Open Secrets: The Explosive Memoirs of an Indian Intelligence Officer (6 page)

“I know.” I nodded peevishly.

“The
Dusserah
has come and gone. Now Christmas and the New Year are approaching. The labourers have no grain to eat and no clothes and fuel to save them from the winter.”

“I understand.”

“I know you want to arrest me. You’re welcome. But before you put the manacles you’ve to kill a couple of workers and I can assure you that all the Darjeeling and Duars (foothills) tea gardens will go on indefinite strike. What do you want?”

“I am not the one who takes decision. But I assure you that I’ll speak to my SP. Till than you hold on.”

“Hold on to what?”

“Status quo.”

“Can you offer anything better?”

“As of now, no. It is better that you too think over the best alternative. I don’t think you’d like to give an indefinite strike call just before the festive season and the New Year.”

“When do I hear from you?”

“I think 10a.m. should be a reasonable time.”

“
Ramro
(beautiful). But work out a solution.”

“One thing,” I asked the Gorkha leader, “Who told you about my stay in this rest house?”

“You have your ways and we have our intelligence.”

Deo Prakash and his friends walked out and the engine sound of their Land Rover told me that they were going downhill, towards Pankhabari.

Ratikanto alias Rat Basu was a weasel of a slippery customer. After a strenuous effort I could limit his hospitality to a cup of tea, which was accompanied by mountains of cakes and sweets from the Flurry’s of Darjeeling.

Haren nudged closer and whispered.

“Deo Prakash is camping at Sataibari. My men are following him. I’m in radio touch with them. Let’s go and pick him up.”

“You better talk to the SP. I think the orders have changed.”

“But the Commissioner spoke to me only ten minutes back.”

“You’re subordinate to the SP. Better take the orders from him.”

I turned back to Rat Basu, who by that time, had started explaining his genealogy tracing back his direct lineage to the family of Netaji Subhash Chandra Bose, the illustrious freedom fighter.

I didn’t have the heart to tell him that live or dead, the Netaji would have banished Rat from his clan for his proximity to the white sahibs and now to the fat
marwaris
, who had done more to fatten their pockets and very little to serve the people of the country. One of their illustrious ancestors had sold Bengal and India to Robert Clive, the British clerk turned a General and a plunderer. The white sahib looted the dough and transferred to England and the fat
marwari
usually transferred his money to the new industrial hub centres in Mumbai and Delhi and built marble
havelis
(palaces) in the Rajasthan deserts.

Haren Banerjee turned back from the phone with a pale face and faced me with a rather doubtful look.

“Should we go out and make the police arrangements?”

I asked him.

“Yes sir.”

Haren followed meekly.

“Aren’t you arresting Deo Prakash? He’s at Sataibari.”

“That’s not my orders Mr. Basu,” I replied gingerly, “My orders are to make adequate arrangement for the protection of the estate properties and lives of the management staff. That’s what I am going to do.”

“But the SP told me otherwise.”

“I’ve received my orders and I’m going ahead with that.”

“I will call the deputy commissioner and the divisional commissioner.”

“You’re welcome Mr. Basu.”

The main approach road to the Pankhabari tea garden had branched off from the Kurseong-Matigara-Siliguri gravel road. It reduced the distance between Darjeeling and Siliguri almost by about nine kilometres.

I positioned a posse of one junior commissioned officer (JCO) and three constables at the factory gate and four lathi-armed constables for the personal security of the management staff under the supervision of the officer in charge of Kurseong police station. Aita Bahdur Rana, the supple and fat Nepali sub-inspector, grinned mightily and conveyed in broken Bengali, for my benefit, I presume, that I had taken the correct action. Tension was building up in almost all the hill tea estates-Sonada, Bijan Bari, Lopchu, Mokaibari, Simana, Panighata, and Happy Valley. The tribal Santhal, Oraon and Munda labours had joined the Nepali labourers. In addition, he shared another piece of intelligence, the stalwarts of the Gorkha language and separate Gorkha province agitation were honing up their weapons. They would welcome a general strike in the tea gardens to press their demands. A mere localised labour unrest would have become a political issue.

I thanked Rana and left for Darjeeling with mixed apprehensions. In my first outing I had taken a stand against the mighty deputy commissioner and the divisional commissioner, who, many told me, was a legend by his own right. Mr. Ivan Surita, an honoured Anglo-Indian, had drifted to the Indian Administrative Service (IAS) through short service commission in the Royal Indian Army. The deputy commissioner, another IAS, was an unknown commodity to me.

That evening I was summoned to the control room of the SP. Maity advised me to put on the best-starched uniform and the best-polished boot.

“Anything wrong, Maity?”

“Why worry? Haven’t you appeared before the Orderly Room earlier?”

He reminded me of the system in which an errant officer was required to appear before his superior to receive his punishment.

