It has been forty years since we saw the face of an Indian Astronaut. Or Cosmonaut if you want to call him that, or even a Gagan Yatri.
The second sighing was when the Prime Minister, Mr Narendra Modi, stuck the “wings” on the velcro patch on the chest of the uniforms of Shubanshu Shukla, Prashanth Balakrishnan Nair, Angad Prathap and Ajit Krishnan who have been selected to be the astronauts on India’s first manned ‘Gaganyaan Mission’, at a ceremony at the Vikram Sarabhai Space Centre in Thiruvananthapuram, a week ago.
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Before the next batch of Indians go to space, an unmanned Gaganyaan test flight is scheduled end of this year to check the technology readiness for the final mission. The manned flight, dreamt of when Jawaharlal Nehru and his merry scientists laid the foundations of India’s space adventure from an ancient church on the sands of the beach at Trivandrum so long ago.
The manned mission may take a few months or a couple of years later. which will fly a three of these four astronauts into a “low earth orbit” of about 400 km from earth for three days. The fourth astronaut is scheduled to go to space on board an American multinational mission much earlier, it would seem at this time. The US invitation has been there for quite some time.
The three astronauts will not beat the record of Squadron leader Rakesh Sharma, whose historic mission in 1984 was a part of a joint space program between the Indian Space Research Organisation and the then Soviet Union’s Intercosmos space program. Rakesh spent eight days in space aboard the Salyut 7 space station along with two Soviet Cosmonauts. They had taken the Soyuz T-11 on 3 April 1984 to rendezvous with the space station orbiting the earth.
Rakesh Sharma, till then the only Indian citizen still to have seen the earth perhaps as it was seen by the gods, was born on 13 January 1949 at Patiala, went to St. George’s Grammar School, in Hyderabad and was commissioned into the Indian Air Force officer in 1970. A fighter pilot, he was a Squadron Leader at 35 when he went to space. For the record, he was among the very few group of Indians to be awarded the ‘Hero of Soviet Union’ medal, the highest that huge military giant had on offer for the world’s best. India matched it, pinning its highest peacetime gallantry award, the Ashoka Chakra, on his chest.
But for those of us his age, or a little older as in my case, the apogee of the space adventure was when Rakesh, floating in the zero gravity inside the space station, responded to a proud Indira Gandhi, beaming like any mother would. “How does India look from up there?” she asked. “Sare Jahan Se Achha, “ he responded, without needing to complete Alama Iqbal’s verse, “sare jehan se achha, Hindustan Hamara.”
I call it the apogee of India’s journey since independence, which had seen the budding of the educational and technical infrastructure in which Rakesh and I grew up, an India where despite wars and riots, we still did not consider the neighbour in our colony as an enemy.
The year 1984 was a tumultuous one. The Emergency was almost a decade old, and Indira had lost and won back her honour and her place in the political world, launching India into the comity of nations with the destructive – or deterrent – power of the nuclear bomb some years earlier.
More important, this was a climatic moment in her own life. She had sent in the Indian army in the Sikh holy of holies, the Gurudwara Harmandir Saheb, or the Golden Temple, and the Akal Takht where the renegade and armed theologian Bhindrewalena had made his fortress. He was killed in a blood bath. Months later, on 31 October, two Sikh bodyguards of Delhi police assassinated Indira Gandhi in the lawns of her own official residence. Egged on by lumpen of the Congress party and some Hindu extreme elements, perhaps over 5,000 Sikh men and boys are killed on the streets of Delhi, Kanpur, Bhilai and some other small towns. Many of them were burnt alive.
That was not the end of that year. It was the year also of the world’s worst industrial disaster when the Union Carbide plant in the midst of Bhopal went rogue, spewing poisonous gas that silently killed thousands, impacted the health of millions. Its impact on the population is still being felt.
It was the year of another general election. Rajiv Gandhi won by the biggest majority any political leader has ever scored in India – 404 seats of the total of 521– the sum total of what the two major political forces, the Congress and the BJP, could even total in earlier parliaments.
And yet, an entire generation remembers the bright day when Rakesh spoke from space.
For India, and for us, the years from Independence till that day had been the most aspirational ever, far more than what is believed to be the ground reality in India among those who follow Mr Modi’s repeated exhortations and promises.
Students of science, the small corps of science journalists in India, and the expanding fraternity of scientists, technologists, and engineers, have marvelled at the exponential graph of science in India. No pioneering molecules yet, and no genuine Nobel prize in this segment, no in invention of the type of the silicon chip, internet or artificial intelligence, but India has overcome blockades and exclusion to continue its growth story.
Away from the vicissitudes of political and the vagaries of its economy, India, Hindustan or Bharat has continued its incremental climb, visible most of all, in the regime of space technology. The simple rockets of the 1960s, the strapped-on compound rockets that could lob a satellite into a polar orbit, to those now that can throw not just a satellite into a geo-stationary orbit, but actually land and extract an, albeit unmanned, craft on the moon.
You will have to bring that craft back to Earth if you dream of sending a man, or three men, into space in a capsule of your own design and making, mounted on the tip of a rocket that you have proven over the years.
This is an endeavour that is really non-partisan, in which each of us can take pride. The stuff of fable it may seem, but this is no myth-spinning yarn. This is for real.
(John Dayal is an author, Editor, occasional documentary film maker and activist)
