Learning to shield our academic excellence

Arun Shourie, Thursday, September 14, 2006

The number of students who come to India to study is going down. Meanwhile, the amount of money spent on Indian students studying abroad is sufficient to set up 30-40 IIMs or 15-20 IITs every year. The threat is that we may lose our best minds at a rate faster than ever before. The opportunity is that we can be educators to the world

About 8,000 foreign students are studying in India. In Australia, on the other hand, there are about 350,000 — and remember, we add to our numbers every year more than the total population of Australia. Nor is it just that foreign students studying in India are less than a fortieth of those studying in Australia. The number of students who come to India has actually been going down: according to government figures, in 1990/91, there were over 12,765; last year there were 7,745! (By contrast, the increase in 2004 in the number of foreign students studying in China was three times the total number of foreign students that came to India: China hosted 141,087 foreign students in 2005.) We could be educators to the world — just as we could be surgeons to the world. But here is another opportunity missed: while Dubai, Singapore, Australia, to say nothing of distant US, etc. are positioning themselves as education hubs, we remain mired in that bog — the HRD Ministry.

It isn’t just that we are missing an opportunity. We are paying a huge cost every year. One estimate puts the amount that is spent on Indian students studying abroad at a figure that would be sufficient to set up 30-40 IIMs or 15-20 IITs every year. And going abroad to study is just the first step. Having studied in that country, having got familiar with the place and people, most decide to take up work there. Soon enough, they settle down there. Science and Engineering Indicators, 2006, reports that of Indian students who received doctorates in Science and Engineering between 2000 and 2003, close to 90 per cent said they planned to stay on in the US; two-thirds had firmed up “definite plans to stay.” The proportions were the same in one critical discipline after another: 91% and 62% in biological and agricultural sciences; 92% and 72% in mathematics and computer sciences; 90% and 70% in engineering...(Science and Engineering Indicators, 2006, Appendix tables, A2-96 to 100.)

The fault is by no means that of the youngsters. And there is no doubt that those who have stayed on in the US, etc. have also done much for India — they have, among other things, helped change the world’s perception of India, and, thereby, India’s perception of itself. But imagine how much our country would have gained in actual productive potential if we had educational institutions of such quality that these youngsters did not have to go abroad. Imagine how much our country would have gained if they worked here, that is if the work environment here had been such that they had felt confident they could develop to their fullest potential, and reap rewards commensurate with their capabilities and with the effort they put in.

And if we persist in the obscurantist policies and practices that mar our educational sector, this drain will only increase in the coming years. Countries are straining to develop themselves as the more attractive destinations — for students, for investors, for firms. Nor is the matter confined to choice, there is a compulsion too, a compulsion of which these leading countries are well aware and to counter which they are taking focused steps. In regard to the US, for instance, National Science Foundation data reveal that in 2003, 85 per cent of those holding Science and Engineering doctorates and working were above 55 years of age; 76 per cent were above 60 years; 20 per cent were 70 and above. The proportions for those holding Master’s degrees were equally significant: they were 85%, 65%, and 16% respectively. (Science and Engineering Indicators, 2006, Appendix tables, A3-43.) And this is just one among many reasons on account of which these countries will continue to aggressively court researchers and skilled workers from India and elsewhere.

Indeed, the threat now is not just that individuals will be wooed away. Countries — from Singapore to South Korea to Taiwan to China to the EU-25 — are making even greater efforts to woo entire firms away, in particular R&D firms. Singapore, South Korea and Taiwan have already become significant research-hubs. But the suction for entire R&D firms can come from farther a-field too. We think of the US as a high-cost economy, as one that is now compelled to outsource R&D efforts to a country like India. But that is just one side of the picture, and that is true only for one end of research. In 2002, US firms spent around $ 21 billion doing research in foreign countries. As against this, foreign firms spent close to $ 26 billion doing research in the US. (Science and Engineering Indicators, 2006, Volume I, 0-4, 0-5, 18.) And that stands to reason: researchers are less costly in countries like India, but today a great deal of research, and almost all of frontier research, involves such high-technology infrastructure that it is best executed in countries like the US.

Things to do

The first thing to do is to stop counter-positioning primary, universal education against higher education. We need both. We can afford both. Second, we must see both — the threat as well as the opportunity: the threat that we may lose our best minds at an even faster rate than the rate at which we have been losing them in the past decades; on the other side, the opportunity that we can be educators to the world.

