Open Secrets: The Explosive Memoirs of an Indian Intelligence Officer (32 page)

I was insulated from the process of witch hunting that had cascaded down the entire IB. The new masters did not hesitate to use the IB for haunting down Indira and her close allies like Indira did to her political opponents. The powerful organisations of the government like the IB, CBI and the R&AW had become handy tools in the hands of the fragile political masters. There was no law in the country to make them accountable to any overview committee of the Parliament or any other constitutional watchdog. The intelligence machineries in India were used as obliging housemaids and the same practice continues unabated. These organisations, like the police and paramilitary forces, have become coercive arms of the government and they are not in any way accountable to the taxpayers and the citizenry, who are supposed to be the ultimate masters in a democracy.

Whatever it is, we left Gangtok for Delhi on December 16, 1978, to start another phase of our life that I envisioned was not going to be rosy at all.

I was deputed to Sikkim at an important juncture of its destiny. The post-merger process required speedy consolidation and emotional integration, besides ingestion of planned economic package. The able Governor had taken care of the daunting task of providing Sikkim with a viable administrative infrastructure and economic development. I must add that B. B. Lal and some of his officers had laid the foundation of solid economic progress though the later day politicians did not fail to emulate their counterparts in the other parts of North East India. Economic activities had become synonymous with fattening of the ruling class of the day.

I derived satisfaction out of the facts that I had done whatever I could do to establish the Intelligence Bureau as a respected wing of the government of India in Sikkim. Generation of internal and counter intelligence tools was perfected to the best of my ability and I had succeeded in penetrating almost all segments of the Sikkimese society. The politicians and the people had started looking up to the IB unit as an independent window to Delhi. The chief minister and the governor had reposed more trust in the IB than on the state intelligence. In my perception it was no mean an achievement.

BACK TO THE RAMPART

When you’re a young man, Macbeth is a character part. When you’re older, it’s a straight part.

Sir Laurence Olivier.

Delhi is a cruel place. It is a place of fortune hunters and essentially a city of migrating bureaucrats and firmly rooted traders and rulers. The rulers survive for a while. The bureaucrats fade away very fast. The traders and fortune hunters stalk the city like their historical and mythological four legged evolutionary partners.

Delhi is a city of opportunity too. The destiny of the geo-political entity called
Bharatvarsha
was made and unmade by the rulers and predators of Delhi. Waves upon waves of human activity around the seats of power had given Delhi its unique flavour and stink. The stink was visible. But to discover the distinct flavour of Delhi one had to dive deep into the human pool.

I too could not escape the fear and flair of the city that was in real sense the
Indraprashtha
, abode of the king of the
suras
(in fact , the Aryans). It was a leveller of some kind, though not for all. For a small intelligence operator like me, Delhi presented the dream peak of success. It also levelled up many of the notions that the heaven born bureaucrats of the All India Services nurtured. I was aware of the possibility of my expectations to be bulldozed by the systemic juggernaut.

The first leveller came in the form of one bedroom transit accommodation in an up coming complex in Minto Road, next to the infamous Turkman Gate. The next hurdle was learning the open sesame mantra that opened the gates of a public schools to our children.

Having taken care of the family I was prepared to jump into action.

I sought out my RSS friend (Benaras one), who had reverted back to his
pracharak
mission. A self-effacing person, he was not interested in governmental matters. Our interactions confirmed my doubt that the Jan Sangh was not in a position to provide good governance. The conflicting interests in the Janata conglomerate were straining the very seams of the coalition. The former Congress elements were in collision with the regional satraps, and the ever-splitting socialists. Charan Singh, Jagjivan Ram, and Bahuguna were perusing their own agenda Morarji Desai was obsessed with the mission of humiliating Indira and tarnishing the Nehru legacy with as much black paint as he could master.

The RSS was not interested in prolonging the oxygen supply to this queer experiment. They were busy in experimenting with the dynamics of transition from an exclusive cultural club to a ruling entity. The wand of power was new to them, and they were not sure how to translate it to electoral magic. Indira was a hate object, but that was not their political mantra. It did not advance their Hindutwa agenda. My friend was candid in admitting that the coalition would collapse sooner than expected. He was aware of the machinations of Indira Gandhi and Sanjay to drive a wedge in the ruling coalition.. They were in touch with Raj Narain and Charan Singh. Even Jagjivan Ram was not averse to the idea of ditching Morarji, if he was promised the top slot. As a member of ‘Dalit’ community he thought he had the right to occupy the South Block room. The political scenario was gloomy enough to shatter faith of the sepoys of Jayaprakash Narayan.

