Open Secrets: The Explosive Memoirs of an Indian Intelligence Officer (48 page)

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I beg the indulgence of my readers, those who care to read, to allow me to have a little detour before I revert back to India’s uniquely crafted killing fields of Punjab.

I did not land in Delhi at the end of journey to disillusionment. But I was, nonetheless, disillusioned with the affairs of the nation. I adored Indira Gandhi in spite of her later day aberrations. The emergency excesses had left deep scars in me and as a politically conscious and oriented person I could have not have lived with it but for the buffoonery of the Janata Party leaders and their unconcern for the people of India. I despised the dynastic aspirations of Indira Gandhi and believed that she had done a great disservice to the nation by stymieing the political party she headed and by subverting the constitutional, legal and the bureaucratic system that were responsible to give the people assurances of stability. She and Sanjay had changed the political and administrative morality of the country for all time to come. They ushered in the most devastating negative revolution, as against the pioneering sacrifices of Gandhi, Nehru, Patel and Subhash that constituted the fulcrum of the positive revolution of twentieth century India.

Rajiv Gandhi, the first apolitical Prime Minister was no revolutionary and visionary. But it was expected that he would really guide India into the twenty-first century, about which he talked so loudly. No doubt he had opened up a couple of windows to the new brave world but he was the very person who had allowed the corporate world to infect the bones and marrows of the nation. If Sanjay was responsible for polluting the political system and allowing cohabitation of crime and politics beyond repair, it was Rajiv and his advisers who had opened up the nation’s conscience to the robbers and plunderers who passed by the name of corporate houses. The Reliance Empire did not have to look back since they succeeded in penetrating the political and bureaucratic scions of the nation. No niche of the Indian system was left untouched by the wizard of money and industry.

Gujarat has presented India with several mythological and historical heroes, including Lord Krishna, Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi, Sardar Ballabhbhai Patel and Dhirubhai Ambani. They had excelled in their own spheres of activities. Krishna had plotted the grand Mahabharata war, Gandhi had piloted the Indian independence, Patel had consolidated the gains of Indian independence and Dhirubhai Ambani had set the course of twisting and bending the Indian political and administrative system to offer India one of the biggest industrial houses. In their own way all four of them were unique, and so unique is a later day chief minister of Gujarat who engineered communal carnage only to win an election to the state legislature. Nevertheless, of all the illustrious sons of Gujarat I always rated Dhirubhai as the most important modern day Chanakya, who corrupted everybody by applying his unique technique of shredding human values, constitutional propriety, and legal concepts of administration in his unique marching machine.

Rajiv’s progress through the pilgrimages of scandal and error of judgement and alleged corruption had disappointed me. It was unbelievable that a man who dreamt of flying with the winds of the 21st century was suddenly grounded by snags, which often raised doubts that he himself was responsible for some of the aspects of the ‘reign of error’. A steeled country had decisively hit back against Sanjay’s ‘tughlaq shahi’. Indira was given another chance to perform a political penance by a wise nation. She did not. Rajiv too failed to put the country back into the air despite the fact that countrymen had given him unlimited flying fuel, a massive electoral mandate.

The country was catapulted back almost to the days when Jayaprakash Narayan had initiated his social revolution. This time around there was no JP. It was doubtful if a VP (V.P. Singh) could substitute him. Indira Congress was on the verge of another journey through the black hole. But there were no star clusters in the opposition that had started orbiting the new JP, the raja of Manda, V.P. Singh. Most of the hungry jackals were around to bite deep into the flesh and soul of the nation.

I had never known V.P. Singh. I still do not know him. I derived knowledge about the ingredients that went in the making of the man who was about to revolt against Rajiv Gandhi from a few acquaintances in the 4th estate including Prabhu Chawla. He was yet to take charge of the
Indian Express
. Rayan Karanjiwala, an advocate, and Bhurelal the indomitable bureaucrat with a Don Quixotic streak, had filled in some of the gaps. My clear-cut assessment was that VP was a fighter who did not know the terrain, enemy, allies and his own weapon holdings. He did not even have the philosophical commitment of JP. His eyes gave out an impression that he was not a steady person to lead a complex nation. But he was there to challenge the family party of Rajiv Gandhi and his quiver basically was filled with ‘
people’s aversion to another corrupt regime and another reign of error
’.