Third, to ward off the threat and to tap into the opportunity, we require the same sort of measures. To arrest and reverse the alarming deterioration of standards in most of our institutions of higher learning. To ensure that in regard to both - students as well as faculty - merit, performance here and now, alone counts. To ensure that rewards are strictly commensurate with performance.

And resources. A large proportion of these will have to come from the government - for instance, private entrepreneurs just do not have the long horizons that basic research requires. Equally, government alone will just not have enough resources for this sector. Thus, one service that finance ministers can do is to give the most generous incentives and tax-breaks for industry to invest in education and in R&D. For every trifling misuse, a Manipal will come up.

And the resources have to be defrayed not just on equipment - that is what is done ever so often: and by the time the underpaid, under-motivated faculty learn to exploit the equipment to its full potential, the equipment is obsolete. A good proportion of the resources have to be set apart for making salaries and allowances of faculty and researchers and their work-environment attractive enough for them to forego careers in private industry and to choose instead to be in universities and research institutions.

It is obvious that we cannot do any of this so long as higher education and research is dominated by governmental institutions. China, for instance, has launched an aggressive drive to bring back the very best Chinese faculty who are working in universities in the US, Europe and the like. To attract them back, China is giving them remuneration and allowances and work facilities that are better than what they have in universities where they are working. This is being done irrespective of what existing faculty get in the Chinese establishments in which these returnees will be lodged. Can such a thing be done in a governmental organisation in India - what with its scales and unions; what with the fact that the salary of a professor cannot be higher than that of the vice chancellor, and the salary of a vice chancellor cannot be higher than that of secretary, HRD...? I am, therefore, wholly against the current rush for affiliation, etc. We should encourage institutions to de-affiliate, from existing universities and the like. Colleges and research departments and institutions will come to be known by the work they do, by the standards to which they adhere. Along with this movement to de-affiliate we should develop first-rate, wholly objective and reliable methods to rank institutions.

But the gaps are so vast that mere resources will not do. We need to adopt unconventional methods to scale up this sector. The remarkable success that F C Kohli, one of the fathers of IT in India, has achieved with the “total-immersion” method in making absolutely illiterate persons literate enough to read a newspaper within 8 to 10 weeks; his analysis of “gaps” between the best engineering college in Maharashtra and other colleges in the state, and how these can be bridged by using modern IT and communications technologies - these are the sorts of measures we need to put in place. And, instead of stuffing IITs and IIMs with mediocrities just because they were born to one set of parents than another, we should induce them to multiply faculty, and to upgrade existing faculty in other institutions.

Two prerequisites

But for any of these measures to be executed we need two prerequisites. The first is to outgrow clichés. “Do not make a commodity of education,” our politicians shout every time there is the slightest effort to make educational institutions self-sustaining. “Do not sell ma-Saraswati,” they shout every time there is an effort to induce industry to take up education. All such shouting ensures is that existing scarcities continue, and the existing education-czars rate off the lolly. All it accomplishes is to enable a dental college here, near Delhi itself, to pocket a “donation” of Rs 28 lakh from every entrant...Is the way to deal with the fact that 150,000 students have just applied to the IIM, Ahmedabad, for 250 seats in its two-year course, to force it to take in 27 per cent additional students — that is, sixty two more students — on the basis of birth? Or is it to give incentives to industry to set up 62 institutions of comparable worth?

And then there is the even more urgent task — to reverse the recent trend in regard to the few islands of excellence that remain: the recent trend of interfering in the IITs and IIMs. The recent edicts regarding reservations are just one — though by itself fatal enough — lance of such interference. Appointments of directors; hauling them up before Commissions because some congenitally disgruntled employee keeps writing letters to high-ups; the insistence of a legislative Committee that they switch to Hindi as the medium of instruction...There is an all-round assault to breach their autonomy.

To ward off such senselessness, three things are required. First, do not temporise: do not think that the way to meet the assault is to concede a bit - those concessions will not assuage the grabbers; on the contrary, they will become the reasons for the political and bureaucratic class to grab all: “See, the director himself is saying that they are ready to abide by our order - all he is asking is that he be given a little time to do so...” Second, as those who are working in these institutions are in a sense under the thumb of government — and I have been struck dumb by fear to which faculty themselves testify in open meetings — outsiders, in particular the alumni of these institutions, have an important duty: they must constitute themselves as firewalls around these institutions.

