Water-tight on the Indus dams

Two deals between India and Pakistan have survived military’s wars, terrorists’ bombs and diplomats’ joint statements. One is about sharing the Indus waters; the other is about telling each other about their atomic assets.

- R. PRASANNAN

First about the latter. General K. Sundarji’s brazen Brasstacks in the 1986-87 so scared the Pakistanis that many feared India might do an Osirak on their Kahuta. Osirak, if you have forgotten, was a plant where Saddam Hussein was suspected to be making bombs, and was bombed by Iran in 1980, and then by Israel in 1981. The two operations defined ‘surgical strike’ for all times to come, though Digvijaya Singh is yet to grasp its meaning.

Then Benazir Bhutto waved a white flag and an olive branch at Rajiv Gandhi. The two, both newly elected and innocent of the ways of the big bad Ronald Reagan-led world, agreed to tell each other about the places where their scientists were experimenting with uranium atoms.