Open Secrets: The Explosive Memoirs of an Indian Intelligence Officer (31 page)

To add to the worries the untimely and unfortunate statement of Prime Minister Morarji Desai on the propriety of merger of Sikkim with India had helped reopening of the hitherto waxed hornets nest. Khatiwada and Bhandari did not lose the opportunity of unfurling the banner of revolt against Kazi and the values he stood for. The Chogyal and the members of his think tank immediately jumped into the fray. They were assisted by a few Calcutta and Delhi based journalists who like the Janata leaders failed to see virtue in the actions of Indira Gandhi. Their personal and ideological bitterness incapacitated them from discerning the special security and political situation in which Sikkim was placed as a border sentinel against China. The very journalist, who did some troubleshooting on behalf of Sanjay, switched over allegiance and started promoting the interests of the new political leadership. Kazini Eliza Maria told me in no uncertain words that the journalist was paid hefty amounts to influence the ministers in Delhi. I did not like to break the glasshouse she was caged in by telling that her precious money had only fattened the pocket of the news and feature agency man.

Kazi depended on me a lot. But my capability was limited by the situation of drift that had taken over the Intelligence Bureau. They too got busy in mending fences with the new masters and did not lag behind in mobilising the agency’s assets to haunt down Indira Gandhi. Indira was the sole problem for the IB too. Surveillance on Indira and her close associates was total. Their phones were tapped, mails opened, movements shadowed and friends and acquaintances grilled and interrogated. The Janata government used the IB as ruthlessly Indira had used it against them during the emergency. The night-beauties of IB did not find it difficult to switch over bedmates. I shuddered at the professional promiscuity of the organisation. How could the same set of officers get ready to burn Indira at the stakes, who had lapped up the dusts of her walkway only a couple of months ago? The answer was not very far to seek. IB did not work under any systemic control. It was a department and worked under personal supervision of the PM and the HM. Therefore, bed hopping was inevitable for the organisation.

However, I kept Kazi and the Governor informed of a sinister move that had started taking shape over the ‘infamous Sikkim statement’ of the Morarji Desai, the Prime Minister. The members of the legislative assembly were being influenced by some mysterious forces to demand a vote against the merger of Sikkim like they had earlier voted in favour of the merger in 1975.

I was surprised to see that the senior IB leaders preferred to play cool to the new game plan of the Chogyal and his think tank. To keep track of the activities of the ‘independence’ protagonists I requested both Delhi and Calcutta to provide me with the facilities of selected phone tapping and interception and examination of postal mails. The need for the selected use of micro tape recorders and radio microphones were emphasised. These requests were summarily turned down. Absence of technical and electronic gadgets confined my intelligence gathering capability only to human assets.

The ambience of merger-romance was over and the forces of disintegration had started cutting out new furrows. Some of them were in touch with the directionless and unfocussed leaders of the Janata conglomerate. The former Chogyal had started reshuffling his cards with great care.

I was not capable to sit on judgement on the correctness or otherwise of the merger of Sikkim. I was not the instrument either to undo what the political leadership did in 1974-75. I was there in Sikkim as an instrument of the government of India to generate intelligence on the security ambience of the newly merged state and to perform counter intelligence operations along the Chinese borders. Having sensed that Delhi had lost its bearings I kept myself confined to honest reporting.

But the high drama of political instability reached the apex around the
Deepavali
(festival of Light) day of 1977. My human assets informed me that 11 legislators of Kazi’s Janata Party, including four ministers were on the verge of defecting and toppling the government. Their plan included two vital aspects: formation of an alternative government and passing a majority resolution demanding annulment of the ‘
deceitful merger of Sikkim
’ with India. Some pro-Chogyal elements had started spreading rumours that once the State Assembly annulled the merger the new sovereign Sikkim would be recognised by a few international powers. The illiterate people of Sikkim were misled by such whispering campaign. I shared the information with Delhi and Calcutta and waited for instructions. Nothing came.

