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BOOK
REVIEW
Spymaster's Pandora's
box
Open Secrets. India's
Intelligence Unveiled by M K
Dhar
Reviewed by Sreeram Chaulia
Released when intelligence agencies of
major global powers are facing flak for
incompetence and fabrication, Open Secrets
is the first attempt to break the taboo of
shielding the Indian intelligence fraternity under
a permanent veil. "As powerful a weapon as a
fusion bomb", (p 8) India's intelligence
infrastructure has been  weaponized by the
governing class to hit the governed. Like the
police, civil administration and judiciary, it has
been used as a handmaiden to suit petty political
ends and crush constitutional liberties. Dhar, an
operative in India's Intelligence Bureau (IB) for
three decades, has a muckraking tale to tell.
Since Indira Gandhi's time in the 1960s,
the IB director has answered solely to the prime
minister and home minister. The refusal of
political masters to allow induction of expert
staff from lateral fields has perpetuated a
servile "police culture" in the bureau. "An
average IB officer is not oriented with the
techniques of war pursued by mujahideen and
fidayeen fanatics." (p13) Non-productive human
assets clutter the bureau. Lack of in-service
checks fosters a "breeding ground for Goerings and
Himmlers in the backyard of constitutional
democracy". (p 18)
No meaningful
cooperation between state and central intelligence
entities exists, especially when different
political parties rule at the center and in the
states. Coordination among the three prime central
agencies, IB, RAW (Research and Analysis Wing) and
CBI (Central Bureau of Investigation), is
non-existent. The Kargil and Surankote
intelligence failures are two glaring
illustrations of a divided house of Indian spook
(see Kashmir's snake in the
grass June 7, 2003).
Dhar gives
a clarion call for freeing intelligence
organizations from the machinations of the
executive. Legislation to make the agencies
accountable to parliamentary committees is a
crying necessity. Election prospecting, verifying
credentials of ruling party candidates,
researching the weaknesses of opposition
candidates, toppling and interfering with elected
governments and other dirty operations victimizing
the innocent are shameful tasks assigned to
agencies that should be protecting national
security.
As a budding officer of the
Indian Police Service in 1965, Dhar learned the
nitty-gritty of grassroots intelligence collection
in Darjeeling, Siliguri and Naksalbari (northern
Bengal). His unusual techniques of raising human
assets were encouraged with subventions from the
police Secret Service Fund. Meetings with Charu
Majumdar and Jangal Santhal, forefathers of
India's extreme Maoist movement, convinced Dhar
that violent agrarian revolution was not far off.
However, politicians from Calcutta (now Kolkata)
and Delhi showed no intentions of addressing the
economic woes of the rural populace. "Indian
rulers blindly follow the firefighting ideology in
dealing with great social and economic fault
lines." (p 71)
In 1968, as a bolt from the
blue, Dhar was advised to join the IB in Delhi.
The intelligence technocrats he met there were
"cast iron cookies" who swore by regimentation and
loyalty. The abject submissiveness of officers
robbed them of initiative and measured aggression.
The IB reeked of factionalism, corruption and
nepotism. Trainers treated the ruling Congress
Party as Caesar's wife in the political analysis
classes. They totally neglected "economic
intelligence" and its relevance to unrest in
society. Coastal security was unheard of as a
concept. The curricula had a myopic strategic view
and general officers were anomalously segregated
from technical officers.
Posted to Manipur
after training, Dhar was released "into troubled
water like a scared fry". (p 95) Battered by
Naga-Mizo rebellions and Meitei agitation for
statehood, Manipur was in coma. Dhar raised very
sensitive human assets and gained access to inner
cores of the Imphal valley. Wanting political and
bureaucratic support to survive, he cultivated
assets inside the Manipur administration. His
reports that Meitei ultras were being taken to
Sylhet in East Pakistan for military training were
treated as overreactions by the IB headquarters.