“No, Maity. What’s the matter?”

“Don’t lose heart. Have a cigarette and keep faith in your god.”

Maity dismissed me and I rushed to my quarters for a change of uniform and boot.

It wasn’t an Orderly Room. There was no officer to present me before the boss. I was gently ushered in and was asked to take a seat by none other than the legend himself, Ivan Surita, the commissioner of Jalpaiguri division.

“So you are Dhar?”

“Yes sir.”

“What was your logic behind defying my orders? Why didn’t you arrest Rai?”

“Sir,” I started nervously, “I’ve been taught to take orders from my commander, the SP. I had done that. And if you’ve time I can explain my logic.”

Ivan lighted a cigarette as a glint of smile went past his face.

He heard me patiently, including my freshly gathered intelligence from Aita Bahadur Rana. Finally I conveyed that the arrest of Deo Prakash would have cost the state government tremendously. The Gorkha movement was almost at its peak and the government in Calcutta too wasn’t really very steady. On top of it the just concluded war in the Kashmir had left the country in a situation of flux. Would it be prudent to offer a new front to the Gorkhas just for satisfying Rat Basu?

“Well, well! Where from you picked up that kind of worldview? I’m mighty impressed. Have a drink with me.”

Surita poured a stiff whisky for him and a small one for me. In his characteristic gracious manner he spoke rather loudly.

“Thanks. Keep it up.”

We shared the drinks, and at the end of the day the SP called me to his room, told me that I would be attached to the office of the sub-divisional police officer (SDPO) Siliguri for practical training and for my police station training I would have to spend eight weeks at Naksalbari. I accepted the order stoically. It wasn’t a punishment I knew. The orders of the SP had given me the opportunity to make myself a part of the history in the making in the jungles of Naksalbari. It offered me an opportunity in meeting the owners of the eyes again, which had made a permanent place in my mind.

I was fortunate to be a part those historic times, perhaps the last days of the innocent times and beginning of the cruellest of times that besieged India soon after the 1965 Kashmir war and subsequent change in leadership both in Delhi and Calcutta.

The Congress government was highly discredited and the party apparatchiks had lost touch with the reality. The Communist Party of India, now divided into two factions, had sharpened up their electoral strategies and had almost paralysed the state through industrial and service-sector strikes. Lawlessness had replaced the calm and civilised social and security ambience. In fact, in Bengal, the political parties had already initiated the process of surrendering the constitutional process to the muscle of the underworld and the barrel of the gun.

The Hindutwa movement and its political front, the Jan Sangh, were yet to take root amongst the Bengalis. The Bengalis from East Pakistan suspected both the Congress and the Hindu political outfit as they had failed to protect their interests. The Communists had started exploiting their helplessness. The society was nakedly divided. Taking advantage of the tottering political hold of the Congress and change of guard in Delhi the much-neglected social and economic reforms had started rushing at devastating speed against the existing value system. Clashes and changes were in the air. The domestic changes were being intricately linked up with the global changes.

THE FIRST TEST OF WATER

The fool, with all his other faults, has this also: he is always getting ready to live.

Epicurus

December 6, 1965.

My attachment to the office of the SDPO Siliguri was an invigorating experience. Deepak Ghosh, the young sub-divisional police officer, wasn’t a wizard in police work, crime investigation and prevention. The police force, as I saw it from a little distance, was not equipped to fight crime. The police stations were located either in rented and dilapidated government buildings, the officers and men were far fewer than required by the graph of crime. They were devoid of mobility. Some police stations did not even have a single jeep. The concept of police patrolling in the crime prone areas had become redundant.

By 1965, Siliguri had become a hub of political and criminal activities, besides being the main artery between mainland India and the Northeastern states. Criminal gangs from neighbouring Bihar, Nepal, Bhutan and East Pakistan operated with impunity in the narrow land link euphemistically called the chicken neck. They operated freely in tea estate areas, plundering, maiming and assassinating the affluent tea estate managers and lumber traders. Some of the illegal lumber traders were in cahoots with the interstate criminals. On top of it the smuggling routes between India and Nepal flourished with the connivance of the corrupt politicians, police and revenue officials.

Siliguri and its neighbourhood had assumed strategic importance after the fatal war with China in 1962. The just concluded war with Pakistan had enlivened the area with increased military presence. The Baghdogra airport had become operational as a fully-fledged Air Force base. The nearby hamlets around Binnaguri hummed with activities, where the military engineers and the Border Roads were busy in setting up the infrastructure of the Corps headquarters.

In addition to strategic military concerns a strong pro-China Left Communist movement was raising its head amongst the landless masses and the deprived tea estate workers. Charu Majumdar and his able lieutenant Kanu Sanyal spearheaded the movement. They had found an able ally in Jangal Santhal, a tea garden labourer. The Charu group had broken away from the parent Communist Party after the formal 1964 split between the Moscow and the Chinese camp followers that had divided the Communist monolith into CPI and the CPI (M); M representing the name tag Marxist, more Marxist than an ideological follower of poor Marx.

