Open Secrets: The Explosive Memoirs of an Indian Intelligence Officer (45 page)

He was the person who tipped me off in early 1986 about the possibility of use of the Safdarjung Flying Club by the Sikh militants for crashing an explosive loaded aircraft on the nearby residence of Prime Minister Rajiv Gandhi. This input, strengthened by other internal inputs had led to the closure of the amateur flying club operating out of the next-door airstrip.

*

Cultivation of the diplomats from Bangladesh Mission did not pose a serious problem. The High Commissioner, a General in Bangladesh Army, was associated with the freedom struggle. I hadn’t had the opportunity to encounter him during my forays to the ‘Mukti Bahini’ training camps in Cachar-Sylhet border. But he was pretty indulgent to a fellow Bengali speaking diplomat and favoured me with his analysis of the security scenario in the subcontinent. He was deeply concerned over the spread of the ISI tentacles in Bangladesh and spread of religious fundamentalism. His friendly dialogues helped to collect valuable data on a key diplomat in Pakistan High Commission, whose exquisitely beautiful lady wife was born out of wedlock between an English father and an Assamese mother. Besides Urdu she could fluently speak Bengali and Assamese.

This was a valuable tip. While Sunanda befriended her on the University Club network, I used my fluent Assamese and Bengali to rekindle in her the memories of Guwahati and Calcutta. The nice human being in her was as beautiful as her exterior appearance. On one occasion when we were visiting India on home leave she did not hesitate to choose us to send some gift to her aunt in Calcutta. Her husband was later posted in Dhaka and we had a final friendly meeting in Calcutta.

Her ‘
unconscious
’ revelations helped me to identify two ISI operatives, one in Ottawa and the other in Toronto. Thereafter I did not find it difficult to ‘exploit’ the services of tow journalists of Indian origin to cultivate the undercover Pakistani diplomats and ferret out useful information.

My other friend in Bangladesh Mission was another Mukti Bahini veteran. I had chanced to meet him at Silchar in early 1971. As a young captain of the East Pakistan Rifles he had rebelled against the Pakistani genocide and switched over loyalty to Mujibur Rahman’s Awami League. Our rusted acquaintance flourished into friendship and our common interest in ‘fishing expedition’ had taken us to the shores of Thousand Island, Dow’s lake and Meach Lake on Gatineau National Park. We two Bengalis, for whom rice and fish bowl represent the better part of the heaven, did not find it difficult to strike a relationship that had transcended the diplomatic limitations. It is needless to say that as a trained professional I possessed the better expertise to peck into his subconscious mind. I benefited immensely from this ‘fishing friendship’. He later rose to the rank of Foreign Secretary of Bangladesh.

We had boarded the trans-Atlantic flight in October 1983 with the fond hope of enjoying the winter snow, fall colours and the quiet social ambience of Canada and take better care of the kids. But the work bug invaded our privacy there too and I was again sucked into the vortex of ‘intelligence activities’, which was the assigned prerogative of my R&AW colleagues.

My misery was toned down considerably with the arrival of a wonderful couple from the MEA, Manilal Tripathy and his wife Shashi Tripathy. Manilal, an Oriya Brahmin, was married to a Punjabi Jat, Shashi. But they made a delightful couple and an efficient team in the office. Mani, the new Deputy High Commissioner took over a lot of my burden and Shashi shouldered the I&P portfolio. I was assigned the cover job of Counsellor Political. Ashok Attri, a career diplomat, was supposed to take over the Political desk. He was naturally hurt by this arrangement. But we never allowed our friendship to falter at the mundane shores of petty office assignment. He continued to be the Head of the Chancery.

The new assignment helped me to devote more time in pursuing my ‘other activities’. In perspective, I feel that the High Commissioner had intentionally made this delicate change. It gave me better access to some of the Canadian parliamentarians, intellectuals and opinion makers. This did not involve ‘intelligence generation’. The delicate task was related to selling the Indian version of the Sikh imbroglio and to convince the Canadian leadership that India was a victim of Sikh terrorism and Pakistan’s proxy war.

June brings in its wake, in Delhi and the surrounding tracts of Haryana, Rajasthan and Punjab scorching heat, dust storm and drought. But June 1984 had ushered in an unprecedented failure of Indian statecraft, internal security machineries and secular political process.