It was different from the reign of terror of Sanjay Gandhi. Rajiv had simply succumbed to the machinations of his corporate aides and allies and bad political managers. His friends in the intelligence fraternity tried to please him, instead of warning him about the distant roaring of thunder and tsunami. He lacked the grit of his father and the acumen of his mother. His vision was as deep as that of Jawaharlal, but his comprehension of the political and bureaucratic machineries was appallingly poor. I pitied the falling hero because I believed that given time and more opportunity, he could pilot India to the new age. I was, therefore, yet hesitant to applaud the new honest but politically naïve messiah.

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At this critical point of time my Benarasi RSS friend again contacted me. He wanted me to meet Lal Krishna Advani and Professor Rajinder Singh. I had been to the austere headquarters of the RSS at Keshav Kunj but not to attend
Shakhas
and to be indoctrinated by the Hindutwa pundits. My faith in Hindutwa is of a different kind. To me it means unity and equality in the Hindu society and building solid nationalist base amongst the Hindus. I believe that one can be a staunch Hindu without hating a non-Hindu fellow Indian. Hindutwa and Bharatiyatwa are not synonymous.

I declined to meet Advani as he was under human and technical surveillance of the Intelligence Bureau. As a towering opposition leader he could ignore the IB, the pliant agency that he commanded for six years. But I could not take the risk.

Interaction with the RSS friend convinced me that the Sangh Parivar was ready with a new blueprint of action. Its association with the JP movement, partnership in the Janata government and subsequent developments had convinced the ideologues that its temporary tryst with power had not succeeded in enlarging its vote bank and the BJP and the RSS cadres were disillusioned with the leadership. Power had eluded them not by the whiskers but by light years. The Indira Congress in 1980 parliamentary polls exploited this state of disarray when the BJP and RSS cadre sided with the disgraced party in several cluster of constituencies.

The BJP had no concretised an economic agenda and the RSS was still immersed in its archaic concept of regeneration of economy through Bronze Age tools. Its political philosophy was unable to weld with the concept of a secular India. Its leaders vaguely spoke about Akhand Bharat, cultural unity, security threat from Pakistan, unceasing flow of Bangladeshi nationals and corrupt practices of the ruling party. The slogan ‘
gali gali mein shor hai Rajiv Gandhi chor hai
’ (there is noise in the lanes that Rajiv Gandhi is a thief) is ascribed to a prominent RSS activist. But this arsenal was not good enough to trounce Rajiv Gandhi and march closer to the South Block.

V.P. Singh was an uneasy ally. He was not unwilling to derive support from the RSS and the BJP but was not ready to compromise on the basic concepts of the constitution. He was a committed secular leader with a penchant for clean administration. He was not exposed to the education that whiffs of power are more polluting than the fumes of fossil fuel. The messiah of honesty had chosen a wrong point of history to deliver his message of purity to the Indians. He had forgotten that between the original Gandhi and the latest imitation of Gandhi two more Gandhis had succeeded in changing the face of India for all time to come. The original Gandhi lying uneasy in the grave was perhaps squirming at the quixotic valour of his vain incarnation.

The strategy of the Sangh Parivar clearly hinged on arousing a decisive Hindu fervour and the ready target was the ‘Babri Masjid’ in Ayodhya, a historical city with mythological halo, where Lord Rama, an incarnation of Lord Vishnu, was born to Dasharatha and Kaushalya. The mechanism of the new campaign was worked out with meticulous care.

My RSS friend, after having enlightened me, requested for advice and help. I was too busy with my Punjab assignment but agreed to meet a dynamic man in his forties called K. N. Gobindachariya, a RSS ‘
pracharak
’ and Rajinder Sharma, another self-effacing stalwart of the Sangh Parivar. I was not averse to meet the RSS leaders. Though not a formal member of the
parivar
I was always attracted to the Hindu organisation out of the faith that only it could unify the fractured Hindu society by fighting against the social discriminations as old as the Vedas (
Purusha Sukta
etc).