The Siliguri police chief Deepak managed to float above the troubled waters. My overtures to him to discuss the political, criminal and the security scenario did not evoke much response. He was a typical and good policeman. He followed his orders meticulously and did not lose his sleep over the thunderclouds that had started gathering around him. Both he and his wife were very nice to me and more often than not I was their houseguest. I must thank the couple for arranging my pre-marriage meetings with Sunanda, the daughter of the mighty DIG, who had by then consented to be a part of my dream.

I accompanied Deepak to almost all the heinous crime scenes and learnt the essentials of forensic techniques and the intricate details of writing case diary, manipulation of general diaries and meticulous investigation process. The other trick that he taught was the methodical inspection of police station. Deepak was not a genius but he had in him the ingredients of an incisive investigator. He taught me the benefits of patience and examining a given clue over and over again. Repeat analysis and examination, he emphasised always resulted in better understanding of any situation.

But he did not like my dual approach to any given problem and issue. He never agreed with me that a given situation should be immersed in the concoction of conflicting ideas with a view to arriving at a perfect solution. There were no quarrelling squirrels inside his mind. He strictly followed the Police Regulation Bengal (PRB), the Vedas for the Bengal police officers. He never did anything beyond the Indian Penal Code, Criminal Procedure Code, Indian Evidence Act, Police Act, and the Police Regulation Bengal. The only time he ignored the dictates of the books when he was asked to do so by his immediate superior. I appreciated the disciplined policeman in him, though I did not like the absence of human touch, the subtle touch of conscience.

*

Naksalbari was a sleepy town on the borders of Bihar and Nepal. With its sprawling tea gardens, rice producing alluvial land and rich forest resources Naksalbari was strategically important. Tentulia in East Pakistan wasn’t far away from the centre of Naksalbari market. Nevertheless, common border with Nepal added more vulnerability to it.

A queer mixture of people inhabited the area. The majority of the tea garden labourers were Santhal, Oraon, Munda and Ho with liberal sprinkling of Nepalis. The upper caste Bengalis were
jotedars
(landed gentry), forest contractors or traders. The lower caste Bengalis mostly tilled the lands of the
jotedars
and tea estate lands on
barga
(crop sharing) system. The Bengali migrants from East Pakistan overwhelmed the original inhabitants, the Coch, Mech, Bodo, Toto and Rajbangshi population. Economically they were the worst hit. Suffering from political and economic neglect the original inhabitants, the sons of the soil, they had nowhere to go. Much later these people were infected by the ambience of insurgency in Assam and had started championing the cause of Kamtapuri, a separate homeland for the aboriginals of the region. By 1995, Kampatapuri movement had drawn the attention of the Inter Services Intelligence of Pakistan and the Directorate of Forces Intelligence of Bangladesh.

Even in 1965, a huge floating population from Bihar, Uttar Pradesh, Punjab, and Rajasthan had started spreading their economic tentacles in the area taking advantage of political and economic neglect by the Bengali ‘bhadralok’ politicians of Calcutta. It was palpably clear that a vital part of Bengal was very fast losing its Bengali and aboriginal characters.

The Bengali refugees from East Pakistan had no fixed vocation. They grabbed anything they could. The Biharis were mainly related to the legal and illegal exploitation of the forest resources, smuggling between India and Nepal and some of them had started taking up military contracts at Baghdogra, Siliguri and Binnaguri. The Punjabi population was entrenched in the transport sector.

The aboriginals of the land were nowhere in the economic and political map of the area. They were mostly landless and jobless. A few families tended cowherds, goats, and sheep. But they were always open to the risk of cattle theft by the Pakistani and Indian gangsters. Naksalbari was a goldmine to some and pit-full of misery for the most.

The other Bengal, the southern and western part of the Indian Bengal that thrived around the accidentally grown city of Calcutta (Kolkata) and its industrial hubs didn’t bother to wreck their heads for the northern part of the state. In fact Calcutta had hardly bothered about the rural and peripherally urban Bengal, which was not blessed by the urban riches and the urbane culture of the hangers on of the empire and the neo-rulers.

The new inheritors had failed to pick up the signals that ‘sonar Bangla’, the golden Bengal had started withering away. Its industry and commerce had started gravitating to the greener pastures, its agriculture floundered for the lack of adequate infrastructure and by 1965, it had lost the political shine. The new political masters in Delhi had focussed their priorities on other horizons.

