Open Secrets: The Explosive Memoirs of an Indian Intelligence Officer (54 page)

At about ten in the night I was summoned to the PMH to be grilled by the Prime Minister and his aides. The Director Intelligence Bureau was also present. It was a cruel and crucial moment.

I was asked piercing questions on the proprieties of handling the operation, alleged manhandling of the Pakistani diplomat, failure to in form the Pakistan embassy about the fact of the detention and untimely publicity over the electronic media. I did not fumble in replying that there was no manhandling and the IB could inform only the Ministry of External Affairs and was not supposed to go anywhere near the Pakistan embassy.

I expected the Director Intelligence Bureau, seated silently on the table to intervene and explain the position. He did not. He ordered conclusion of the operation and he should have been able to explain the things better in private to the PM. Instead I was grilled by a house-full of aides of the PM. Such incidents are unheard of in intelligence parlance.

All these years I had idolised M. K. Narayanan as a thorough professional. It’s he who had decided to terminate the operation on a particular day, two days after I joined the PCIU. I did know precious little about the practical details of this operation. Narayanan’s silence panicked me. Standing before the Prime Minister of the country I developed a feeling that the ground was slipping out from under my feet and my boss was not reluctant to sacrifice me to keep his position intact with the coterie.

Rajiv Gandhi behaved coolly. He was not flabbergasted by the rhetorics of his aides.

“Thank you for what you have done. But I should have been consulted.”

That was the ultimate I expected from the Prime Minister of the country. Who gave the final nod, if he did not? Did the DIB act on the promptings of the hirelings in the PMO? That was unlikely. I was shuddered by the thought that the beleaguered PM was so clueless about happenings around him. How could he be so naïve to assume that neutralisation of a Minister level cover diplomat would weaken the position of Benazir Bhutto? Normal political and strategic reflexes could have impelled the Army Junta to defer handing over power to Benazir.

I turned to him again and managed to say that part of the order was conveyed from his office.

Rajiv Gandhi raised his head again and said, ‘well done.’

That was a comforting gesture. I was frustrated with the behaviour of the Director IB. He failed to stand by his soldier at a crucial point of time, when the PM’s aides tried to double cross his friend and political mentor.

All that I could do was to return to the police post with a serious concern over the attitude of my boss, and a pity for the son of Indira Gandhi. The Abbasi affair was another instance of his ‘reign of error.’ Elements of error were involved in timing the conclusion of the operation, the manner in which it was concluded and the serious communication gap between the PM, his aides and the intelligence chief. No assessment was obtained from the MEA about the likely reaction of the new Prime Minister elect of Pakistan.

I had witnessed similar lack of inter-agency coordination in Punjab operations and lack of control on the home minister. Rajiv Gandhi, a trained pilot, was supposed to possess an uncanny sense of timing and coordination. But very little of his training was reflected in his flying of the most complicated machine he was saddled to, the complex Indian nation.

*

Before I make my readers to walk through the fault lines that Pakistan exploited to its fullest advantage, I would beg their indulgence to face a turbulent and a devastating tornado, which was initiated by Rajiv Gandhi again by a serious error of judgement. He was wrongly guided and advised by his double-crossing aides.

I have earlier mentioned about my close proximity to some of the RSS and the BJP stalwarts. By May 1988, the contacts and consultations took a brisk shape. Besides K. N. Gobindachariya, Deodas Apte, late Rajendra Sharma, S. Gurumurthy, Uma Bharati, Ved Prakash Goyal and his son Piyush continued to visit my residence almost daily. I was introduced to Sushma Swaraj and O.P. Kohli. However, I could not develop their proximity for security reasons that I would not like to disclose. I also kept deliberate distance from Keshav Kunj for similar reasons.

My wife was particularly fond of young Piyush, Gobindachariya, and Uma. They shared our family meal almost 4/5 times a week. We shared political analysis and strategy and discussed the ways and means, which could result in better electoral performance by the BJP. I must make it clear that I had no access to internal political intelligence generated by the IB. I did not steal IB’s information. I had my own network that was capable of generating crucial information and assessment.

