Open Secrets: The Explosive Memoirs of an Indian Intelligence Officer (60 page)

For reasons not well understood by the informed strategists and tactical applicators Delhi has always preferred to adopt passive and defensive stances. Pakistani establishment is a geopolitical bully. The best response to blunt such a bully is to take the war inside his home. India has allowed itself to be blackmailed by Pakistan even before it went nuclear. The sabre rattling of ‘coercive diplomacy’, which is nothing but sterile military poser, cannot convince the Islamist Pakistani Establishment that India can take the border skirmishes inside their homes and hit at the very roots of the jaundiced Islamist groups.

History cannot be made and unmade by protracted inaction and defensive action. Calibrated action to exploit the fault lines of the enemy often reduces the risk of open warfare. Pakistan has proved this point by successfully waging prolonged low cost proxy war against India. India’s helpless dependence on the US for taming Pakistan is pregnant with the possibilities of third country intervention in the complicated Kashmir issue. The present day BJP leadership appears to be amnesia afflicted on this front.

I don’t think it’s possible for me to dwell on the efficacy of intelligence and political handling of the affairs in Kashmir, where my services were borrowed under special circumstances. I did whatever I could do to offer a toehold to the Intelligence Bureau after the sudden collapse. I was not cut out for the job of miming the ‘single basket’ drama that was being pursued by the new regime too. India failed to adopt new strategic and tactical approaches in that vital area of national security. But, as a knowledgeable citizen I was concerned with the pathetic turn of events, which resulted from mindless bungling by Indira and Rajiv government and fresh proxy-war thrust by Pakistan. The nation had willy-nilly entered into another quagmire of its own creation.

In fact, the V. P. Singh government was so much swayed away by the bluff of kidnapping of the home minister’s daughter that they refused to change their looking glasses and have a fresh reading of the situation in the troubled state. The new government too was sucked into the surging fire of Kashmir fault line. Pakistan called the shot and India simply echoed the sound and fury by police/military response. Even a political giant like George Fernandez did not get ample opportunity to shift the eggs to newer baskets. He was hemmed by the same set of administrative, security and intelligence bureaucrats, who were considered ‘experts’ on the affairs of the ‘honeymoon state of the Nehru-Gandhi family’. The moment of crisis required some innovation and George was the man who could lay new bricks to bridge the minds.

I had no illusion about the gravity of the Indian fault lines, some inherited and some created by the grown up children called politicians and their punching bags, the bureaucrats. I had witnessed the fissures in Naksalbari, in the North East and now I was swimming aimlessly in the muddled up bloody poodle of Punjab. I was an ill equipped Don Quixote de la Mancha in the PCIU, which was supposed to fight the mighty Pakistani Establishment’s diabolical thrusts with a few skeletal horses and a couple of broken lances.

PUNJAB
REVISITED

Action and faith enslave thought, both of them in order not to be troubled or inconvenienced by reflection, criticism and doubt.

Henri Frederic Amiel.

Before I turn to my favourite rendezvous with Pakistan I think I should go back to my passionate love for the Punjab fault lines. Before being humbled in the parliamentary polls Rajiv Gandhi had initiated certain positive actions, which were aimed at weakening the terrorist movement. Pakistan’s intentions in Punjab had become more transparent by mid 1989. The Pakistani Establishment was convinced that the Jat Sikh gentry were incapable of putting up a united front against India. Their Hindu roots were much deeper than the egalitarian preaching of the Gurus and artificial efforts by certain leaders to project Sikhism as altogether a new faith. Its roots were firmly embedded in the
saptasindhu
region, the foremost playground of Indian civilisation.

However, Delhi had created enough problems for itself by crafting a Bhindranwale and destroying the Vatican of the Sikhs. It lost an illustrious Prime Minister in the process. The communal divide had taken threatening proportions in the traditionally unified Punjabi society. But the expected communal explosion did not take place, despite Pakistani prodding. The vast majority of the Sikh masses were not ready to walk along the fundamentalist path following the era of fundamentalism ushered in by Iran revolution, Zia-ul-Haq and Afghan jihad.

A disillusioned Islamabad had no intension to help the Sikhs beyond a point. They maintained tactical supply of Afghanistan surplus weapons and explosives and imparted rudimentary training to the lumpen terrorist cadre that believed more in loot and rape than advancing the cause of the ‘
quam
’ (nation). Islamabad simply wanted the chaos to continue at heightened scale with a view to diverting Indian attention from Kashmir, where it had decided to play the new game of ‘inflicting thousand cuts’ on India by launching a reinforced proxy war.

Rajiv Gandhi was convinced that the movement in Punjab could be fragmented with deft manipulation of some of the key personalities. He had discussed this point with me twice. This policy sounded contradictory to the policy (not necessarily Delhi’s policy) of both conventional and unconventional application of force to contain the terror machine. The application of planned conventional force by police and paramilitary forces under the leadership of K.P.S.Gill had succeeded in localising the movement to narrower geographical features.

