Did Kalam have a rethink on Pokhran-II N-tests?

Equally astonishing was Dr Kalam’s another initiative. When a long-drawn people’s movement against the Kudankulam Nuclear Power Project (KKNPP) in Tirunelveli district in the backdrop of the Fukushima nuclear disaster in Japan in 2011 had threatened to derail the Indo-Russian joint venture, the former President took considerable personal risk in visiting the plant, studying all its systems and tried to convince the people about its need.

Could the same degree of certainty of purpose be attributed to him about the Pokhran-II nuclear explosions in May 1998, when India tested five nuclear devices over two days in the Rajasthan desert and in which Dr Kalam played a crucial role has been well documented?

Going by Dr Kalam’s own words in his latest book released recently before he passed away, ‘Transcendence- My Spiritual Experiences with Pramukh Swamiji’, which he co-authored with Arun Tiwari, it appears the ‘Missile Man’ later

had a rethink about the Pokhran-II blasts, notwithstanding the other larger controversies encircling the N-tests. Even before he became the 11th President of India, Dr Kalam, recalls in the introduction to his work, how he was suddenly confronted with a Robert Oppenheimer-like predicament – the late physicist was known as the ‘Father’ of the American nuclear bomb - when he (Kalam) visited Bhuj in Gujarat in March 2001, as principal scientific adviser to the Government of India to review the rehabilitation work after the devastating earthquake.

A disciple of Pramukh Swamiji of the Swaminarayan faith, at that time asked me “a startling question”, says Kalam. “After the detonation of the first atomic bomb, Robert Oppenheimer remembered (a line) from the Bhagawad Gita: ‘Time I am the shatterer of the world’. What came to your mind after you detonated India’s first atomic bomb?” was the question posed by that disciple to Kalam.

“I was puzzled by this question and said, ‘the energy of God does not shatter, it unifies’, to which he replied, ‘our spiritual leader Pramukh Swami Maharaj is a great unifier. He has unified all our energies to regenerate and restore life from the rubble of damage,” writes Kalam, adding, it was that chance event in his life that led him to meet Pramukh Swamiji, “my ultimate teacher, unwittingly.” “A chance introduction became a divine destiny”.

“At the most elementary level, all nature is one. Only one noble material weaves constantly different garbs. The nascent convergence of Nano-Bio-Info-Cogno technologies is testimony to this. How can we ensure that this convergence leads to human good and not harm; to the benefit of the marginalized and poor and not to merely an influential few?” asks Kalam.

After being drawn towards Pramukh Swamiji, Kalam writes that later on returning to Delhi that year he requested then Prime Minister A.B. Vajpayee to relieve him from his duties as GOI’s scientific adviser. He decided to move to his alma mater, Anna University in Chennai, to resume “my academic pursuits as Professor, Technology and Societal transformation”.

That turning point not merely rekindled his life-long passion for teaching, but he also felt the need, as he puts it, that the “divine ordinance to produce spiritually enlightened, skilful and hardworking youths must be fulfilled.” Again after becoming President in 2002, significantly, Dr Kalam’s first official visit outside New Delhi was to meet the people of Gujarat.

These and other reflections on science and spirituality in his latest book subtly underscores that he found it right to move away from the nationalist jingoism associated with the Pokhran-II N-blasts, though he may not have actually said it in so many words.