"They thought that a greenhorn with only about
four years experience was trying to act smart." (p
107)
On prime minister Indira Gandhi's
visit to the region in 1969, Dhar's "humint"
(human intelligence) inputs on armed disturbances
saved the day and exposed the pathetic state of
VIP security arrangements. His top-secret
negotiations with insurgents succeeded in the
conclusive eradication of Mizo militancy from
Manipur in 1970. Stalking Naga gangs from hilltop
to hilltop on their way to and from East Pakistan
was not the only kind of action Dhar took. In
1972, Gandhi's point persons asked him to topple
the Manipur state government. It was the first of
many instances of "bleeding in silence at the rape
of my conscience". (p 148)
Transferred to
neighboring Nagaland when underground armies were
escalating jungle warfare with Chinese support,
Dhar thwarted and neutralized several militant
posses. Since Nagas value the family as an
institution, his strategy of involving family in
work paid dividends. His personal friendships with
key rebel leaders such as K Yallay, Z Ramyo and B
M Keyho aided the Indian government's peace talks
in 1974-75. His second tryst with unlawful acts
came when Delhi called on him to subvert the
loyalty of a section of Nagaland's elected
legislature.
In 1975, Dhar was moved to
the just-annexed state of Sikkim. He became the
first Indian official to fraternize with the
deposed king (Chogyal) and bring his sulking
loyalists into the mainstream. To observe Chinese
posts along the disputed border, he won over
numerous transborder agents who made forays deep
into Tibet. During Gandhi's emergency (a sort of
martial rule declared in 1975), he was asked to
frame the Chogyal and persuade local politicians
to back the bullying Sanjay Gandhi, Indira's
younger son. In 1977, the Janata Party government
ordered Dhar to perform a converse action of
political prostitution. Such immoral compulsions
drove him into mental depression.
In 1979,
Dhar was brought back to Delhi to head the IB's
"Election Cell". Prime minister Charan Singh
ordered him to assess "what was required in each
constituency to influence the electorate". (p 233)
When Gandhi rode back to power, she asked him to
assist the Puri Committee, a tool of political
vendetta, to blacken the faces of her opponents.
In 1980, Dhar was placed at the USSR
counter-intelligence desk of the IB. He identified
four central ministers, more than two dozen
ministers of parliament, and layers of the armed
forces to be on the payrolls of the KGB. His
penchant for digging out skeletons forced a
hurried shift to the subsidiary bureau in Delhi,
practically the "special branch of the Prime
Minister's Office". (p 252) From the perch, he
espied the astonishing influence of Indian
Rasputins like Dhirendra Brahmachari, "Mamaji" and
Chandraswami. Indian industry bigwig, Dhirubhai
Ambani, and other wheeler-dealers approached him
for illegal favors.
After Sanjay Gandhi's
death, Dhar was commissioned to shadow his widow
Maneka and her associates. He was even asked to
record the conversation of home minister Zail
Singh with a Sikh militant on Indira Gandhi's
instructions. The Prime Minister's Office (PMO)
pressed him to sabotage Devi Lal's Haryana state
government. The entire field machinery of the
Delhi IB was mobilized to help the Congress Party
win the Delhi municipal elections in 1983. In
conspiracy and thuggery, "there was hardly any
difference between the durbars [holders of
high political position] of Jahangir and the
viceroys and those of Morarji Desai and Indira
Gandhi". (p 284)
Dhar was next posted to
the Indian mission in Canada with the brief of
penetrating the transcontinental Khalistan
separatist network. The RAW representatives in
Ottawa resented his presence and raked up a turf
battle. Dhar accessed extremist Sikh Gurdwaras and
sections of the vocal Sikh community. Diplomatic
assets ferreted out useful information on
Pakistan's Inter Services Intelligence (ISI) links
with Sikh secessionists. Dhar 's uncorroborated
information about a terrorist attack involving an
Indian aircraft was not taken seriously by
Canadian authorities, leading to the Air India
Kanishka bombing in 1985.
Returning home
in 1987, Dhar joined the Punjab cell of the IB. He
vehemently opposed the government policy of
"filling up the follies of fault lines with dead
bodies". (p 320) Unlike his colleagues, Dhar's
operations avoided mindless killings of civilians.
He drove wedges between feuding Sikh terrorist
leaders and outfits and facilitated two secret
peace initiatives of prime minister Rajiv Gandhi.