The application of unconventional force by the police/paramilitary formations and some messianic intelligence operatives of the IB had succeeded in sending shivers of panic amongst the civilian population. They reacted in a frenetic manner with violence. The state forces responded with equal ferocity in questionable acts of plunder, extortion, inhuman torture and murder of innocent people. At points of time it had become difficult to differentiate between state action and terrorist action. These were not violent response to violent acts by the terrorists. These were organised acts of state repression that alienated the people and eroded their faith in the rule of law, as enshrined in the constitution.

It’s not my intention to count every incident of excesses committed by the state machineries, including the central intelligence machineries. The nation should have gone into these misdeeds, which allowed a section of the citizens to be tortured and killed by state machineries, in a planned manner. Inaction by the conscience keepers of the nation had allowed a few dozen officers to walk away with fat material booty and prestigious honours. It was a shameful chapter. All that I can say that the people of Punjab and the Indians at large deserved a human rights accounting after peace was restored. Is it too late to reopen the grave wounds, which finally aggravate the hidden fault lines?

In any case, my understanding of the task assigned to me by the PMO was very clear. It involved cleverly planned intelligence operations to drive wedges between the feuding terrorist leaders and groups.

One of the prime targets was Harwinder Singh Sandhu, General Secretary of the AISSF (Manjit). He was expected to split the Sikh Students Federation and rally around him some of the terrorist outfits. Sandhu was released along with other Jodhpur detainees after V. P. Singh came to power. Some clumsy direct interference by a self-righteous political figure had compromised the delicately planned operation. Sandhu was assassinated on January 24, 1990, by terrorist outfits owing allegiance to the Second Panthic Committee. My inability to establish adequate rapport with some of the over zealous political operators of V. P. Singh often stood in the way of successfully concluding some of the operations. V. P. Singh as well as some his emissaries thought that good intentions were enough to quell the fire in Punjab. Some of them behaved naively if not stupidly.

But my next target Gurbachan Singh Manochahal, self-styled chief of the Bhindranwale Tiger Force of Khalistan (BTFK) and a member of First Panthic Committee had in the meantime returned from Pakistan with a cache of weapons and bagsful of disillusionment. My earlier contact with him before the release of Jasbir Singh Rode was fortified by intervention of a rice mill owner of village Shero. A strange character named Vishram Singh worked as a go between.

Vishram Singh was a tribal from Chhotanagpur. He was converted to Sikhism by a Patna Sahib (Bihar) based Sikh missionary and was deputed to Dam Dami Taksal for religious training. After completion of training he had worked in several rural Gurdwaras in Amritsar district and had left for Patna after Operation Blue Star. My colleagues in Patna helped me in recruiting him and relocating him at Dam Dami Taksal and finally securing a job for him at Sirhali Kalan Gurdwara. Vishram was not the only one of his kind. A couple of such former pupils of the Taksal were recruited from Nanded Sahib (Maharashtra) and Paonta Sahib (Himachal Pradesh) and relocated in Punjab to work as eyes and ears of the Intelligence Bureau.

Manochahal was disillusioned with Pakistan as he discovered to his horror that his ISI handlers were not keen on the issue of helping the Sikhs to secure an independent homeland: Khalistan. They were keen only on keeping the Punjab cauldron boiling. Punjab was not an integrated part of Pakistan’s proxy war; it was a diversionary tactics that exploited India’s self-created fault line. Punjab happened because India had faltered and Islamabad simply took advantage of the situation.

Manochahal was further shocked to see that the ISI handlers reposed greater trust in Wassan Singh Jaffarwal, Dr. Sohan Singh and Babbar Khalsa leaders like Wadhwa Singh and Mehal Singh. He was in for another shock when his lieutenant Sukhwinder Singh Sangha broke away under instigation from the Second Panthic Committee and an ISI handler.

My meetings with Manochahal and confabulations with Jasbir Singh Rode had helped in forming a new axis comprising BTFK (M), KCF (Gurjant Singh Rajasthani) and the AISSF (Manjit). In fact, a tip off from Manochahal had led to an engagement between Sangha and police near village Bhuller, in Amritsar district.

Manochahal played his role appreciably and brought about a clear line of alignment in the underground movement. Forces opposed to him comprised SSF (Bittoo), KCF (Panjwar), KCF (Jaffarwal), BTFK (Rachpal), KLF (Budhsingwala) and Babbar Khalsa.

Another front on which I worked was the Babbar Khalsa. The Babbar Khalsa movement was evolved out of Sikh quest for
Khalis
(purist) aspects of the Khalsa faith propounded by the Gurus and finally encoded by the tenth Guru Gobind Singh. It drew inspiration from another purist organisation –Akhand Kirtani Jatha headed by Bhai Fouja Singh. Let’s not dabble in the religious and ritualistic specialities of the Babbars. On many counts they did not conform to the rites and rituals prescribed by the SGPC and the Dam Dami Taksal. They were ready to walk along with other terrorist groups but preferred an independent furrow. The Babbars were one of the earliest militant groups to establish linkages with the Inter Services Intelligence and the Sikh Diaspora that strived for an independent Sikh homeland as a logical conclusion of the manoeuvres a section of the Sikh elite made on the eve of the transfer of power negotiations and the Punjabi Suba movement. The Babbars had acquired expertise in using sophisticated improvised explosive devices.

