Open Secrets: The Explosive Memoirs of an Indian Intelligence Officer (33 page)

At this point of time a strange person visited our modest Pandara Road home. A former minister in Indira’s pre-emergency government and maternal grandfather of Sunanda remembered us after a gap of about 11 years. The learned educationist and politician shared a family dinner and finally told me that Sanjay Gandhi wanted to see me. I was foxed by the request. My brush with Sanjay at Gangtok was not a pleasant one and his reputation, as the guillotine man did not escape my antenna. I flatly refused to oblige my wife’s grandfather.

Around the same time I was directed by a Joint Director to see the caretaker PM in his office. I had met Charan Singh for a few moments when he had ordered me to motivate Kazi Lehndup Dorji to merge his Congress unit with the Janata Party.

I was ushered in to the sprawling room of the PM and was handed over a list of election candidates of the remnants of the Janata conglomerate from various states. He ordered me to submit a quick assessment on the prospect of each candidate and what all his government was required to do in each constituency to influence the electorate. I was surprised by the order of the lame duck PM. He should have normally routed the request through the Director Intelligence Bureau and the cascading channel down the line. I walked down the corridor of the North Block to see the Joint Director who had deputed me to see the PM. He listened to me and asked me to keep this off the record and to direct the field units of the IB to file immediate reports. He added that this was a normal practice in the IB and general election assessments as well as specific assessment for the ruling party were being done on regular basis.

I carried out the exercise honestly with adequate support from my field colleagues and finalised a report by mid-September. It brought out a startling picture. A distinct pattern of Indira wave was discernible and my computations indicated that Congress (Indira) was heading for a landslide victory, scoring over 300 seats in the new Parliament. My Deputy Director grilled me for over four hours and rather reluctantly agreed with the conclusions and pushed the report up to his next senior. It was time for me to be grilled again by the Joint Director, who disagreed with the report and tersely commented that the Prime Minister was not likely to be amused by my performance.

I was presented before the Union Home Secretary, who glanced through the report and asked me to follow him to the PMO. The lame duck PM gave a cursory look at the report and asked if I were a Trojan Horse of Indira Gandhi. I tried to explain the basic electoral scenario to the best of my ability but the old man on the other side of the table was not convinced. He took out a report earlier submitted by me in which I had mentioned about the instances of muscle being used by the Jat community against the backward classes in certain constituencies in western Uttar Pradesh. I was asked to withdraw the report and recast the election assessment ‘with an objective outlook’.

On return from his office I received a dressing down from a senior officer and was advised to pack my baggage for likely reversion to my state cadre, West Bengal. That night I returned home with a bruised mind and an acute sense of humiliation. I opened my mind to Sunanda after the kids went to bed. She comforted and encouraged me to look for a different career-window and assured that she would do her best to adjust with any vicissitudes that might befall on us. We sat around the coffee table in our living room and tried to plan out our next strategy in the uncharted field in West Bengal.

Around 11.30 p.m. the door bell rang. I was ready for an order placing my services back to West Bengal. Instead, I faced an unexpected visitor as I opened the door. He apologised profusely for the late incursion and sought permission to come in. For certain reasons I am holding back his identity. He was an important Congress (I) leader and was known for his proximity to Indira Gandhi. After brief preliminaries he wanted me to meet R. K. Dhawan and Indira Gandhi. The idea was preposterous. I was not unaware of IB surveillance around Indira and her important aides, including R. K. Dhawan. The IB had bugged most of their phones and had planted discreet watchers at 12 Willingdon Crescent, the home and hub of activities of Indira Gandhi. Dhawan’s parental home at Atul Grove Lane was under blanket intelligence coverage. His personal residence at 141 Golf Link was also covered by the IB sleuths. In fact, two IB agents were infiltrated amongst the security staff that guarded Indira Gandhi. My face was known to them. I pointed out to my visitor that I was already in trouble and I did not like to jeopardise the safety of my family by jumping into uncertain waters.

