Both were Kalam’s kids—scientists who had worked with A.P.J. Abdul Kalam, first on ISRO’s Satellite Launch Vehicle (SLV) programme, and later on the Integrated Guided Missile Development Programme (IGMDP) at DRDO, which shaped India’s missile arsenal. Always calm, composed, self-effacing, and generous with their scientific wisdom—even with schoolchildren.
Each had a singular weakness. For Sivathanu Pillai, it was the mention of Tomahawk; for R. Prahlada, it was Patriot. Mention the two American missiles, and the men would fly off the handle.
I was once a victim of their wrath. In a lighthearted article about Delhi’s party circuit, I described a lanky lady lighting a cigar as “she lit a miniature Tomahawk”. Pillai called the next morning to chastise me, asking why I didn’t mention BrahMos instead. I laughed, wondering why a venerable missile scientist should care what a poor scribe had written about the city’s party animals. But he had a point: “India needs to project the brand image of our defence products; we should go on mentioning our equipment, even in jest.”
The exchange with Prahlada happened at a press meet. I asked him how he would compare his Akash with Patriot, and he snapped: “Patriot? Are you so taken in by Patriot? OK, I will call my Akash ‘poor man’s Patriot’. Happy?”
We had our reasons. Tomahawk and Patriot had been stealing not only the show in many of America’s wars since the 1990s, but also the hearts of generals across the world. Dazzled by the demonstration of American war technology during the Gulf wars and the Afghan campaign, most of us thought poorly of Indian military knowhow. The bias was worsened by delay, cost overruns and early failures of ballistic missiles systems such as Nag and Trishul. The stigma often spread to successful systems like Agni and Prithvi. The scientists didn’t mind criticism, but they couldn’t stand our starry-eyed obsession with ‘phoren’ ware.
Both men claimed their babies were superior to their American counterparts. Look at the basics, they used to say. “Tomahawk is subsonic, it can easily be shot down,” Pillai would say. “My BrahMos is supersonic, flying at three times the speed of sound. No known missile can shoot it down.” Prahlada would echo: “Patriot? My Akash is more accurate, can shoot down more enemy missiles, and costs not even half as much.”
But we had our doubts. Tomahawk and Patriot were battle-proven. BrahMos and Akash were not.
Till Operation Sindoor.
In May, both men watched their creations in action—one safeguarding India, the other pulverising the enemy. “Till now, India had only seen our missiles in Republic Day parades,” said Prahlada, now retired and settled in a modest home in suburban Bengaluru. “Now we saw them fired in anger for the first time—and they have proven their worth,” said Pillai from his equally modest home in Chennai’s Adyar.
Akash shot down virtually every Pakistani missile that came its way—a feat Patriot has never achieved. The BrahMos missiles launched from Sukhoi-30s hit Pakistani targets harder than ever. Tomahawks have never scored so heavily. And they remain ship-launched subsonic projectiles.
Together, the Akash and BrahMos systems changed the game in Operation Sindoor. Pillai even got the enemy’s word for it. At a meeting in Lachin, Azerbaijan, Shehbaz Sharif candidly admitted: “On the night of May 9-10, we decided to respond in a measured fashion to Indian aggression…. We had decided that at 4:30 in the morning after Fajr prayers, Pakistan armed forces, led very ably by our Field Marshal Syed Asim Munir, would teach a lesson to our enemy. But before that hour came, India again launched missile attacks, and BrahMos hit Pakistan’s provinces, including the Rawalpindi airport and other places.”
That was a sort of last laugh for Pillai. Once, at the Dubai Airshow, a Pakistani major general visited his stall and inquired about BrahMos. Pillai explained what he could. Impressed, the general asked if India would export it, and at what price. “I couldn’t help quipping,” Pillai recalled. “I said, yes, India would be willing to sell it. To Pakistan—free delivery.” The general left in a huff.
It was not easy developing the world’s first supersonic cruise missile and a unique air defence system capable of simultaneously targeting multiple enemy planes.In fact, neither capability—supersonic cruise or multi-target tracking—was in the original job description when Kalam inducted Pillai and Prahlada into the missile programme.
The IGMDP, launched by Indira Gandhi in 1983, aimed to develop critical technologies for an array of missiles—an intermediate-range ballistic missile (Agni), a short-range ballistic missile (Prithvi), an air defence missile (Akash), an anti-tank missile (Nag), and a short-range, surface-to-air missile (Trishul). Kalam brought in Pillai as programme director and Prahlada as project director.
