the Council said, rejecting Khan’s petition, that it had ‘no reason to disbelieve Nayar’s story’.
Islamabad did not give up. It had a book published in which it was alleged that Pamela Bordes, an Indian model, was used by Kuldip Nayar to seduce the Observer editor in order to ensure the publication of the bomb story. The PTI picked up the Pamela portion from the book and ran it a couple of years later. I threatened to sue the agency. M.K. Razdan, then heading the PTI, withdrew the story but never expressed regret. This was a new kind of journalism: disseminating defamatory material and refusing to express any regrets. I left it at that because the agency had after all withdrawn the story. The Pakistan High Commission in Delhi also sought to punish me by refusing to issue a visa to me for nearly five years.
Almost a decade after the story, I met Mushahid at a conference in Dhaka. I asked him if my meeting with Khan was cleared with General Zia-ul-Haq. He replied in the affirmative, that it had all been arranged. Where things went wrong, he said, was that Khan spoke too much and disclosed more than he was supposed to.
To return to Brasstacks led by Gen. Sunderji, Beijing’s reaction became clear to me when I visited China at the invitation of the Institute of Foreign Affairs, a prestigious organization. One day my guests fixed an interview for me with a few top retired military officers. Their expressions and behaviour was stern and hostile. Without my touching on the 1962 hostilities between the two countries, they literally pounced on me for Gen. Sunderji’s ‘foray in their territory’.
Without letting me speak, they said: ‘Have you forgotten the thrashing we gave you in 1962? We will again come and punish you, and return as we did then. You do not seem to have learnt any lessons.’ The current National Security Advisor Shiv Shankar Menon was then number two at Beijing, and the ambassador was away. I told Menon about the threat and whatever else I had been told. He said someone from the defence ministry would meet me in Delhi. None did, just as no one from the government of India met me to seek details about my interview with Khan.
Giani Zail Singh nurtured a grievance for having been kept in the dark about Operation Bluestar, and resolved that one day he would put the government on the mat to ventilate his feelings of hurt. How he should do so was his predicament. The course of action he decided in consultation with me was to withhold his assent to some important bills. He did not have to wait long. An opportunity arose when the Rajiv Gandhi government sent to him for approval a constitutional amendment bill relating to the Shah Bano case.
The Supreme Court had granted a maintenance allowance to Shah Bano, a Muslim divorcee, whose husband had refused to pay her anything beyond the paltry one-time traditional payment, or meher, as alimony. The Muslim community considered the judgement interference in their religious affairs. Agitated, Muslims argued that they would themselves decide the quantum of allowance and would ensure its payment, and did not want the court to ‘interfere’.
Following the judgement, there were demonstrations by Muslims throughout the country to force New Delhi to effect a constitutional amendment to overrule the ‘damage’ the Supreme Court had caused to Muslims. Rajiv Gandhi, with an eye on the elections, thought he would placate Muslims by using a constitutional amendment to nullify the Supreme Court’s judgement. It was naïve of him to think in those terms. Subsequently, when he realized that Hindus had been seriously upset by the constitutional amendment brought about by the Shah Bano case, he had the locks of the disputed Babri Masjid–Ram Janmabhoomi Temple at Ayodhya opened. He in this way tried to run with the hare and hunt with the hounds. The nation is still suffering as a consequence of these two actions of his.
When the bill to undo the judgement on Shah Bano’s maintenance allowance reached Zail Singh for assent, he saw it as an opportunity to hit back at the government. I used to meet Zail Singh regularly in those days, but he had avoided meeting me when he was home minister. ‘Mrs Indira Gandhi did not like our meeting,’ he explained to me when I once met him in the Central Hall of parliament. Now, as president, he sent for me when this bill relating to the Shah Bano case reached him.
We discussed the repercussions of a refusal on his part to assent to the bill. Eventually, he realized that a negative response from him would displease Muslims, and he did not want to get embroiled in a situation fraught with religious overtones. At the same time, he did not want to miss the opportunity to embarrass the government. Finally, he decided to assent to the bill to the great relief of Rajiv Gandhi, who had sent Buta Singh to Rashtrapati Bhavan to placate him. Buta Singh told Zail Singh in Punjabi: ‘Thwadda hi putter ha
i [He is your son]’. Buta Singh takes credit for dissuading Zail Singh from dismissing Rajiv Gandhi as prime minister.
I informed Zail Singh that the Postal Bill, which was being discussed in parliament in those days, was his best bet. He was ready with his knife to hurt the government when the bill reached him for assent. The Postal Bill authorized the government to open anyone’s mail. The intelligence agencies were already doing this surreptitiously but the government wanted to make it legal.
When Zail Singh and I discussed the issue we had anticipated that refusal to give assent would evoke a popular response in favour of rejection. The public, jealous of its privacy, would hail the president’s step. This was precisely what happened and Zail Singh’s refusal was my scoop.
The government’s reaction was wild. It stopped sending the president the cabinet papers, telegrams from foreign missions, and the like. This was against the constitution. Zail Singh protested against the government action. He argued that he had a constitutional right to receive copies of government papers just as he was also entitled to ask to see any document. The government however felt that it was within its right to bypass him and Zail Singh’s protest, even though publicly voiced, had no effect on Rajiv Gandhi.
Zail Singh did not give up. He thought of some other way of embarrassing the government. This proved to be his Achilles heel. The Indian Express, which was largely critical of Rajiv Gandhi, came in handy for the president. He wrote a vituperative letter to the prime minister, drafted by the then editor of the Express S. Mulgaonkar and the RSS ideologue S. Gurumurthy at the newspaper’s guest-house in Sunder Nagar, New Delhi. As Zail Singh had made some changes in the draft, the letter which appeared in the newspaper was slightly different from the one that had been originally drafted. Both Zail Singh and the Indian Express cut a sorry figure when the government raided the guest-house and recovered the draft with Mulgaonkar’s corrections.