I remained in touch with my RSS friend and prepared myself for the next assignment.

*

I expected an opportunity to handle an analysis desk. But, I was summoned by B. R. Kalyanpurkar, a Joint Director, and was grilled on various aspects of human, technical and electronic intelligence tradecrafts. I was foxed by the detailed interview. Kalyanpurkar, a soft spoken and mild mannered
Konkan
Brahmin from coastal Maharashtra, was pejoratively called as the ‘safe deposit vault’ of IB, for his alleged habit of sitting over files. He did not like his juniors to take quick decision. He himself did not take. I was, they opined, surely heading for a massive black hole

After about seven days of the elaborate interview I received an order posting me as the Assistant Director of the IB’s famous training facility at the Anand Parvat. I welcomed the order. As the training in charge I was only to teach the techniques of decision-making and not take any earth shaking decision. I expected that my stint with the training institute would help me in concretising some of the unorthodox tradecrafts that I had practiced during field postings. I was painfully aware of the inadequacies of the hackneyed training manuals that were being imposed on the new and old officers. No one had taken care to study the training manuals and practices of the western countries, especially those of the MI5, MI6, the CIA and the French intelligence organisations. We had no real-time access to the tradecraft used by the Russian and Chinese intelligence, though our counterintelligence units covered their activities on Indian soil. The tradecrafts applied by the foreign intelligence operators in India too were analysed for use by the counterintelligence branch concerned but these were not integrated with IB’s training curricula.

I was thrilled over the idea of getting a chance to do some research on the training methodology and upgrading the assorted gadgets that help HumInt, by providing technical support.

I devoted two weeks to understand the training curricula and the contents of the tradecraft subjects. The curricula content had not changed since I attended the course in 1968.

I concentrated on the tradecraft subjects and the techniques of human agent building, secret communication, concealment, memory training, secret enquiry and ancillary technical subjects like foot surveillance, shadowing, and operational intelligence in insurgency and terrorism affected areas. I quietly attended the classes of some of the instructors with a view to assimilating the quality of the contents and the impact on the trainees. The new recruits were more receptive than the old serving officers, who were recycled periodically for so called refresher courses. For them it was either a paid holiday or a forced detention. Most of them, I realised had developed resistance against learning new tradecraft techniques and thought that Anand Parvat had very little to offer. The police officers on deputation to the IB also resisted fresh training inputs. Most of them refused to be transformed from policemen to intelligence operatives.

In the meantime, vast changes had taken place in the blueprint for inducting the members of the Indian Police Service to the Intelligence Bureau. Earlier most the IPS officers were caught young from the training college and inducted to the IB on the third or fourth years of their service under the ‘earmarking scheme’. They were supposed to spend entire service life in the IB, and fashion themselves as career intelligence operatives and executives. The ‘earmarked’ officers were supposed to act as the hardcore spine of the organisation.

Indira Gandhi had abolished this system partially to build up a ‘committed and loyal’ band of officers around her and partially under the pressure of the IPS lobby, who were on constant lookout for greener pastures in Delhi. They sought out safe shelters in the central police organisations when they were in conflict with the state governments. The Intelligence Bureau, they pleaded, should be treated as a central police organisation, and not as a specialised agency to be handled by a ‘selected few’. They were supported by the Indian Administrative Service Officers, who were keen to dwarf the reach of the IB to the ears of the PM and the HM, and create a loyal band inside the secret service. This had opened up the floodgate of short tenure deputation to the IB, especially of the officers having political patronage, and those who wanted to escape from the tougher state cadres in the North East and cadres where the Marxists happened to run the state governments.

It’s not that most of these officers were transit passengers. A few of them had shaped up as good intelligence bureaucrats and had managed to build up good rapport with the ruling politicians of the day. Some of them were identified with the political totems in their respective states.

It was a painful experiment to train some of these officers. Way back in 1968, I was trained along with officers eight to twelve years senior to me. They were not interested in shaping themselves up as intelligence operators. They wanted some happy cushion in Delhi and return to their states when the weathercocks blew favourable winds. During my tenure in the training institute I found that this crop of officers had no craving for learning the tradecrafts and the slogging that a field officer was supposed to undergo. Some of them decorated the ‘subject desks’ and others managed to get posted to the regional units of the IB and lorded over their small empires, as long as they did not jump to a higher trapeze.