But the assault on such institutions is but an instance of the general assault on excellence in India today: from legislatures to civil service to educational establishments, mediocrity is being asserted as norm, vulgarity as right, intimidation as argument, assault as proof. Two classes today stand in counter-position to this assault on standards - entrepreneurs and the professional middle class. Accordingly, the pan-Indian organisations of professionals should get together to contain, roll-back and eventually eliminate this assault.

(Concluded)(Based on the Foundation Day Lecture, IIT, Kharagpur, Alumni Association, Delhi.)

We need the best for the brightest

Arun Shourie, Wednesday, September 13, 2006

An inverse snobbery is afoot. We are lectured every other day: “What is needed is universal, free, primary education.” From this comes the unstated inference: “Institutes of higher learning - the IITs, IIMs - are institutions of, and for the elite. They must be bent to serve the poor, suffering, excluded backwards.”

No one can deny that we must spread primary education at the fastest pace possible. That China has achieved near universal literacy and just about 60 per cent of us are literate - and that too only on our definition of “literacy”, that is that a person is able to sign his name - must account for some of the difference between China and India today. Nor does one need much argumentation to see that we must wholly reorient our school education: it consists almost entirely of imparting information, and then trapping the student in the exams into revealing what he does not know; when she can get the information at the click of a mouse, of what significance is it that she has or hasn’t memorised the date of the Battle of Plassey? Contrast what our NCERT textbooks’ controversies, with the report in the International Herald Tribune the other day [1 September, 2006] about the textbook that has been put out in China’s Shanghai region: Bill Gates and JP Morgan get prominence while Mao is mentioned in just one sentence - it explains that when flags are flown at half-mast when a person like Mao dies. That’s it.

Nor can anyone dispute that one of the things we must expand is vocational education. Seventy per cent of those who graduate have degrees in Arts. One, they don’t want to do the sorts of jobs that are available. Two, employers have little use for them. Third, you can’t find a plumber¿ Krishan Khanna, an alumni of IIT, Kharagpur, an evangelist for vocational education, points to the telling contrast: India has about 5,000 ITIs (under the Ministry of Labour) and about 7,000 vocational schools (under the Ministry of HRD; and never the twain shall meet!); China has about 500,000 secondary vocational schools.

There can be no dispute about the need for expanding primary and vocational education, nor for the need to reorient them totally. It is the inference that is drawn, “IITs and IIMs are for the elite, higher education is for the elite,” which is errant nonsense. Higher learning, and the Research and Development work that can follow only from such higher learning are just as necessary. Not “Either/or”, as Vinoba would say, but “And also”.

The growing gap

We often pride and comfort ourselves with the observation, “We have one of the largest pools in the world of scientific and technical manpower.” But clearly, the numbers, large in absolute terms, are not large enough: look at the way salaries, even starting salaries have shot up in the last five years in IT, ITES and similar professions: they speak to a grave shortage.

Even if the absolute figures of engineers and scientists are taken at face value, numbers by themselves don’t go far. While celebrating the impressive jump in enrollment in higher education - the 1991 Census had counted 20 million with graduate and higher degrees, and 53 million by 2003; while pointing out that enrollment in science and engineering courses had risen faster than overall enrollment: 2.7 times in science and 10 times in engineering; the NCAER’s India Science Report, sets out some telling figures that give pause. Almost 30 per cent of those who have finished 12th class or higher in science are not working in jobs requiring scientific learning: they are either unemployed or are housewives. The figure is 20 per cent in the case of science graduates, and 14 per cent for those with Ph. Ds in science. Of science graduates, only a third are employed in “professional and technical” assignments. And on the other side, many employed in science-centered jobs turn out not to be sufficiently qualified. Of post-graduates who are unemployed, two-thirds have studied science. Of Diploma Holders who are unemployed, 53 per cent belong to the science stream¿

But sub-optimal utilisation is just one aspect. A presentation of Dr. R.A. Mashelkar points me to two studies and the indices of output they sketch - Science and Engineering Indicators, 2006, Volumes I and II, National Science Board, Arlington, VA; and R.N. Kostoff, D. Johnson, C.A. Bowles and S. Dodbele, Assessment of India’s Research Literature, Office of Naval Research and Northrop Grumman, Arlington, VA. These show an alarming slippage - of effort, of attainments, of standards.

