Morarji Desai, Operation Kahuta, and What Dhurandhar Dares to Show

The Phone Call That Built the Bomb

There is a scene in Dhurandhar that silenced theatres across India. Major Iqbal — the ISI officer played by Arjun Rampal — tortures a suspected Indian spy with hooks embedded into his entire body, incisions made across every inch of skin. The body arranged not in rage, but in method. A human being converted into a message.

Most watched it as cinema. What they didn’t know is that this scene has a real address in history — and the man most responsible for putting those agents in that room was not a Pakistani operative, but India’s own Prime Minister.

RAW Knew Everything

By the mid-1970s, India’s RAW had already cracked Pakistan’s most dangerous secret. Through painstaking field work — including collecting hair samples from a salon frequented by scientists near the Kahuta facility and testing them for radiation — they confirmed that Pakistan was secretly building a uranium enrichment plant. They had agents inside. They had a mole willing to hand over the full nuclear blueprint for a modest bribe. They were one step from stopping the Islamic Bomb entirely.

Then Indira Gandhi lost the 1977 election.

The Gandhian Who Dismantled a Spy Network

Morarji Desai took office at 81 — a lifelong Gandhian with a rigid moral worldview and a deep personal contempt for RAW, which he believed Indira Gandhi had weaponised against him during the Emergency. He slashed RAW’s budget by 30 percent. He pushed out R.N. Kao, the legendary spymaster who had built the agency from nothing. When RAW approached Desai for approval to pay the Kahuta mole, he refused — calling it interference in a neighbour’s internal affairs.

He did not stop there.

General Zia ul-Haq had cultivated a warm telephone friendship with Desai through deliberate flattery. In one of those conversations, Desai — guided by his Gandhian instinct for honest neighbourly relations — told Zia directly that India knew about Pakistan’s clandestine nuclear programme at Kahuta.

Zia moved immediately.

The Rollup

Within weeks, Pakistan’s ISI systematically identified, captured, tortured, and eliminated every RAW asset connected to Kahuta. The mole who was days away from delivering the blueprint vanished. The entire intelligence network India had painstakingly built inside Pakistan was destroyed. The hooks you saw in Dhurandhar — that is what a “rollup” looks like when the ISI has been handed a map.

Kahuta continued undisturbed. A.Q. Khan enriched uranium in peace. Pakistan tested its first nuclear weapon in 1998.

The Gandhian’s phone call had accomplished what years of Pakistani counter-intelligence could not.

What Was Actually Lost

Beyond the agents killed, Desai also blocked a joint India-Israel proposal to strike and destroy the Kahuta facility militarily — an option India never had again. The destruction of RAW’s Pakistan network left India operationally blind for years, during which Pakistan simultaneously built its nuclear arsenal and ran ISI programmes to destabilise Kashmir. The intelligence vacuum that followed can be traced forward — through the Kashmiri Pandit exodus, through the Parliament attack, through 26/11.

Pakistan later awarded Desai the Nishan-e-Pakistan — its highest civilian honour — for his contribution to good neighbourly relations. History’s darkest jokes write themselves.

The Unremembered

The agents who died in Pakistani custody after that phone call have no memorials, no medals, no names in public record. They lived as someone else, died as someone else, and exist today only as classified footnotes — and as a three-minute torture scene that audiences watch before the next action sequence begins.

Dhurandhar forces you to sit with that scene a moment longer than is comfortable. The real history demands the same. Every Indian watching that film should know: those hooks were not a director’s imagination. They were the price paid for one man’s misplaced idealism — and a nation’s failure to hold its leadership accountable for the lives it quietly destroyed.

Remember the Kaoboys. They deserved better.

P.S: “Kaoboys” refers to the handpicked, elite team of intelligence officers who served under Rameshwar Nath (R.N.) Kao, the legendary founder and first chief of India’s external intelligence agency, the Research and Analysis Wing (R&AW), established in 1968. 

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