By around 1987-88 my meetings with them revolved around dissection and analysis of the political scenario and sharing of ‘information’, which belonged to the realms of strategy of Indira Congress, informal survey and microanalysis of the potential vote banks. I had taught them the tricks of vote-bank accountancy by correlating caste with right social programme and economic policy. A little later, around the end of 1988, Uma Bharati, Ved Prakash Goel and his son Piyush visited me regularly. My home had become a hub of activities of the BJP and RSS activists.

My disillusionment with Rajiv Congress was not solely responsible for my tilt towards the BJP. I never ceased to be a political animal, despite the fact that I had joined a covenanted service. Politics was an ingredient of my H2O. As far as my political proclivities are concerned I often suffered from split personality. The proverbial squirrels never ceased fighting inside me. I had started with hating the Congress for reasons that were related to humiliation heaped upon my father, a revolutionary freedom fighter. The same hatred had pushed me nearer to the RSS and Jan Sangh and had made me hostile to the Muslims.

I was drawn to Indira Gandhi after I realised that she was the only dynamic leader around to pilot the country after some of the Janata leaders mocked the people’s mandate and looted the country like reincarnated gangs of thuggies. I had given her some ideas as to how to win over the disaffected and disillusioned RSS workers to congress fold for the limited purpose of electoral success.

I was, in fact, not pitching in for the BJP. My understanding was that V.P. Singh interlude would stretch for at least five years before the BJP could make a decisive bid for power. In the meantime my hands were full with the affairs of Punjab and the new ambience in the Intelligence Bureau.

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The Intelligence Bureau could by no stretch of imagination imitate the corporate work ethics and the ‘coterie culture’ of Rajiv Congress. It inherited and emulated a pyramidal structure with plenty of functional autonomy, may be anarchy, to the lower and tertiary building blocks. It has always been a queer admixture of police and intelligence ethos; often more police than intelligence. However, great transformations were taking place in this traditionally conservative organisation. Rajiv and his cousin Arun Nehru attended to some of the crying needs of the resource starved organisation. Some teeth were provided to the counter-intelligence wings. But its resource level continued to be far below that of the comparable world class intelligence organisations like the CIA, MI5, MI6 and the next-door ISI. Some cosmetic efforts were made to modernise the tools of technical intelligence production and to strengthen its ElInt capabilities. But these ended in cosmetic exercises, except visible accretion of some vehicles, alphanumeric pagers and a few Motorola VHF hand-held sets. The political breed was not yet ready to arm the IB with the sinews of real-life war against internal and external threats. I had often felt that they were not keen to see a real powerful organisation, more powerful than the ambitions and acrobatics of the political breed.

These cosmetic changes did not affect IB’s basic dependence on HumInt. M. K. Narayanan, the Director, had revived the aspects of ‘operational approach’ in dealing with the Punjab problem. This was not an innovation. This was successfully tried in the North East but had lapsed into disuse. This time around the ‘operations’ desks were separated from the analysis wings and were empowered to run conventional and unconventional operations to combat Pakistan sponsored militancy in Punjab.

He is credited with the revision of the training aspects and widening the vision of the technical wing of the Intelligence Bureau. Like the young Prime Minister Narayanan too bubbled with enthusiasm and welcomed constructive changes. But, some senior colleagues felt that he suffered from a couple of deficiencies.

His lower commands were still moored in the traditional bondages to old-fashioned intelligence collection and dissemination technologies. The cutting edge level continued to suffer from inadequate pay packet, stagnation and the age-old boorish tradition of abject submission to the hierarchical bosses. They were yet to be freed from police psychology and given new veneer to empower and enable them to operate at all conceivable levels of national and regional activities. Morale was deplorably low.

The most dramatic deficiency arose from the personal transformation of M.K. Narayanan. A simple, open minded, work-alcoholic and intellectually sharp Narayanan was trapped by the corporate culture around the Prime Minister. He added on to his personality some borrowed flashes from some of the coterie members of Rajiv.