My friend pressed me to see Indira and Dhawan. I requested him to allow me to churn over his suggestion. He insisted on visiting me the next night around the same time for a definite answer. Sunanda and I discussed the unexpected development late into the night and our sleep was further disturbed by a telephonic call form her maternal grandfather, the former minister in Indira’s cabinet. He too insisted on my meeting Indira Gandhi.

We finally decided to take the plunge knowing fully well that I was putting my service security on the line and I was about to breech the time-honoured code of conduct. Did I act imprudently under momentary pressure from the HM? I think I did not. The politician in my parental genes and me, still hibernating, had called out loudly to help Indira to take the country out of the Janata mess. It was, I think, an act of messianic madness. Well! Some people are born with two squirrels inside and believe they have a mission. Nothing could be done at that stage of my life to change me.

Next night I was driven in a friend’s car to a distant location from where another car picked me up. I was driven straightaway inside the small front lawn of 12 Willingdon Crescent and was ushered into a room where R. K. Dhawan received me. I had met him very briefly after the 1969 visit of Indira Gandhi to Imphal. I did not expect him to remember my face. A witty person as he was Dhawan feigned to have placed me promptly into the correct slot. We settled down over tea and cigarette. After a brief discussion on the overall election scenario he escorted me to a poorly lighted room where India was seated in a pensive mood. I did not fail to notice the tear marks on her cheeks. There were wrinkles on her forehead and her eyes betrayed a defeated look.

She started with the acts of witch hunting by the Janata government and asked me if I could help her. Indira’s lonely figure and her depressed demeanour touched the chords of my heart. Her request sounded as an act of clutching at a straw by a drowning person. It amounted to a piece of history touching my soul. I was overwhelmed and assured her that if she expected a lowly placed officer like me could help her I was there to help. I did not miss her tearful eyes and did not cynically brush it aside as a part of the theatrics she was alleged to have perfected over the years.

I did not jump into the decision to meet Indira Gandhi with a view to save a damsel in distress. I was no Don Quixote. I did not intend to score points against the imbecile and lame duck PM Charan Singh. The Jat satrap from Uttar Pradesh could by no means emerge as the leader of India. He was not even good enough for the complex state of Uttar Pradesh. I was mostly amused by his tantrums.

I looked around inside the IB organisation and other segments of the government. Most of the senior officers of the IB and the R&AW were aligned with the Janata leaders, political stalwarts from their respective states and caste totems. One of the senior officers of the IB, Thanga Velu Rajeswar, considered close to Indira was shunted out of the IB and he was cooling heels at the Andhra Pradesh Bhawan in Delhi as the Resident Commissioner. He was still in touch with Indira and R. K. Dhawan.

Indira Gandhi had inducted Mr. S. N. Mathur into the IB on recommendations of some Punjab politicians and R. K. Dhawan. But he managed to mend fences with the Janata leaders and survived the onslaught. A few senior officers like K. P. Medhekar, B. R. Kalyanpurkar and R. K. Khandelwal had maintained distance from the feuding political forces but had become suspects in the eyes of the Indira loyalists.

I did not have any equation with the political leaders from West Bengal. I had left the state on the fourth year of my service and I had very little contact with the affairs of the state. Moreover, the Communist leaders were not particularly fond of me, as I had crossed their path as a young Jan Sangh and a Congress activist. I was, by nature and upbringing, against the Indian Communists, and I considered them to be more loyal to the extraneous forces than Indian national interest.

My personal preference was for promoting the political prospects of the Jan Sangh and now the Bharatiya Janata Party. I continued to be drawn to the RSS and I had not been able to overcome my partition day’s hatred for the Muslims. I looked around for my RSS friend, who had played a key role during the JP movement. We met twice but I did not get any positive direction from him. He himself was confused and felt that the existing leadership had not been able to work out any strategy to draw the imagination of the people. My friend finally opined that the grassroots RSS workers would prefer to support Indira instead of the rump Congress headed by Swaran Singh and the socialist brand of perpetually splitting politicians. My friend, an outspoken person, finally concluded that the time was not ripe for the RSS to make a determined bid for power. They would like to wait for a while for the Congress to ‘whiter away’.