Run out of all options and her well-known uncanny sense of strategic evaluation and manipulation Indira Gandhi had reached a dead end in the blood sodden Punjab. Sikh politics had often presented unexpected surprises but no one in India ever doubted the folksy patriotism of the Sikhs. Post emergency political manipulation and the strategy of matching Akali fundamentalism by unleashing Bhindranwale brand of fanaticism by Sanjay Gandhi, Zail Singh and other players in Indira’s court had generated a unique field of force that was not purely a Sikh issue. The master players in Delhi had failed to calculate the impact of calculated nurturing and nourishing of Islamic fundamentalist forces by General Zia-ul-Haq, President Reagan and their Cold War allies in the West and Middle East. That Pakistan would stoke Sikh discontent and reorient its thrust in Kashmir was made sufficiently clear by the military junta in 1979. Unmindful of the tectonic geo-political shift Indira had allowed her near and dear ones to play with fire. Her new managerial team spearheaded by Rajiv Gandhi too had failed to invent strategic moves to deal with the Punjab imbroglio without declaring an all out war on the symbols of Sikh faith. The Army was called on June 2 to aid the civil authorities in the Punjab. The Indian state had for the second time mobilised a professional army to fight its own people. The first such engagement had started in the North East.

I received a call from an Amritsar based friend who lived in Galli Jallianwala Bagh next to the Golden temple and the historic ground where a British General had mowed down hundreds of Indian freedom fighters in a planned action of genocide. He gave me almost a running commentary on the deployment of the armoured and cavalry columns and gun positions. Could anything be done to save the Golden Temple? He asked. I advised him to pray and take care of himself and his family. I also told him that Army in civil action is a blind and injured lion. It behaves according to its own animal rules.

I briefed Fabian and advised him to interact with the Canadian authorities to augment security around the Chancery premises and residences of the diplomats. He waited, for good reasons, for June 7. Delhi had pushed the Indian state to a new precipice of tectonic chasm. For a while our communication links with the Canadian Sikh community were disrupted. Even the sympathetic Canadians were baffled by the military option used by Delhi. But we had managed to bounce back and re-establish toehold inside some of the Gurdwaras and reopen dialogue with a few Sikh leaders.

But a great impasse was created when Indira Gandhi was shot dead by her Sikh security guards on October 31, 1984. The shell-shocked world woke up to a greater shock when Hindu mob owing allegiance to Indira Congress killed thousands of Sikhs in Delhi and other places in India.

I received two calls from Delhi on the 30th October night at around 11.30 p.m. (Canadian date and time). The first caller was a friend of mine in Indira Gandhi’s personal office at 1 Safdarjung Road (not R.K.Dhawan). He broke the news of Indira’s death at about 10 a.m. Indian time on October 31. The next call came around 7.30 a.m. on October 31 (Canadian date and time) from our family physician, a Sikh doctor, who lived in a lane behind Gurdwara Balasahib, behind Sarai Kale Khan. His neighbourhood was attacked by an Indira Congress mob. My doctor friend requested me to call up someone in Delhi police to rescue his family. I was not aware that the most shameful act of Indian drama was being enacted under the very conniving eyes of Delhi police. Finally I rang up a Muslim friend and requested him to rescue the aged doctor and his family and to shift them to the safety of Muslim majority Jama Masjid area. Thanks to the instrument invented by a Canadian that helped me saving the lives of six innocent Indians, who preferred to worship their God in a different manner.

My understanding of the dynamics of creation of the Bhindranwale phenomenon and its tragic consequences did not inhibit my commitment to the job I was assigned. I had come to know Indira Gandhi under difficult circumstances. I had developed a rational respect for her nationalism, patriotism and her peculiar sense of attachment to the country and its people. Perhaps she was the best that the post-Nehru India could invent for itself. She was rejected and was again called back because the other pack of political jokers had miserably failed to give any semblance of governance to the problem-ridden country.

Indira Gandhi’s assassination and mindless killing of the Sikhs added an altogether new dimension to the functioning of the Mission in Ottawa. Movements of the diplomatic and non-diplomatic staff were severely restricted. Our families were made to maintain a low profile in the social circuit. For a while the RCMP maintained discreet watch on the schools where our children studied. Armed guards were placed at our residences.