In short, the northern part of Indian Bengal had plunged into deep political, economic and cultural crisis. Siliguri was fast turning into a city of opportunist hounds, which had started descending on the virgin tract with hungry colonial motives. Only a few British companies managed to survive the onslaught of the
Marwari
traders in the tea sector. The Darjeeling-Siliguri-Jalpaiguri duars, like Assam, were the most lucrative tea producing centres. But the revenue from tea and forest industry wasn’t ploughed back to the region.

The economic chaos had started breeding a new ideological warfare. But Delhi and Calcutta preferred to believe that administrative fire fighting could extinguish all fires, including the ideological fire and the fire burning in the stomachs of starving masses.

*

That was the
summum bonum
of the briefing I received from Shailen Mukherjee, the officer-in-charge of Naksalbari police station. A well meaning person and an indifferent police officer, he believed like most other police officers that his sacred duty would be well performed if he could register lesser number of reported cases and swept most of the dirty mess under the green grassy carpets of the wild fields of Naksalbari.

I did not go by his briefing. But I must say that Mukherjee and his deputy Netai Pal had taught me well the nitty-gritty of running a police station, crime prevention and grass-roots level intelligence collection.

I realised much later, after I spent about a decade in the Intelligence Bureau, that police stations are the most important fountainheads of intelligence. The elaborate system of rural
chowkidars, dafadars
(village level security/revenue functionaries), village headmen, village teachers, postman and a few village level health workers and preachers could work out wonders for an alert intelligence boss in the district headquarter.

A discerning police officer invariably devoted some time with them to find out facts and trends in remote villages. On top of it these village functionaries invariably reported to the SHO all-important developments and developing situations in their respective areas. The weekly ‘hat days’ (flea markets) were used by the police station in charges to gather information about the interior areas. These were regularly despatched to the sub-divisional police officer (SDPO) and the SP. The district intelligence officers turned this information into intelligence pieces. The monthly report of the SP to the Inspector General of Police and occasional special reports kept the state government in regular touch with the remotest and tiniest villages in the state.

The Intelligence Bureau officers and agents of the government of India could never match the penetration and sweep of the police station functionaries. Unfortunately, in post independence India the emphasis had changed. The police stations had degenerated into mere administrative decors, which detected lesser number of crimes, prevented much lesser and functioned more as the wish tree of the politicians and police and civil bureaucrats. The fear for the police station, I felt, had increased much more than it was during the independence movement. The police are now more identified with the political vested interests and mafia than they were in the colonial regime.

My short tenure in Naksalbari gave an opportunity to renew the contact with Jagadananda Roy, the revolutionary turned teacher, whom I had chanced to meet in the crammed train compartment. I must admit that Jagadananda Roy, the headmaster of a Naksalbari school, had helped considerably in shaping my views on the socio-economic problems of the area. An old revolutionary, he had led several struggles against the British in the remote areas of Midnapore, Birbhum and Bankura districts. A gold medallist in English from Calcutta University, Roy had spent 13 years behind the British prison bars. He was wooed by the Indian National Congress to join the state legislature. Jagadananda preferred to take up the job at Naksalbari against protestations of his well wishers. A chronic bachelor, he lived alone in a decent hut behind Naksalbari’s only cinema hall, Neelam.

I spent some of my spare time listening to his narrations on the rural economic scene and the mindless mistakes committed by the new political masters by endowing demonic affluence to the big cities. India’s soul lived in the villages. Neglect of the rural economy, he felt, would increase the gap between the rich and the poor. India would soon be exposed to massive social explosions. Jagadananda fascinated me. He was an illustrious soldier of the independence struggle and had chosen the path of violent non-Gandhian methods to reach his goal.

I understood his concerns. I had my ears close to the ground and I could pick up some of the rumblings building up inside the labour shacks and deprecated villages. I had, in fact, started gathering some data from the employees of the junior land revenue office and the
chowkidars
and
dafadars
controlled by the Union Board, a kind of local self-government unit. The picture wasn’t encouraging. I shared some of the reports with my SP. He encouraged me with a sanction of Rupees 25, from his secret service fund. This kingly amount was sanctioned by the SP only to the officers of the intelligence branch. A rookie was not even supposed to know that the SP handled some such sacred and secret funds.

I avoided socialising with the tea garden managers and the forest contractors. Some of them queued up in the police station to invite the budding ASP. But I kept myself to the police station and often accompanied Mukherjee or Pal to the scenes of crime. I had to complete the quota of my independent investigation of at least two burglary cases, one case of homicide and a couple of cases under minor acts. I was supposed to maintain the General Diary of the police station and draft the First Information Reports (FIR) and write the Case Diaries of heinous crimes. I devoted the slotted time to my assigned duties. I hated to be rated as a fluke by my subordinates.

My spare time was spent between the pages of books that I managed to purchase from Siliguri’s ill equipped stores. In between my work and books I dreamt of Sunanda, whom I had pledged to marry. Nevertheless, I was in the midst of a fast approaching cyclone, the famous and infamous Naksalbari movement.