Consider one index: the number of papers that are being published by China and India in high-calibre journals - ones that are accessed by Science Citation Index and Social Science Citation Index. The Kostoff study indicates that in 1980, papers from China were one-fifteenth of the papers produced from India. In 1995, they became about equal. By 2005, papers originating from China had become almost thrice those from India. Between these dates, papers from India increased by 2.5, China’s ten times. Kostoff and his associates point out that the scientific output of South Korea already exceeds that of India, and that of Taiwan and Brazil is catching up fast.

As part of the dramatic growth in Chinese research output may be caused by the multiplication of journals, Kostoff and his colleagues turned to three high Impact Factor journals - the Journal of the American Chemical Society, the Physical Review Letters, and the Journal of Biological Chemistry. “India had noticeably more publications in the three journals prior to about 2000,” they note. In 2005, their figures show, Chinese researchers published more than five times the number of papers than Indian researchers in the Journal of the American Chemical Society. Mashelkar points to his own field, Chemistry: every eighth paper published in Chemical Abstracts is now from China; every fortieth Indian.

Nor is this accidental. The US National Science Board’s Science and Engineering Indicators shows the focused effort behind China’s leap. In 1991, China was spending around $ 12 billion on R&D, $ 85 by 2003. Our total R&D expenditure is around $ five billion. Over this period, China’s academic R&D expenditure increased ten-fold. “China’s R&D expenditures are rapidly approaching those of Japan, the second largest R&D performing nation,” the study notes. “OECD data show China’s investment at 17% of Japan’s in 1991 but at 74% of Japan’s in 2003.” The National Science Board’s analysts observe, “such a rapid advance on the leading R&D performing countries and regions would still be unprecedented in recent history.”

This emphasis on R&D is bearing results. Focusing on five high-technology industries, Science and Engineering Indicators shows that “In 2003 China had surpassed Japan as a producer of high-technology goods¿ China’s rise from a mere $ 23 billion in 1990 to $ 224 billion in 2003, remarkable both for its speed and consistency, moved its share of world high-technology exports to 12%, beyond Japan’s share,” which by then had been pushed down to 9%. Not just papers by Chinese researchers are now such an important proportion of high-impact publications, their work is being translated into products. And many of these high-technology industries add sinews to military prowess.

This effort of China has only accelerated with each passing year. While we are on a course to undermine the few islands of excellence that have survived, the IITs and IIMs, China has set itself a target at the opposite end: one hundred world-class universities. Mashelkar points out how it has already begun pursuing this target. It is giving each of its ten leading universities $ 125 million - around Rs. 550 crore each. The two foremost universities - Beijing and Tsinghua - are being given $ 225 million each - around Rs. 1,200 crore each! In the second phase, China has decided to allocate similar grants to thirty more universities.

I leave the task of collecting comparable figures about our universities as an exercise for you, dear reader!

(To be concluded)

Rescued from the abyss

Rescued from the abyss

Arun Shourie, Tuesday, August 22, 2006

In the first of a three-part analysis of the Indo-US nuclear deal, Arun Shourie argues that credibility has passed from the political class to professionals and entrepreneurs. And that the prime minister was wise to engage with the scientists’ misgivings

The prime minister’s statement in the Rajya Sabha on 17 August was a triumph for him – after months and months of seeming to be dragged along, he stood up. He spoke for the country. He drew a line.

And it was equally a triumph for all who have led the campaign to alert the country to the abyss into which we were being pulled. Leading defence analysts like Bharat Karnad and Brahma Chellaney; Yashwant Sinha from the BJP; Digvijay Singh from the JD(U); Prakash Karat and Sitaram Yechurry from the CPI(M); and several others deserve the country’s gratitude for their unremitting labours in this regard. It is after a very long time that a public campaign has had a salutary outcome.

The most influential voice, of course, has been that of the scientists. And in that lies an important lesson which transcends the nuclear deal. They are the ones who have over the decades built our nuclear capability. They are the ones who know. That is why what they had to say on the nuclear deal just could not be ignored.

But their voice also carried greater weight because they are professionals. And in that lies a lesson. When Siachin is at stake, were the retired Army Chiefs to speak up, their message would count for more than anything anyone else could say. When reforms get blocked, if entrepreneurs who have built empires out of nothing, who have brought prosperity to millions, were to speak up; when institutions of excellence like the IITs and IIMs are sought to be shackled and stuffed with mediocres, were educationists to get together and speak up, were the alumni of these institutions — alumni who, after all, have changed the world’s perception of India, and India’s perception of itself — to detail the consequences, the wrecker’s hand would be stemmed.