“Right from the beginning we knew that nobody would sell us critical technologies, and that we had to develop them,” said Prahlada. In six years, Kalam made a capability statement with the successful test of Agni TD (technology demonstrator), which would later spawn several strategic missiles with ranges from 1,500km to more than 5,000km. “We had only a small window,” Pillai recalled. “The test was May 22, 1989. Two days later, a cyclone was to hit the Odisha coast. If we had delayed, the test would have had to wait several months.”
If they had delayed, the missile perhaps would not have been tested for several years. In another few months, Rajiv Gandhi would lose elections, a weak V.P. Singh government would come and go, and none in the government would have had the stomach to approve a missile test.
The Agni test proved two things. One, India had mastered ballistic missile tech—no big deal. Two, India had cracked re-entry tech—a huge deal. ISRO had been sending SLVs and ASLVs (augmented SLVs) that never returned—an exo-atmosphere ballistic missile was a different tech game. A ballistic missile’s nose cone needs to be coated with material that can resist the intense heat generated at re-entry point, but no country would give you the technology to make that material. Also, the missile had to have a gyro to correctly guide it to its target. In short, re-entry and guidance technologies were the missile world’s most closely-guarded secrets. The Agni TD test showed that Indian scientists had mastered both. Alarmed, the big powers began tightening missile technology transfer rules.
The following year, Iraq ruler Saddam Hussein invaded Kuwait, accusing the emirate of stealing oil from his fields through underground pipes. US President George H.W. Bush “drew a line in the sand”, asking him to withdraw. In mid-January 1991, Bush began bombing Baghdad, mostly with Tomahawk cruise missiles launched from ships berthed in the Persian Gulf. For the first time, the world saw a modern land war opening with volleys of fire launched from ships at sea.
“We understood the value of cruise missiles then,” said Pillai, whom Kalam had sent to Harvard Business School on sabbatical. “All our IGMDP missiles—Prithvi, Agni, Trishul, Akash and Nag—were ballistic. I felt we needed a cruise missile.”
Meanwhile in India, Kalam and Prahlada were tracking the anti-missile system Patriot, originally developed as an anti-aircraft system. The Americans were hard-selling it during the war. They gifted a few Patriots to Israel, and sold more to the other Gulf states, which were getting hit by Saddam Hussein’s Russian-origin Scuds which Bush called “inaccurate tools of terror”. That actually was another sales talk. The Scuds were originally accurate, but Hussein had extended their range through what we in India call jugaad, thereby compromising its payload and accuracy. Patriots could thus shoot them down easily, boosting its brand value at the cost of Russian ware.
Desert Storm convinced Pillai of the need for a cruise missile, and Prahlada of the need to develop Akash as a robust air defence system. There were three challenges. “We needed a phased-array radar to track multiple targets at the same time,” said Prahlada. DRDO’s electronic lab in Bangalore, LRDE, began work. “Next was propulsion. We offered to develop a booster-and-coaster system, but the Army and Air force said no to coasting,” he said. That is, the missile should not burn up all its propulsion, and coast towards the target at the terminal stage.
“We realised we needed a ramjet—which we didn’t have,” he said. Kalam told the team: “If the Russians can build it, so can you.” With Prahlada as project director, DRDO’s missile lab in Hyderabad, DRDL, took it up.
The third challenge was guidance. Until then, each radar was connected to only one missile battery. When the radar detects an enemy plane, it tracks it and ‘tells’ the missile to launch. Needed now was a system by which one radar could not only spot and track multiple targets, but also tell multiple missiles to go and hit those targets. In other words, the radar has to ‘speak’ to multiple missiles at the same time. “It took us 10 years to build the radar, 10 for the propulsion, and three for guidance,” said Prahlada. “In the early days, everything failed. Some said we should shut it down, as we had done with the Trishul programme.”
But they persevered, braving jeers from sceptics in the military, the media and the political class. “By 2006, we told the Army and the Air Force we were ready,” recalled Prahlada. Who would produce it, asked the generals and the marshals. “We had anticipated the question,” he said. “Production factors had been included in the original plan. So we were working with Bharat Electronics Ltd and Bharat Dynamics Ltd to get the system into production. I remember a busload of BEL engineers and technicians coming every morning to LRDE to work with us in Bangalore, and another busload of BDL people to DRDL in Hyderabad. So the transition from development stage to production stage was fairly quick.”