I happened to notice that the RSS and its family members had correctly noticed the vacant political space generated by sudden assassination of Indira Gandhi and Rajiv Gandhi’s lackadaisical performance. They did not discount the emergence of Vishwanath Pratap Singh (VP) as an alternative to Rajiv Gandhi and transformation of Indira Congress to its pre-1969 shape. But they did not take into account the crucial factor of slavish attachment of a section of Congressmen to the family of Motilal, Jawaharlal and Indira. In the absence of any other viable all India figure they had rightly opted for the Nehru-Gandhi family as the right vehicle to drive down to the armatures of the political power houses in Delhi and in the states. In fact, post-independence Congress minus Nehru-Gandhi family is an unthinkable political chemistry. That kind of a political test tube is not likely to germinate life force.

The RSS and BJP had, for the first time, drawn up a blueprint of action to emerge as the most viable political force and the simplest weapon before them was to reinvent the Hindu aspirations. Their piggyback ride on the JP movement had proved that the identification of appropriate vehicles and personalities could take them nearer to power. They had identified V. P. Singh as the new JP and planned out a war game for achieving ascendance of Hindutwa strategy.

Politically Rajiv Gandhi was not a complete bankrupt. Operation Black Thunder in Punjab had caught the Hindu imagination and they looked up to Rajiv Gandhi as a better planner and executor than his mother was. Black Thunder was a neatly executed operation, though it did not succeed in rooting out Pakistan backed militancy. It helped Rajiv to resurrect some of the Hindu support.

Rajiv Gandhi’s next act to woo the Muslim vote bank was, however, not based on correct political assessment. The reversal of the Supreme Court judgement on Shah Bano case and passing of the Muslim Women (Protection of Rights on Divorce) Bill was said have been done to placate the Muslim vote bank. Many observers alleged that Rajiv had rushed through the legislation to placate the Muslim psyche that was seriously hurt after the Assam Accord, which envisaged deportation of Bangladeshi Muslims from Assam. On final count, the Shah Bano case action had sullied Rajiv’s secular image and antagonised a sizeable section of the Hindu vote bank. The moderate and progressive Muslims too were not happy with him. Rajiv had rather proved again that Congress treated ‘secularism and minorityism’ as a ‘policy of apartheid’—segregating a major religious group from the mainstream of the country.

This was preceded by the judgement of a lower court in Faizabad that authorised the unlocking of the disputed mosque at Ayodhya to enable the Hindus to offer worship to Lord Rama, an incarnation of Lord Vishnu. Rajiv Gandhi, to quote his estranged cousin Arun Nehru, had deliberately decided to play the Hindu card to offset the Muslim card he played in Shah Bano case. It was Rajiv’s decision, according to the grandson of Nandlal Nehru, to facilitate TV broadcast of Hindus worshipping at the Ayodhya mosque.

Some political observers have commented that Arun Nehru was responsible for the Ayodhya fiasco. There are documented reasons (secret IB documents) to believe that the corporate manager did commit the blunder based on shortsighted assessment of the communal relationship between the Hindus, Sikhs and the Muslims. He was attuned to marketing strategy of manufactured products and lived from day to day tally of the balance sheet. Statesmanship and national political strategy were not his forte. Rajiv had committed a big folly by depending on a faulted marketing strategy of his cousin.

The ‘communal atmosphere’ had come under severe strain. Around that time the state controlled TV had broadcast the serialised version of the Indian epics the Ra
maya
na and the Mahabharata. This had tremendous impact on the Hindu psyche and the country witnessed a spontaneous resurgence of Hindu sentiments. The actor who played the character of Rama had campaigned for V. P. Singh in Allahabad by-election. The actress who portrayed the role of Sita was known to be a BJP sympathiser.

The communal imbroglio was compounded by the severe outbreak of communal riot in Meerut in early 1987. Rajiv’s congress government in Uttar Pradesh performed precious little to quell the riots and the Hindu mobs and an allegedly partisan provincial armed constabulary killed about three hundred Muslims. Three Indias now harked at Rajiv Gandhi rather menacingly: the Hindu, Muslim and Sikh India. He did not know which way to go. His friend, the Director IB, had also failed to guide the confused and novice Prime Minister on correct lines. The latter preferred to swim with the PMH/PMO coterie. Rajiv’s political judgement and strategic grasp was virtually paralysed by the turn of the events.