Credibility has passed - from the political class to professionals and entrepreneurs. This is what the immense impact that the scientists have had this time round brings out dramatically. In a word, professionals should exercise the authority that has fallen to them, and speak up on issues that are their specialty. When they neglect to do so, they fail the country.

The nuclear issue has been exceptional in another respect also, and in that it holds a lesson for the media, at least for some in the media. This is one of the very, very few issues on which, and after a long time, well-reasoned, well-documented arguments have been carried by the print media - arguments both pro and con.

But some at least in the media must have been embarrassed by what the prime minister has now said. For on every particular, his statement was an acknowledgment that the apprehensions which have been expressed were valid about the direction in which Americans were taking our Government. Were some of our papers and reporters to look back on how much trust they placed on “backgrounders” and “briefings”, they would squirm. They were used to insinuate constructions which the prime minister has himself decisively put down.

Look at the benign interpretations they read into the House and Senate Bills and what the prime minister has now acknowledged about the real import of their provisions. Look at the way they greeted the “overwhelming vote” by which the Bill passed the US House of Representatives, and how the margin was projected as a victory — not just of the Bush Administration, but also of Indian diplomacy – when the overwhelming margin simply reflected the fact that, so many new conditions having been added to the Bill, the overwhelming proportion of legislators felt it would now overwhelmingly advance US’ objectives, and sink our autonomy.

“Amendments defeated”, some of our papers proclaimed and led readers to believe that, as this had happened, the Section binding India to assist US efforts in regard to Iran, the Section envisaging an India with a foreign policy “congruent to” that of the US were out. Readers were not told that, in fact, these Sections were very much a part of the main Bill, and, therefore, remained — amendments or no amendments.

The lesson thus is: the more contentious the issue, the more it has become a matter of prestige for a Government, the more wary

we should be of “backgrounders” and briefings.

Lessons for governments

There are lessons for Government also. The prime minister has spoken, he has spoken unambiguously. But he has spoken at last. It is to his credit that among the propositions he has now stated unambiguously are ones that can break the deal. But that he delayed articulating in public an unambiguous position in regard to them for so long now means that his interlocutors will conclude that the Government has gone back on what it was leading them to believe, that it has done so as it has had to succumb to pressures at home.

After all, several of the pronouncements had been ambiguous in the extreme. Thus, while answering a question in the Lok Sabha on 26 July, 2006, the PM said, “We will never compromise in a manner which is not consistent with the July 18 joint statement.” On the one side, it meant that, so as not to be surprised into surrender, every concerned person here must decipher which manner of compromise, and which particular compromises, would, in the view of Government, be consistent with the July 18 joint statement! To the US negotiators such statements would have signaled that our Government was going to be more flexible than they have now found it can be.

There were ambiguities even on the most consequential operational aspects. We do not wish to place any encumbrances on our Fast Breeder programme, the prime minister told Parliament on 7 March, 2006. In the next sentence, he said, however, that we have decided to place all future civilian thermal power reactors and breeder reactors under safeguards. Then that the fast Breeder Test Reactor and the Prototype Fast Breeder Reactor would remain outside safeguards. Yet, immediately after that again that future civilian thermal power reactors and civilian Fast Breeder Reactors would be placed under safeguards. There always are ways to pare such statements and show them to be harmonious. But, just as easily, others can spot gaps through which to drive bargains.

Even when “unambiguous statements” were made, they were in fact empty vessels into which anything could be poured. To every apprehension, the answer used to be the bland assertion, “Nothing will be done that violates the 18 July joint statement.” But that sudden scripture was a general statement of intent, an empty vessel into which anything could be, and was being poured. Who, upon reading that general statement, could have detected that, through it, India had undertaken to close down, within four years, the recently renovated CIRUS reactor? This is one of the two research reactors that have been producing weapons grade plutonium (the other one is Dhruva). In fact, it has hitherto been supplying one-third of the fissile materials that we use for our weapons programme. Did anyone going through the 18 July statement deduce that such a critical reactor will be closed down as a consequence? And there is the related question: in view what that reactor has been yielding for our weapons programme, how candid was the prime minister when he told the Lok Sabha on 10 March 2006, “Both CIRUS and Apsara(whose core Government has agreed to shift out of the Bhabha complex) are NOT related to our strategic programme...”?