I worked on preparing a concept paper on the requirement of revising and updating some of the training manuals I emphasised the need for studying the tradecraft specialities of some of the leading foreign intelligence organisations. Some of the suggestions included mandatory qualifying tests before a direct recruit officer was promoted to the next higher rank, meaningful interaction between the officers of the general and technical wings and restoration of the ‘earmarking scheme’. The other ‘preposterous’ idea that I incorporated was the induction of middle level officers from the tertiary institutions like the scientific, economic, and specialised fields of communication. I also suggested creation of a separate unit for training IB officers in the tenets of Islam, and shaping them up as ‘real Muslims’. The other unit that I suggested was related to the teaching of the ‘black arts’ of intelligence tradecraft that should equip IB officers in operating inside target ‘enemy territories’, and in areas affected by insurgency and terrorism.

I think that my revolutionary ideas had upset the applecart of some of the faculty members and a few boss-men. Talking about change was an act of heresy. I was posted out of the training facility in early August 1979, and was directed to take charge of the ‘election cell’ under supervision of Mr. Sudhin Gupta, a fine but disillusioned and disinterested officer. I did not expect a better scenario after about nine years of my first encounter with Gupta, because he had himself become a ‘resistance’ to new ideas and changes. He loved his past and lived in the past

*

The election cell had started functioning at a low key well before the Presidential order dissolving the Parliament on August 22, and scheduling of elections to the Parliament in January 1980. The Presidential order was preceded by bizarre developments around the Janata conglomerate. Morarji Desai had proved beyond doubt that he was not the visionary who could rescue India from the mess created by Indira Gandhi’s younger son. He was busy in witch hunting, and his son had started indulging in questionable financial dealings. Morarji’s billion blundering actions had brought about serious fissure in the Janata Party.

Maneka Gandhi, the young wife of Sanjay, had managed to scandalise the government by publishing lurid sexploits of Suresh Ram, son of Jagjivan Ram, in her glossy magazine
Surya
. Various other scandals involving the Janata leaders overshadowed the gossips, writings and exposes of the alleged demonic activities of Indira and her younger son.

The RSS backed Jan Sangh was caught in the web of the murky question of dual membership and alleged non-secular activities and the maverick socialist Rajnaraian , and his mentor, Chaudry Charan Singh, the Jat patriarch from Uttar Pradesh, had toppled the Morarji government with strings-knotted help from Indira and her son Sanjay. Charan Singh, a pioneer of the politics of defection, was not new to the concept of changing sides. He had earlier performed that magic in Uttar Pradesh.

India was not the only country to be rocked by political turmoil.

The farcical performers in Delhi had not taken into account the diabolical developments in Pakistan that followed the ouster of Zulfikar Ali Bhutto and assumption of power by General Zia-ul-Haq. The fundamentalist General had initiated the process of Islamisation of Pakistan and had launched Pakistan on a course of closer coalition with the US for fighting the Russian backed regime in Afghanistan. He too initiated the process of encouraging the ethno-religious groups in Indian Punjab and Jammu & Kashmir.

The Janata government had blissfully ignored the growth of new geo-political realities in the region, and Morarji Desai had, in fact, reopened the question of ‘merger of Sikkim’ with India. His undiplomatic gesture in meeting A. Z. Phizo, the rebel Naga leader, in London had subverted the spirit of the Shillong Agreement, reached in 1975.

Indira Gandhi did not have to do much from the confines of her 12 Wellingdon Crescent home, a small place that doubled as the residence of her extended family, and her office. The ‘revolution’ initiated by Jayaprakash Narayan was squandered away by the hungry and tactless politicians of the Janata conglomerate. They failed to understand that the people of the country were not interested in hunting down Indira for her emergency follies. They had been aggrieved and had given Indian democracy a chance to change for the better. The Janata leaders betrayed them. The people wanted economic regeneration, poverty alleviation, and transparent governance and not witch-hunting.

Indira had not failed to seize upon the buffoonery of the pack of Janata jokers. She had managed to return to the Parliament and revive the Congress party by causing another split. The common people soon understood that Indira was the best bet for them to take care of the internal political, social and economic problems and steadying Indian strategic policies against the diabolical designs of Pakistan.

My simple and insignificant election desk, therefore, assumed some importance. I was required to collate data from all over the country and prepare intelligence assessment about the main election issues, prospects of the parties and emerging law and order condition. For this daunting task four subordinate staff, with very little experience of the electoral process in the country, supported me. On top of it my immediate boss was more concerned with coma, semicolon and full stops and immaculate Oxonian words that were used in the reports rather than the projection of political trends and issues that were shaping up the mood of the people.