It appeared that the forced polarisation between the Indians of Hindu and Sikh origin had suddenly developed an unbridgeable chasm. Very few Sikh members of the Indian community turned up for diplomatic parties and most of us were barred from the Sikh homes and gurdwaras. New barriers were created between the Mission and the Sikh community.

The High Commissioner summoned me to the Mission on November 3, a Saturday. Manilal, the Deputy High Commissioner and Shashi, his wife and Counsellor were present too. I drove through the season’s first heavy snow and was closeted with the three senior professional diplomats for over three hours. A few pertinent issues discussed included upgrading the Mission’s physical security and generation of intelligence.

The High Commission ruefully lamented that the R&AW representatives in Ottawa, Toronto and Vancouver were not sharing intelligence with him and he was to depend on handouts that he received through the MEA. He reiterated the earlier scheme that he had drawn up for covering Sikh militancy in Canada and requested me to accelerate the process of generating intelligence.

I hesitated to accept the added responsibility and requested that the R&AW representative should be separately briefed to attend to the urgent needs of the High Commissioner. I was overruled on grounds that most of the briefings given by him were insipid and did not contain hard intelligence.

I was not enamoured with the professional performance of R&AW first secretary in Ottawa. The Toronto representative, a retired Army officer, went about his job as if he was deployed on trench warfare. He was busier in preparations for settling down in Canada or the USA after retirement. He was not in a hurry to antagonise the Sikh community by being truthful to his department and country. His inefficiency was well compensated by the Consul General, a career diplomat.

However, Gurinder Singh, a young Indian Police Service officer, in Vancouver proved to be a professionally sound person. But the systemic wrong wiring inhibited him in sharing his intelligence input directly with the Consul General and the High Commissioner. Fortunately for the Mission the situation vastly improved after J.C.Sharma, a career diplomat took charge at Vancouver.

I do not intend to disclose the details of the intelligence operations that were carried out between Mani, Shashi and me in deference to the niceties of diplomatic protocol. But we did a lot and reached appreciable penetration in the key Sikh inhabited cities in Canada. Certain friends were developed in Chicago, New York, California and Seattle who supplemented the coverage of the World Sikh Organisation and Council of Khalistan. A few journalists of Indian as well as the US origin helped me out to stretch south beyond the political boundaries of Canada.

Rajiv Gandhi’s succession was heralded by the general elections in December 1984 and for a while he emerged as a young charismatic leader often compared to JFK in the western hemisphere. But witch hunting that is peculiar to Delhi’s durbar politics witnessed the disgraceful removal of Dhawan, the powerful aide to Indira. He was again made to walk over the fire and stigmatised as the person at whom the ‘needle of suspicion’ pointed out, as a suspect in the assassination of Indira Gandhi. Manipulation of the judicial luminaries is not uncommon in India and Justice Thakkar lived up to the expectation of the machinations of some of the courtiers of Rajiv Gandhi, especially Arun Nehru and M. L. Fotedar. It caused tremendous pain to my family and me. We had developed friendship with the ‘trouble shooter, dirty manipulator and corrupt person’, as his critics and a section of the media severally described Dhawan. He could be anything, I was ready to concede, but I never believed that he could be a part of the conspiracy that killed Indira Gandhi. My bosses in Delhi advised me that I should desist from contacting Dhawan on phone as he was ‘contaminated’. It meant that he was under HumInt and TechInt surveillance.

In early April 1985 I stumbled against a piece of ‘uncorroborated information’ that the ISYF, Canada chapter and the International Babbar Khlsa were planning some spectacular show. Discreet probe in quarters closer to Satinder Pal Singh Gill, Avtar Sigh Koonar and Kulwant Singh Nagra of the ISYF and Ripudaman Singh Malik, Talvinder Singh Parmar and Ajaib Singh Bagri of the Babbar Khalsa raised reasonable doubt on two important security considerations. The first one involved attack on Rajiv Gandhi’s residence from a truck mounted three inch mortar. The second suspected threat pertained to sabotage involving a civilian Indian aircraft.