The prevailing political spectrum and my personal proclivities to get involved in nation-building politics finally got the better of me and I decided to help out Indira Gandhi consciously and deliberately. I did not agree to support her out of any expectation. I was motivated by pure and simple concern for the state of affairs of the country and the rot that had started eating away the social and economic security of the nation. The regional geo-strategic situation and the developments in Afghanistan and Pakistan had also started threatening the internal and external security fabrics of the country. I took the plunge consciously out of a genuine conviction that a chastised Indira should be able to provide a cleaner and stronger government.

However, I discussed with Dhawan my nagging reservations about Sanjay Gandhi. Indira Gandhi was forced to give election tickets to a large number of Sanjay cronies. They would play havoc with the system again. Dhawan explained that Indira had no option but to depend on Sanjay at her moment of political isolation. Rajiv Gandhi was not interested in politics and Sonia Gandhi was busy in managing the affairs of the Gandhi household. Maneka, daughter of a flamboyant mother and brought up in a different social milieu, was busy with her own pursuits and was unable to relate herself to the cultural values of the Nehru-Gandhi family. Indira, Dhawan explained, was aware of the ambitions of Sanjay and she was not going to allow him to run political riot as he did after the Allahabad High Court judgement and after imposition of the emergency. She was no doubt fond of him, but was highly weary of his unscrupulous and unjust way of functioning. Indira, he assured me, was ready to command the boat herself and she had rescued her soul out of the magic black box of Sanjay.

How did she do it? Dhawan had lighted another Dunhill and assured me that I should be able to discover the truth very soon.

We met regularly to exchange notes on the election scenario. Indira Gandhi insisted on having a day-to-day input of the impact of her election campaign and analytical study of all the constituencies. She was keen to know the weaker links and remedial suggestions. It was a tall order. It was not safe to meet her at 12 Willingdon Crescent home. I had declined to see Dhawan at his Golf Link residence too.

However, I did not want to disappoint Indira. It was worked out that Vincent George, a stenographer in the AICC and an assistant to Dhawan and Raghu, another AICC assistant (later Sanjay’s temporary assistant), would visit my home in the night, take down dictation and type out the material for presentation to Indira Gandhi first thing in the morning. This routine continued till the day of the polling.

I was not sure if Indira was impressed by the study reports. We had a final assessment meeting three days before the polls. Indira was not inclined to believe that her party would score a decisive majority. She gave a final weary smile and commented that she hadn’t come across another chronic optimist like me.

I took it as a compliment. Indira had put everything at stake and she knew that another defeat would mean permanent exit from politics and another round of hate campaign. Her psyche was hovering between hope and despair. She had become highly suspicious in nature and did not trust people around her. She depended on Sanjay but had started developing positive dislike for Maneka, though she doted on Sanjay’s son Varun. She earnestly believed that the evils in Sanjay would be aggravated by the avaricious propensities of his wife and mother in law.

The fear of the return of another vengeful hotchpotch Janata type regime often sent her back to the cocoon of gloomy despair. She had in her the habit of consulting occultists and Dhirendra Brahmachari, a sort of yogi. He had started exploiting her susceptibilities by feeding her ‘intelligence on threat to her life and the malevolent designs of the cosmic forces.’ Another minor
tantrik
from Bihar, somewhat related to the Kalkaji temple, had also started hovering around her. But he was a minor crook and faded away soon after he managed to make a few millions through dubious dealings. Indira was a highly superstitious lady and I witnessed her strange habit of believing in omens. It was easy to exploit her susceptibilities that had arisen out of her personal suffering and those of her mother and her final journey to disillusionment with Firoze Gandhi.

Indira did not suffer from the lack of advisors even in her dark days. The old ‘Kashmiri faithfuls’ had parted company. But a few new Kashmiri midgets like M. L. Fotedar and Arun Nehru had started replacing the old intellectual giants. These new crops were mere trouble-shooters and fortune hunters. They were as duds as wayside peddlers could be. They were more loyal to Sanjay, but Indira had started lending her ears to them. She was susceptible to rumours and gossips camouflaged as authentic intelligence.