Two other major errors of Rajiv had eroded his credibility as a national leader. He and his troubleshooters that included a few senior officers of the Intelligence Bureau and the Research and Analysis Wing of the Cabinet Secretariat (specially its SSB wing) propped up the Bodos against the Assamese on the demand of Bodoland, a separate state for Bodo-Kachari people living in Assam and West Bengal.

The same trouble-shooters plus a fortune hunter journalist (who later became a MP from Darjeeling) had stoked the fire of unrest amongst the discontented Gorkhas of Darjeeling. The IB station in Patna was used as the forward base for troubleshooting in Darjeeling, simply because the IB station in charge was once upon a time district superintendent of Darjeeling and a close associate of some of the Congress ministers (he was later appointed a governor by the BJP government). In fact, Patna and Banaras were used as proxy-hub for Gorkhaland operation.

Some of us tried to intervene and point out that both the Bodo and Gorkha fires were likely to spread an unmanageable bushfire. I knew Darjeeling pretty well, perhaps better than any of the IB trouble-shooters, especially the Director IB and the Patna station chief. I offered my services to contact and contain certain Gorkha personalities to canalise the agitation to the advantage of the strife torn nation. But Rajiv’s political aides, open market troubleshooters and intelligence abettors were in no mood to listen to sane advice.

The bounty of accords that Rajiv managed to reach had only helped in resurrecting two ethnic demons, which were later to spawn serious internal security threats. The Bodo machinations were left to the designs of another senior IB officer and the political gang headed by Hiteswar Saikia.

These developments etched in my mind a serious thought process. I concluded that Rajiv had closed all doors to saner advice and had surrounded himself by sycophants, who were more preoccupied with self-aggrandisement than serving the nation. Rajiv too, it appeared, was desperately trying to revive some of the Emergency day’s ghosts. After having wasted the goodwill of the people by continuously erring on vital decisions he had reached the very end of the precipice. The more he erred the more inflexible he became.

No other Prime Minister of India was dragged by nose by the Intelligence Bureau, before and after Rajiv Gandhi. It displayed his immaturity, dependence on a coterie and fatal trust on intelligence machinery. Incidentally, it should be mentioned that IB was responsible for decoding cipher messages of the LTTE. One Narasimhan was incharge of this operation. The messages of the LTTE could not be deciphered by him. M. K. Narayanan blindly trusted him. Some such messages contained clues of the LTTE plan for assassinating Rajiv Gandhi. The comical prologue of the story was: Narayanan was appointed as National Security Advisor by Sonia Gandhi and Narayanan rewarded Narasimhan by making him a Governor.

The state of desperation of the coterie of Rajiv Gandhi was better exemplified by an intimate incident that had rattled my family. I was not aware of the cartoon-drawing faculty of my elder son. A student of St Stephens he had drawn a few cartoons lampooning Rajiv Gandhi and got these published in
Indian Express
, supposedly anti-establishment news daily of the day.

Shubhabrata Bhattachariya, a seasoned journalist and a barnacle to the politicians in power, drew my attention to the budding genius at my home. Bhattachariya was not new in our life. I had known him since my days in the SIB Delhi as a professional friend and my wife had arranged his second marriage to a nice lady at a Karolbagh temple. He advised me to restrain my son. In spite of the fact that he had consumed a lot of salt from my hand and food cooked by my wife he presented the cartoons to an aide of the Prime Minister and recommended action against my son and me.

The same Bhattachariya had later volunteered to help out Rajiv Gandhi in the St. Kitts scandal, which tried to frame V. P. Singh and his son Ajeya. He and his wife were sent to St. Kitts on a presumed honeymoon, which was funded by an industrial house. The St. Kitts affair had exposed the most raw and inane nature of Rajiv Gandhi’s concept of playing political games. He proved only a shade different from his brother Sanjay. As far as Bhattachariya was concerned I drew comfort from the fact that such are the frivolities of compulsive taxis like Bhattachariya in the fourth estate! They can be hired at any point of time. He is not alone in that competitive field. One has to discover and either enjoy or suffer these taxi rides.