Home minister Buta Singh's own underground group
spoilt one demarche. Singh, the Punjab governor,
state police and a jealous section of IB officers
stonewalled the second plan. One IB faction
opposed to Dhar leaked out the identity of a
valuable asset and sacrificed him to the bullets
of a Khalistani hit squad. Be it Punjab or Nepal,
"agent safety was not a part of IB's professional
ethics". (p 491)
Promoted to the Pakistan
Counter-Intelligence Unit (PCIU) in 1988, Dhar
launched transborder agents to penetrate Pakistani
posts on the Punjab and Rajasthan borders. Rajiv
Gandhi's lackey, Mani Shankar Aiyar (presently a
central minister), instigated a crude incident of
arresting a Pakistani "cover diplomat" against the
counsel of Dhar. The prime minister's
troubleshooters and some of their IB acolytes
naively propped up the Bodoland and Gorkhaland
agitations in Assam and Bengal.
At PCIU,
Dhar discovered that Mulayam Singh Yadav (later
defense minister) was in clandestine contact with
the ISI. Sincere IB efforts to nab mujahideen and
Pakistani agents were frustrated by key Indian
politicians in Delhi, Bihar and Bengal.
Undeterred, Dhar helped the IB regain a toehold in
the Kashmir Valley and penetrated some jihadi
training camps in Pakistan.
In 1989, Dhar
aided the Assam operations of the IB. The
collaboration of politicians and bureaucrats had
whetted sub-nationalist aspirations in Assam.
After creating Frankensteins, the state government
was incapable of planned military action against
the ULFA (United Liberation Front of Assam).
Infected layers within the Assamese regime
divulged advance information about Indian army
plans and allowed insurgents to cross over into
friendly Bangladesh. Fat amounts from the Secret
Service Fund of the IB for "missions" in Assam
were never utilized for the putative purpose.
In 1991, Dhar was posted a chief of the
IB's secret technical wing. Groupism and
favoritism ruled in this "breeding ground of
inefficiency". (p 423) Policing mentality occluded
opening the doors of intelligence to scientific
specialists. The abject condition of Indian
intelligence's cipher breaking cost the life of
Rajiv Gandhi. Ministry mandarins and greasy alley
manipulators defeated Dhar's reform proposals.
Apart from diplomatic constraints on aggressive
intelligence collection, he was enjoined by
diehard Gandhi family hangers-on to record exotic
audio and videotapes about a romantic liaison of P
V Narasimha Rao, just before his confirmation as
prime minister in 1992.
Back at PCIU, Dhar
busted many ISI networks across India and tapped
"fountain organizations" that hovered over the
peripheries of Islamist outfits. Frustrated by red
tape, he took unapproved measures to raise
"talents" inside Nepal and Bangladesh for mapping
ISI fields. Certain "special projects" penetrated
targets in Karachi, Islamabad, Lahore and
Peshawar.
In November 1992, prime minister
Rao ordered Dhar to arrange a discreet meeting
with the supremo of the RSS (Rashtriya Swayamsevak
Sangh), the fountainhead of Hindutva. The wily
Congressman actually had "old linkages with the
Sangh as a student". (p 466) Reminded that the
stability of Rao's job depended on subordination,
the PMO tried to force Dhar to "cooperate" with
the Ambanis by implicating their corporate rivals.
Dhar's final struggle was against the
erroneous persecution of fellow IB officers who
honestly investigated the infamous ISRO (Indian
Space Research Organization) espionage case of
1994. Mention of the prime minister's son as a
suspect rushed Rao to prevail upon the Kerala
state government and the CBI director to "go slow"
and bury the trail. The accused were exonerated
without due process. Indian rocket/missile
security was compromised. Dhar's efforts after
retirement to get the case reopened invited death
threats and assassination attempts.
Open Secrets is a depressing hidden
camera fixed on the systemic failures of Indian
polity and intelligence. It illuminates the
weaknesses of India's national security setup and
exhorts urgent patchwork.
Open Secrets.
India's Intelligence Unveiled by M K Dhar.
Manas Publications, New Delhi, 2005. ISBN:
81-7049-240-8. Price: US$11.50, 552 pages.
(Copyright 2005 Asia Times Online Ltd. All
rights reserved. Please contact us for information
on sales, syndication and republishing.) |
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