Around 7 p.m. I received a call from the Raj Bhawan and was advised to see the Governor immediately. Governor B. B. Lal was already seated in his ornate office room and was in the process of discussing the matter of political instability with Davy Manavalan. I was promptly ushered in and on demand from the Governor I shared with him the precise intelligence that I had. I also told him that about 12 legislators were herded together at a secret place in the capital. It was a sort of ‘action camp’ to motivate the legislators and to finalise the rough edges of portfolio allocation and distribution of moneybags.

The Governor summoned the police commissioner for rescuing the ‘camped’ legislators. I requested him not to compel me to discuss the delicate matter in front of the police chief. But he insisted that I share the complete information with Khurana. I had to give in.

The Governor desired that I should help the police to retrieve the ‘camped’ legislators. I declined to oblige and suggested that at best I could show the place to Davy Manavalan from a safe distance and he could do the rest. This compromise was agreed upon. Davy Manavalan was one of the oldest ‘deputationist’ officers from West Bengal and he had established excellent rapport with the Sikkimese politicians and bureaucrats. A man of outstanding integrity and a devout Catholic, Manavalan was an excellent performer. I returned home after helping in rescuing the legislators and called Delhi up to apprise the desk analyst of that evening’s developments.

The night before
Deepavali
is traditionally a gambling time for the superstitious Hindus. The avid gamblers fill up several holes where alcoholic beverages are served liberally. Gangtok was no exception. But after my rendezvous with Manavalan was over I returned home for a family dinner and rest. Our elder son was down with chicken pox and Sunanda too was running temperature. I wanted to spend the festive evening with them.

But my destiny eluded me a peaceful pre-
Deepavali
night. Khurana rang me up to demand as to why I did not share with him the information of likely defection prior to my briefing the Governor. He was as usual very high on whisky and could hardly speak out the words he intended to convey. Khurana was not the guy to take the message gracefully. He kept on ringing me after every 10 minutes and came down to abusing me.

Khurana raided my home with a great commotion. Dressed in a woollen evening gown and armed with a pistol he stormed into my house and demanded that I open the door for him. He brushed aside the CRPF armed guard and kept on banging the main door.

Sensing trouble I called staff members who lived in the same campus. They ran down to my help. I requested K. M. Lal and Davy Manavalan to come down to my residence to pacify the drunken police chief.

As I opened the door Khurana stormed into the outer corridor followed by a deputy superintendent of police, whose only job was to give company to his commissioner till he dozed off well after midnight. The young Bhutia officer apologised and requested me to help him out. Sunanda requested Khurana to sit down and talk slowly as our son was running high temperature. But the police chief, high on spirits kept on shouting and hurling abuses for my alleged defiance of his superior authority. Fortunately for us Lal and Manvalan reached our home in five minutes and stood silently behind Khurana. On seeing them he rushed out of the corridor and bumped against a stair. We steadied him and helped him getting into the car that brought him to our home.

Sunanda and I felt extremely humiliated by the outrageous behaviour of the police commissioner who had even forgotten the normal social niceties. Next morning Sunanda and I drove down to the Raj Bhawan and apprised the Governor of the mischievous and objectionable behaviour of Khurana. I reminded the Governor that as the head of the state he had every right to be privy to the security and stability related intelligence, but his police commissioner could not get away by making such demands on me. I followed this up with a written complaint to the Director IB with a copy to the Governor. That was the end of my official and social relationship with Khurana.

My point was well taken by the Governor and Delhi too supported me. Khurana was transferred out and I was able to help out my former boss at Kohima, M. N. Gadgil to join as the new police chief. I had gone out of the way to lobby for him as he was on the verge of reversion to his state cadre and he had no chance of earning the next higher rank. He did me a good turn in Calcutta by tilting in favour of my posting to Gangtok and did whatever I could do to influence an obliged chief minister and a gentleman Governor.

