This is essentially an anecdotal piece. And yet not wholly so.

Seventy years ago is a long time ago, and what happened at this very time in November and December of 1955 would seem today like a self-indulgent rumination about the past. But the thing that happened then is happening today in a startlingly similar way, making this recollection go beyond the genre of old folks’ tales. And that “thing” is the “N thing” — nuclear bombs. Russian President Vladimir Putin’s visit to India under the canopy of nuclear risk-taking is what takes this column beyond the pyol of stories.

In 1954, the US had carried out horrendously powerful tests of nuclear weapons on Bikini Atoll in the Marshall Islands, one of which was described as being “about 1,000 times more powerful than either of the atomic bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki”. An indignant C Rajagopalachari (Rajaji), from his obscure corner in Madras, shot off a letter to The New York Times that read, “Let each not wait for the other, but unilaterally… regain the Paradise we had held and which we lost in August, 1945”. On January 10, 1955, the Congress met at Avadi, near Madras, for its annual session. Rajaji, who had been eased out of the office of chief minister of Madras only a few months earlier, was invited — doubtless at Prime Minister (PM) Jawaharlal Nehru’s instance, as such........

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