Moreover, as has been pointed out, the Government has pledged to close down this reactor in spite of our not having a reactor to replace what it has been supplying for our weapons-programme. And it has agreed to do so, in spite of the fact that, as Bharat Karnad has pointed out in The Asian Age (14 June, 2006), the Americans themselves have not been able to establish, even to their satisfaction, that we had violated any treaty obligation in regard to the use of materials from this reactor. US Undersecretary of State, Robert Joseph told the Senate Foreign Relations Committee on 2 November, 2005, that whether India had “illegally” used the CIRUS reactor for military purposes was still “inconclusive owing to the uncertainty as to whether US-supplied heavy water contributed to the production of plutonium used for the 1974 device.”

Specious arguments

And the case for postponing definiteness was being advanced by specious arguments. “The House and Senate Bill are just interim steps in the US legislative process,” we were told. “Let us wait for the final outcome.” “The US and Indian legislative processes are different,” we were told. “India is not bound by laws passed by the US Congress,” we were told, with much posturing of “standing firm”, of defiance. But the American President is bound by what the American Congress passes! How could he be expected to enter into an agreement with India which went contrary to the law that the US Congress had passed?

It is precisely because the legislative process, etc. are different in the US than they are in India that there was the utmost reason to speak up in time. In India, the power to enter into international agreements and treaties rests solely with the Executive. Parliament may discuss them, but it can do nothing about them - short of throwing out the Government, and the next Government repudiating them. But even that would be done by the Government on its own authority, not by Parliament. But in the US, the Senate has the ultimate power to ratify or reject international treaties and agreements that the US President may enter into or canvass. The League of Nations was in some ways the brainchild of President Wilson. The Senate threw out the agreement he had worked so hard to secure. The same thing happened recently in regard to the CTBT. As Dr P C Alexander reminded the Rajya Sabha during the debate, for three years President Clinton twisted the arm of many a Government to sign up on the CTBT. His own Senate threw out the very treaty that he had compelled others to sign. In a word, there has been every reason to speak up early, to speak unambiguously, to speak unambiguously in public so that no one in the US could be in doubt about what India will accept and what it will not. To wait till “the final outcome becomes available” would be to close all options.

The second lesson for governments engaged in such a far-reaching venture is: a leader must not let such a deal become a matter of personal prestige. He may well choose to sacrifice his post and government on an issue. But that because he regards the issue as vital for the country, or because he wants to make clear to those pushing him around where they get off. Never because he has allowed his personal prestige to get mixed up with the issue. The moment an issue becomes a matter of personal prestige for a ruler, others can wring one concession after another knowing that the ruler, so committed to seeing the matter through, will himself arrange that favourable constructions are put on those concessions.

Third, there is a lesson from the Dabhol agreement. At that time also, that agreement with Enron was being projected as being vital for Indo-American relations. It was being projected as being vital to sustain investor interest in India. As in the ensuing months its consequences became apparent, as the Maharashtra Electricity Board was pushed towards bankruptcy, that very agreement became a cause for the souring of relations and perceptions. Indians came to see Americans as ones who were out to exploit the country. Americans came to see in the fate of Dabhol yet another example of Indians not living up to an agreement.

The nuclear deal is being translated into concrete specifics in the Senate and House Bills. These, as we shall see, are iniquitous in the extreme. In these circumstances, to make the deal the test and symbol of improved Indo-US relations is to inject the vinegar that will sour relations again.

Nor is it ever a good defence, “But you were prepared to do the same thing. Does Talbot not say that Jaswant Singh was prepared to sign on the CTBT?”

Such arguments are silly on their face. Even if India had signed the CTBT, that would have had no consequence at all - the CTBT cannot come into effect unless 40 countries sign it, including US, China, Pakistan, etc. The US Senate has already thrown the treaty out. Even if we had signed the treaty, and even if it had come into force, our options would not be shut in perpetuity, for the CTBT has a clause by which a country can withdraw from it on grounds of “supreme national interest”. In the US Bills we are cabined “in perpetuity”. There is no circumstance at all, as we shall soon see, in which we can, for instance, resume tests.

Specifics apart, there is a fundamental flaw in the “But you were going to do the same thing” alibi. Assume for a moment, that some previous government would have inflicted some grave harm on the country. How does that entitle a successor government to take or extend that ruinous step?

In a word, what is done by a government has to be assessed and defended on merits. And it is this – what was being done in the wake of the general statement of 18 July — which had come to cause the gravest apprehensions.

(To be continued)