User trials in 2006 were so flawless that the IAF ordered 100 units immediately. The Army followed suit. A USP was the cost. “The unit price was less than half of any system of its kind anywhere in the world,” said Prahlada. Orders soon poured in from Armenia and the Philippines.
Meanwhile, Pillai, back from Harvard, was on a non-ballistic path. If Patriot had inspired Akash, it was Tomahawk that pushed Pillai and his team towards BrahMos. Pillai was convinced that cruise missiles were the new currency of conventional warfare. On his return from Harvard, he gave a report on it to Kalam. IGMDP did not include a cruise missile, and a lot of work went into approving it.
By now the Soviet Union had disintegrated, and its legatee state Russia was like a millionaire facing bankruptcy—lots of assets, but no money. On a visit to Moscow, Kalam, Pillai, Prahlada and the team were quietly taken to a secret facility of NPOM—the Soviet rocket design bureau—where they were told that the Russians had developed a liquid ramjet engine for a ship-launched cruise missile. The trio couldn’t believe their ears when they were told two things—one, it’s supersonic; two, would you like to take it?
Now, a word about cruise missiles. A ballistic missile is one that flies like a stone that is thrown; it follows a ballistic trajectory dictated by the laws of physics, and can’t be controlled once shot. A cruise missile is almost like an unmanned aircraft. It flies as it had been programmed—either following a route map that has been fed into its brain, or matching with the terrain that it is following. If it sees a hill ahead, it can turn upward and fly over the hill, avoid trees or other impediments, and hit the target. All known cruise missiles in the world, including the much tom-tommed Tomahawk, are subsonic, and here were the Russians, short of funds for defence research, showing them the engine for a supersonic one, and also offering it.
The team thought over the proposal for a few weeks, and finally came up with the idea of a joint venture—India investing 50.5 per cent and Russia 49.5 per cent. Prime Minister Narasimha Rao, who really wanted to help Russia return to the global military market, readily agreed. But Russia still had no money to even invest in a joint venture. After several rounds of discussions, Indian ambassador to Russia Satinder Lambah persuaded the Russian government to convert the annual debt payment by India to Russia into Russia’s share capital. It was decided that the company, named after the rivers Brahmaputra and Moscow, would be run like a government-owned private venture.
Thus Russian and Indian missile scientists began developing the missile together.
The first flight trial had a hiccup. The missile, without a warhead, fell from the crane. But Pillai and team had anticipated such issues. They had prepared two for the test, and within minutes the other flew.
Almost every flight trial then on—ship to land, land to ship, land to land, ship to ship, submarine to land, and so on—was a success. Each type in the versatile family of missiles they developed needed different technical inputs. “Ships are unstable platforms,” explained Pillai. “It’s not easy to launch a precise strike from unstable platforms; so the platform engineering had to be different. Missiles behave differently when launched from deserts, cold areas, high altitude terrain, and so on. So the team had to develop the technology to take care of all these.”
Finally, when Navy chief Admiral Arun Prakash wanted a fulsome trial with a live warhead, Pillai agreed on a few conditions—one, the Navy would pay for the test; two, if successful, the Navy should place immediate orders, and three, the missile that is test-fired should be treated as ‘sold’. The naval brass laughed heartily as they agreed. Soon BrahMos’s order book was full—with orders coming from the Navy and the Army.
The final challenge—perhaps the toughest—was to miniaturise the missile for an air-launched version. A mammoth weapon weighing 3,000kg had to shed at least 500kg to be carried on a Sukhoi-30MKI, which to had to be modified structurally. The test firing of a BrahMos against a sea target from a flying Sukhoi on November 22, 2017, was a milestone event. For the first time, the world saw a supersonic missile being launched from a long-range supersonic fighter plane.
In effect, a missile with a range of less than 300km suddenly acquired a range of thousands of kilometres. In two years, BrahMos-capable Sukhoi squadrons were flying to India’s border airfields to be based there. And they were the ones that pulverised Pakistan’s close-to-a-dozen air bases in Operation Sindoor.
Both Akash and BrahMos are today exported, making India an arms seller—Akash to Armenia and BrahMos to the Philippines. Now that both missiles have drawn blood, there should be more.