It was bouquets all the way for the poet-Prime Minister who looked pleased as young Sneha Datar did an amateurish Bharatnatyam to a poem of his inspired by the Lenin Mausoleum. This was followed by a screening of the more accomplished Jaya Pradha doing the dance to his Geet Naya Gata Hoon, with the danseuse watching herself from the front row. The video, released on television channels tonight, describes Vajpayee as Insaniyat ka Masiha (Messiah of Humanity).

The evening was spiced by a witticism or two by actor-turned-politician Shatrughan Sinha from the third row. Padmaja started her singing with a tame poem in which the poet hums to himself by the lake. But the second song set the mood of the evening. It was Vajpayee's Hum Jang Na Hone Deinge. This song says that Nagasaki will not burn once again, and goes on to proclaim:
Bharat-Pakistan padosi
sath-sath rehana hai...
Amreeki bomb ho ya Roosi
Khoon to ik hi behana hai

It was but natural that the entire thrust of the evening was diverted to the nuclear bomb with the ISI mark. Vajpayee, in his speech, chose to play Jekyll and Hyde with the poet explaining the prime minister and vice versa.

``You must be thinking that on one hand I wrote anti-bomb poems and on the other hand made the bomb. There is a dichotomy in this,'' he said. The poems, he added, were real and written after seeing the devastation at Hiroshima and Nagasaki, ``These lines were written with the colour of my blood.''

Vajpayee went onto describe the Pokharan explosions of the summer of 1998 as a dhamaka made to make India's presence felt with the super nuclear-powers. ``And they did feel, and sent us messages to sign the CTBT. I said it before and I am saying it now that if superpowers agree to destroy nuclear weaponery, so will we. It is the discrimination that we resent. They will make nuclear bombs but we cannot, as we are not white,'' said the Prime Minister.

Clarifying his stand, he declared: ``So there may be a dilemma between the poet and the PM, but there is no contradiction. We wish to use nuclear knowhow for peace.'' He, however, added that he wished Padmja had consulted him on what she was going to sing and he would not have had to give such a long explanation.

Explanations were another hallmark of the evening with Jnanpith-winner Left-wing poet Ali Sardar Jafri explaining why he had accepted the invitation from Padmja to release the cassette, adding that it was done before the poet had turned PM. ``I am a poet of Urdu and Vajpayee of Hindi. I feel that there should be friendship between the two languages, '' he said. Yes, his decision did surprise a few old-timers who remembered that Jafri had declined to write a preface to Saadat Hasan Manto's Partition stories Syah Hashiye because Manto wasn't `Left' enough.

Next Jafri offered to be an emissary to Pakistan promising to take the Prime Minister's message of not being the first to use nuclear arms as he was leaving the country tomorrow to participate in a poetry symposia at Dubai and Qatar where Pakistani poets too would be present. Vajpayee applauded this, adding, ``Yes, tell them to make a similar statement and then there will be no war...Hum Jang Na Hone Deinge.'' Vajpayee also confessed to the audience that his contribution to poetry was negligible, as poetry demanded a lifestyle different from that of a politician. ``I had never imagined that my poems could be sung or danced to!'' he added. But now that it is happening all too often, he seemed to be liking it.