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| Indira Gandhi offered to back test ban treaty in 1974 | | | Washington | Dec 23
Long before the controversy over the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty (CTBT) snowballed in the 1990s, former Prime Minister Indira Gandhi had back in 1974 offered India's support to such a treaty if it was non-discriminatory and brought every country on board.
Newly-declassified US documents quote Daniel P Moynihan, the then US Ambassador to India, as reporting to Secretary of State Henry Kissinger that
Indira Gandhi signaled her backing for such a treaty when he called on her in June 1974, a month after India conducted its first-ever nuclear test.
However, while conveying New Delhi's thinking on the subject, she made it clear that India needed to explore options such as nuclear energy, given its great needs.
She told Moynihan that it was her father Jawaharlal Nehru, who first proposed a test ban treaty at the UN. And that was “ridiculed” at the time by both the US and the then Soviet Union. “But when such a treaty came, India signed it,” she said in an obvious reference to the Partial Test Ban Treaty, 1963.
“India did not sign the NPT which was discriminatory. The real problem at this moment is not so much horizontal proliferation as vertical proliferation. China and France remain out of the NPT. The policy today is against the interests of developing countries. In the past few days both had set off explosions of greater yield than India's,” Moynihan quoted her as saying.
The quest for CTBT itself gathered momentum only in the 1990s, culminating in the UN General Assembly's adoption in September 1996. India and Pakistan are among the few countries that have not signed it, while several countries, including the US and China, are still to ratify it.
Other documents relating to South Asia for the period 1973-76, released on Friday by the State Department's Office of Historian, note that US-India relations that had improved considerably improved since their 1971 nadir suffered a setback with the nuclear test three years later.
“India's successful nuclear test was a setback for bilateral relations, amplifying US concerns about Indira Gandhi's close relationship with the Soviet Union, her declaration of martial law in 1975, and her decision to develop nuclear technology while dependent on US food aid,” said the Office of Historian in a news release.
It said Nixon's appointment of Moynihan as envoy in 1973 “led to the resolution of several long-standing economic and political tensions, although New Delhi continued to object to US support for Pakistan and alleged a US role in its domestic instability”. Earlier, the India-Pakistan War of 1971 had cast a long shadow and defined the US relationship to both countries for the Nixon and Ford administrations, it said adding the chief concerns for the US were the enforcement of the 1972 Simla Agreement and the re-establishment of normal relations between India and Pakistan. |
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