Abstract
In the United States, decision-makers on the public payroll are required by “sunshine laws” to meet with the press and answer questions as openly as possible. Not so in India, at least when it comes to the people who manage the country's biggest and most unproductive scientific and technological enterprise, the Department of Atomic Energy (DAE).
Reporters who wish to write with fairness and objectivity about the agency's performance sometimes encounter strange obstacles. DAE authorities, it seems, don't tolerate anything in the media but praise. Critical assessments are dismissed as “biased and unfounded.”
The DAE's media managers know how to play the game. Intent on keeping their masters in good humor, they go out of their way, although sometimes with embarrassment, to prevent their bosses from being confronted by “notorious” scribes.
I am on the “notorious” list. A few days after the Indian nuclear test series last May, the Bhabha Atomic Research Center (BARC)–India's flagship nuclear research and weapons lab–was decked out to celebrate the return of the scientists and engineers from the deserts of Rajasthan.
Invitations to the event were sent to the news media, including my paper, the Indian Express in Mumbai (formerly Bombay). As my paper's science correspondent, I have been a regular visitor to BARC, covering virtually every important and unimportant workshop and seminar. But now I was going to the grand we-have-the-bomb! event. I rushed to BARC that day in time to get a security clearance. The security officers at the North Gate, who know me, issued me a pass even before a public relations officer showed up with an official list of invited journalists.
But as I waited with other reporters to board a bus that would take us into the sprawling research campus, another public relations officer asked me to step aside. I was not on the list.
I was surprised. What was the reason? He hedged a bit, looking as if he desperately wanted to be somewhere else. Finally he said that there had been a “specific order” from DAE headquarters not to allow me in. He added that he was “just an ordinary official. He could not help me “in this kind of situation. We may be good friends, but that's a different issue.”
This was not a BARC event, he added. The DAE had organized it, and had “specifically asked” that I be denied entry. “You see, that article of yours in Jane's Intelligence Review has created problems for you.”
Ah, that article. For years I had given extensive publicity to DAE activities. When I began my career, some senior journalists said: “As long as you write good things about them, they will be your best friends. Just see what happens when you turn critical.” The DAE could be “vindictive.” They had a point.
The article that put me in disfavor appeared in the January 1998 issue of Jane's Intelligence Review, a publication I regularly write for. After analyzing scientific papers published by BARC scientists over a period of 20 years, I had concluded that India had produced tritium for its nuclear-weapons program.
“This is not to say,” I wrote, “that India has already secretly developed the H-bomb, but the very fact that tritium, according to all available indications, is now being stockpiled, puts India in a comfortable position in terms of nuclear deterrence, given the nuclear ambitions of Pakistan and the already-nuclear China.”
Because the story was published five months before the actual test series, the DAE apparently suspected that insiders had leaked information to me. And so I began to be treated as a security risk. In fact, the information had been in the open scientific literature for a long time, although no one took note of that.
When the DAE's media managers regarded me as giving them good publicity, they mailed tons of material to my office and home, including newsletters, copies of conference proceedings, and other items.
Now I am off the DAE's mailing list. A nonperson, as it were. But I wonder–do the DAE's media managers know that the material they mail out is also available on their website (www.barc.ernet.in)?