The Babbars had maintained their distinct identity from the First Panthic Committee and an uneasy truce with Dam Dami Taksal and Jasbir Singh Rode. After Operation Black Thunder and appointment of a new
jathedar
of the
Akal Takht
by the SGPC, Jasbir Singh Rode had announced that he and other high priests appointed by the militants were the real
jathedar
s. This development had led to a split in the Panthic Committee. After several stormy discussions in August and September 1988, the formation of Second Panthic Committee was announced on November 4, 1988. Wadhwa Singh and Mehal Singh represented the Babbar Khalsa in the committee. The Babbars were accommodated at the instance of the ISI.

The initiation of peace talks by the government of India in late 1990 had stirred up mixed reactions among the militant groups. Pakistan did not want the terrorist groups to mend fences with the government of India at that critical point. Soon after conducting the Zarb-I-Momin (the Believer’s Blow) exercise in December 1989 the Pakistan army had concluded that it was adequately poised to fight a conventional war with India. There were rumours of possibility of another round of Indo-Pak war in early 1990. For a change V. P. Singh too talked in terms of war, which was echoed by General Aslam Beg. The Pakistan Army in consonance with the President had started calling the shots bypassing Benazir Bhutto, who was finally deposed in August 1990. The ISI had played a decisive role in these developments.

Pakistan hadn’t failed to notice the fragile coalition in Delhi tottering under irreconcilable pulls and pressures. Indira Congress had established bridgeheads with Devi Lal and Chandrashekhar and the BJP had embarked on a dangerous game of whipping up Hindu sentiment by launching L. K. Advani’s Somnath to Ayodhya rathyatra (chariot safari). V. P. Singh had responded to the looming perils by letting lose the genie of caste hatred. History is yet to assess which of the two blunderers—Advani’s rathyatra and V. P. Singh’s Mandal Commission action —had inflicted the maximum injury on Indian society.

The Pakistani strategic planners were not blind to these changes in Delhi and gleefully pumped in men and materials in Kashmir and egged on the eggheads like Dr. Sohan Singh to adopt sterner postures.

The time frame chosen to woo a section of the Babbars was, therefore, not propitious. I sought out the services of a Sikh journalist to approach two important leaders of the Babbar Khalsa. A bridgehead was established after a sizeable goodwill amount was passed on to a cut out. Support from an unexpected quarter facilitated the operation, when Atinderpal Singh, a journalist turned terrorist, then a Member of Parliament, pitched in to soften a section of the Babbar Khalsa. Adequate help was received from a Patiala based lady member of the parliament.

The desired result was achieved when Dr. Sohan Singh expelled Wadhwa Singh and Mehal Singh from the Second Panthic Committee and inducted Daljit Singh Bittoo (son of a renowned agricultural scientist) and Shahbaz Singh. A few Punjab observers and ‘experts’ have described this as ideological incompatibility between the Second Panthic Committee and the Babbar Khalsa. They also pointed out Pakistani displeasure with the Babbars.

These assertions were far from the truth. Babbars never lost the confidence of the ISI and Pakistan. The fissure came through because of the initiative taken by Rajiv Gandhi and adequate helps that I received from various sources, including the family of Jarnail Singh Bhindranwale.

The Babbar Khalsa had in the meantime floated its political fronts like the Shiromani Babbar Akali Dal, and Babbar Akali Istri Dal. It declined to wind up the London based ‘Khalistan Government in Exile’.

My tasks were limited to bringing about fissure in the Second Panthic Committee and prepare the ground for talks with the government of India. I had reasons to believe that the limited brief was implemented gracefully but with a great personal loss. My Sikh journalist friend was assassinated by a hit squad of the KCF on suspicion that he had helped the government of India in bringing about a fissure between the Second Panthic Committee and the Babbar Khalsa.

I was later informed by a very reliable source in the IB that an organisational faction opposed to me (personally and professionally) had leaked out the identity of the journalist friend. I still consider it as the most despicable event. My grief was compounded by the refusal of the IB to concede a ‘compensation package’ to the ‘friend’s’ family. There is no provision of golden and silver handshakes in the intelligence fraternity.

Atinderpal Singh had played a significant role in pushing the militant movement in the direction of a negotiated settlement. At heart a poet and journalist the spark of ‘militancy’ had hit this lower middle class journalist after Delhi’s unimaginative handling of the Sikh affairs between 1982 and 1984. The ideas of revolution are mostly expressed through cataclysmic explosion. The ‘contrived revolution’ in Punjab was no exception. It brought in its wake plenty of blood and body bags, for which the terrorists and the state machinery were equally responsible. Atinderpal too had contributed a large number of body bags. But I did not find him to be a mindless killer. In a war situation losers are treated as criminals and the winners get away with trophies. I did not fail to notice that Atinderpal abhorred the criminal tag around his neck, and he sincerely aspired to replace it by a respectable tag of a man of peace.