The intricately complicated aspects of relationship between the state and the central intelligence machineries and the appropriate protocol of sharing intelligence require deeper examination. Some of the police chiefs expect the central intelligence to serve their local interests, which are generally conditioned by the requirements of the political bosses of the sate. I faced similar difficulties in Manipur, where a frustrated and incompetent IG police had mounted surveillance on my subordinates and me. Baleshwar Prasad, the corrupt Chief Commissioner, goaded him.

However, Sikkim was a different case study. It was a new laboratory of political experiment and the Governor was a seasoned and balanced administrator. He deserved a better police chief, which Khurana was not. His demands exceeded the limits of the Rubicon that are imposed on an intelligence officer by his training and the ethics of his profession. Sharing and denial of intelligence by itself is an art that has to be learnt over a long period. But some bulls to which a china shop is as good as the wheel cart of a vegetable vendor often misinterpret polite intelligence denials as acts of defiance. That was the tragedy with Khurana, which was compounded by his drinking binges.

*

The developments in Delhi under the first non-Congress government, a queer coalition of conflicting ideologies and directionless leaders caused severe convulsions in my mind. It appeared that Morarji Desai and his ministerial team were merely glued together by hate Indira mortar. They had very little time to govern the country. Their demolish Indira programme was joined vigorously by the media persons, intellectuals and the so-called secular democrats. Indira Gandhi was no doubt guilty of mutilating the constitution, tampering with the judiciary and destroying the administrative iron frame in the name of loyalty and commitment. The emergency aberration had unfolded the ugly aspects of a democratic system mortgaged to a gargantuan political party and a leader who had forgotten the golden rules of democracy that the system should not be made subservient to the personal stability of a leader. Indira had become the ‘high command’. That indispensability was incompatible in a democracy had escaped Indira’s attention. Did she start believing in the sycophantic slogan that Indira was India?

Sanjay Gandhi had seemingly established a stranglehold not only on her style of functioning but also on her cerebral properties. The backseat driver had assumed that India was there to be plundered and treated as a bonded chattel maid. They were blatantly wrong. They had initiated the process of destroying the finer grains of democratic process and introduced the elements of muscle, money and street violence as the new weapons that degenerated to plain and simple criminality. Sanjay was the first irresponsible Indian politician, if he was a politician at all, to put crime and politics on the high pedestal of social and political acceptability.

However, Morarji Desia’s single-minded obsession against Indira and non-governance had disillusioned most of the thinking citizen of the country. He failed to take India out of the morass of political morbidity and economic disaster. Moreover he was dogged by the ideological conflicts inside his political juggernaut.

The Jan Sangh was wedded to the anachronistic Hindutwa concept of the RSS, which might have been relevant in the pre-partition days as a symbol of Hindu interests as against the only-Muslim single minded programme pursued by the Muslims and encouraged by the bankrupt Imperial masters. The Jan Sangh ministers tried to follow their own brand of political objective while the multi-hued socialists opted for more anarchic handling of the sensitive national issues. A few of the cabinet colleagues of Morarji had already started plotting his ouster and promoting themselves as prospective prime ministers.

The farce of Indira’s arrest and the resultant haunting and the comical handling of the Shah Commission had left no doubt that the dream of Jayprakash Narayan had gone sour and the revolution that he had envisioned was being systematically demolished by the hungry pack of politicians whom he had parked at the helm of affairs of the nation. His dreams too were shattered like those of Mahatma Gandhi.

I felt apprehensive when the establishment head of the IB sounded me of my possible transfer to Delhi. I had completed my tour of duty in Sikkim. I had earned the distinction of setting up the Intelligence Bureau’s edifices in the new state and I had succeeded in generating valuable human assets both for the internal as well as the counter-intelligence wings of the IB. It was time for me to seek out a wider field. The kids now deserved better education and as a career intelligence operator I was also required to gather some experiences as a desk analyst.