Book Excerpt | How Manmohan Singh Helped India Beat China To Mars

(The following is an edited excerpt from Pallava Bagla and Subhadra Menon’s book ‘Reaching For The Stars: India’s Journey to Mars and Beyond‘, published by Bloomsbury India

How India’s maiden mission to Mars became ‘Mangalyaan’: Prime Minister Manmohan Singh’s 2012 speech written in Urdu hid the answers.

Not many realise that it was Dr Singh who gave India its first inter-planetary voyage with one single point geo-political message: India should beat China and reach the Martian orbit ahead of the Dragon. An Asian space race unfolded and India won it hands down as, under Dr Singh’s leadership, the mission was conceived and delivered in all of 18 months. India ran a Martian marathon as if sprinting for a hundred-metre dash.

Mangalyaan was publicly announced by Dr Singh from the magnificent ramparts of the Red Fort in Delhi on August 15, 2012.

Interestingly, when the Moon mission was being planned, Chandrayaan was also announced from the Red Fort by Atal Bihari Vajpayee, who was the prime minister in 2003.

Dr Singh, as it seemed, took the cue, delivering his speech that was actually written in Urdu. But who could match the visionary politician Vajpayee, who made sure to call the Moon mission Chandrayaan-1, whereas the bureaucrat in Manmohan Singh merely called it Mangalyaan, not thinking at all about any sequels. What’s in a name, you might ask.

When the first budgetary clearances of Rs 125 crore were given for the Mars mission on March 16, 2012, during the 2012-13 budget presented by Finance Minister Pranab Mukherjee, it was officially recorded – “Mars Orbiter Mission envisages launching an orbiter around Mars using the PSLV XL during the November 2013 launch opportunity. Mars Orbiter will be placed in an orbit of 500 x 80,000 km around Mars and will have a provision for carrying nearly 25 kg of scientific payload.”

In what might be some 10 kg of documents running into thousands of pages, embedded in a book with orange covers called the Expenditure Budget, laced with tables and millions of figures, was a small annotation that announced this remarkable plan, giving financial sanction. “What a mangal announcement” was the observation on March 16, 2012, when one of the authors was in conversation with jubilant officials in the Prime Minister’s Office, thinking about what name the mission would get. How India’s maiden mission to the Moon was named Chandrayaan, and how this might perhaps become Mangalyaan was alluded to, and of course, some months later, in his speech from the Red Fort, then Prime Minister Dr Singh referred to the mission as Mangalyaan.

This was a deviation from his written speech that was made public in English but written in Urdu, and what Dr Singh read from, and that is why many people, who later reviewed the written English version questioned whether it was ever called Mangalyaan by the prime minister. This resulted in a small technicality that made ISRO formally stick to calling India’s maiden mission to the red planet as the ‘Mars Orbiter Mission (MOM)’. It seems the Department of Space (DOS) officials had sent a list of names to the Minister of Space, a portfolio always held by the prime minister of India, to select one. As it happened, Dr Singh never returned that list giving his preference, and this led decision makers within the space community, for safety, to stick to referring to it as MOM.

This was in sharp contrast with how the Moon mission was named, when in 2003, a list of names was sent to Prime Minister Vajpayee. ISRO’s preferred name was ‘Somayaan’, but astute officials around Vajpayee renamed it as ‘Chandrayaan’ and Sudheendra Kulkarni, the press advisor to the PM, told me (Pallava) that Vajpayee himself added, in his own handwriting, the suffix ‘1’ after Chandrayaan, and said how a big country like India could make only one visit to the Moon.

This led decision-makers to use the informal names, MOM and Mangalyaan. Interestingly, after demonetisation in 2016, when new currency notes were introduced [by Prime Minister Narendra Modi], the image of Mangalyaan was printed on the Rs 2,000 currency note with Mangalyaan emblazoned below the image as an honour to ISRO. This was a remarkable tribute to the space community that aced the Mars launch and landing on the maiden attempt. India’s tiger handsomely beat China by reaching the orbit of Mars ahead of the Chinese dragon.

(Disclaimer: The author and publisher of the book are solely responsible for the contents of the book or any excerpt derived therefrom. NDTV shall not be responsible or liable for any claims arising from the contents of the book including any claims of defamation, infringement of intellectual property rights or any other right of any third party or of law. Paragraph breaks and subheadings have been added by NDTV for readers’ ease.)