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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.
India’s soul lived in the villages.
Delhi is a melting pot. We in the IB are not sure about the attitude of the Prime Minister. She is visiting the North East next month.
An Indian traveller, alone or with a lady companion was more secure in the highly disturbed Naga areas than he was in the streets of Calcutta.
The most important occasion was the proposed visit of Indira Gandhi to Imphal on September 23, 1969.
The cadre of the Hindutwa protagonist Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh and charismatic socialist leaders like George Fernandez joined him. The IB rated him as a foreign spy, because of his linkages with the Socialist International and several surveillance measures were adopted to keep a tag on his activities. The government responded by harshly implementing the Maintenance of Internal of Security Act (MISA).
I sure was. Therefore, I carried out the exercise and I believe Indira Gandhi later changed her minister.
It is often alleged that this commoner turned queen American was a CIA plant.
She retaliated by superseding three senior judges and appointing her man of choice, Justice A. N. Ray as the Chief Justice of the apex court.
In any case it boosted up Indira’s domestic image slightly and she managed to take complete control of the Congress organisation and install her staunch follower Fakhruddin Ali Ahmed as the President of India.
that Indira and Sanjay were using the Intelligence Bureau and the R&AW to fabricate reports against the opposition leaders.
I did not know that I had risked my job and neck that night by standing up to the greatest bully of Indian public life.
Some arguments have been offered that the political managers and hammer smiths in Delhi did not want to commit the mistakes of granting special status to Sikkim and than chipping at those provisions on the sly, like they did in Kashmir.
Indira was a highly superstitious lady and I witnessed her strange habit of believing in omens. It was easy to exploit her susceptibilities that had arisen out of her personal suffering and those of her mother and her final journey to disillusionment with Firoze Gandhi.
My painstaking research and intelligence penetration had succeeded in identifying over four Union ministers and over two dozen members of the Parliament who were in the payrolls of the KGB operatives.
The most interesting case was that of a member of parliament, who regularly received a pay packet from the Soviet embassy for covering certain segments of the kitchen cabinet of Indira Gandhi.
The new acquaintance was Dhirubhai Hirubhai Ambani. The circumstances in which we met did not leave a good taste. But I had rediscovered this man more meaningfully in early 1993.
As I was saying, a parallel powerhouse was coming up at the Akbar Road annexe. For a short while Jagdish Tytlar presided over the nascent coterie. Kamal Nath often overshadowed him.
Indira was, in fact, surrounded by the brawny elements loyal to Sanjay and putative politicians who had very little expertise in running the affairs of a complicated country, especially in the concluding decades of the 20th century.
The other person who was perceived to have nudged closer to Indira was Dhirendra Brahmachari. His closeness to Indira has been profusely commented upon by many, some based on ill information and some out of malice. Indira was a vibrant human being. She had chosen her love and married him, though it wasn’t a roaring success.
“Have you heard of Chandra Swamiji?” “No.” “He is a great tantrik. He can perform miracles. Arrange his meeting with Indiraji.”
lowered their voices to inaudible decibels when Maneka’s father’s dead body was found in a rural Delhi field with a cryptic note and a pistol by its side. He had presumably committed suicide.
Conspiracy
Maneka, my naughty friend expressed, had access to vital clues to some of the ill gotten wealth of Sanjay. Huge amounts, he claimed, were stashed away abroad about which Indira had no clue.
But the unkindest cut of all was the alleged decision of Maneka to circulate ‘SHE’, the censored chapter of the autobiography of M. O. Mathai. This document was reportedly in possession of Sanjay even before the emergency. But he had no intention of using it overtly to discredit his mother. But he had made it known to Indira that he possessed the vital weapon. It has never been possible to confirm these reports beyond any tinge of doubt.
The enquiry had cost me my friendship with my colleagues and Bikram continued with the tirade long after Indira was assassinated. He had later joined Mamata Banerjee and was returned to the Parliament.
But the most important innovation involved a top leader of the Communist Party of India (Marxist). He was a very conscious person and in active touch with a Delhi based USSR intelligence
But I had managed to plant a micro tape recorder on one of the close associates of Labh Singh Rode, the ISYF chief, and get some of connectivity between the Sikh militant outfits in Ottawa and Toronto based Inter Services Intelligence (ISI) operatives of Pakistan. The Government of India had later shared some of these evidences with the Canadian authorities and Labh Singh was forced to leave Canada and seek refuge with his ISI mentors in Lahore.
His involvement with experimentations with IED in rural localities in British Columbia had drawn attention of the RCMP sleuths. His masterstroke was to plan the downing of AI Boeing 747 Kanishka on June 23, 1985, and bomb explosions at Narita airport in Japan.
Arun Nehru, Rajiv’s crooked cousin, V. C. Shukla and powerful lobbies that ranged from industrial houses to thirsty and hungry politicians, ably assisted him. In fact, certain accounts attributed a plotted coup by the Reliance Industry of Dhirubhai Ambani to replace Rajiv by Arun Nehru. They were indeed close during the days of bonhomie when Arun collected funds for Rajiv’s political campaign. Dhirubhai was known to be a kind financier behind many a successful politician in India.
Nusli Wadia, a grandson of Muhammad Ali Jinnah, on the other hand depended only on a few ‘crusaders’, Ramnath Goenka, Arun Shourie and S. Gurumurthy, all connected to the Indian Express group and the Hindutwa party, the RSS and its ‘Parivar’ (family) members.
By 1986 Dhirubhai Ambani was in a position to influence the Indian establishment machinery in an unprecedented way. He had gained foothold inside Indira administration through political bureaucrats like Pranab Mukherjee and a number of obliging professional bureaucrats headed by Nitish Sengupta and N.K. Singh.
The first scandal to explode was the Fairfax affairs. The US based detective company was allegedly hired by V.P. Singh to investigate a number of Indian industrialists and important personalities like Amitabh Bacchan and his brother Ajitabh.
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.
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.
A section in the Operations Cell of the IB too adopted a hostile attitude. Mr. A. K. Doval headed that group. He was more inclined towards killing the terrorists than advancing the peace process. In the process, several Punjab observers alleged Doval collected ransom money and money for sparing lives of the villagers. It was not difficult to fathom their designs. It’s not that I did not try to draw attention of the DIB. But Mr. Narayanan was not in a position to remedy the obstacles, coming from politicians and bureaucrats. Regarding Doval he said his trusted officer was a Dervish.
Never before, I believe, the IB was pressured to conclude an important CI operation for giving doubtful political and diplomatic elbowroom to a Prime Minister, whose enthusiasm was not matched by his expertise.
On the fateful November 30, 1988, Brigadier Abbasi was to meet his Indian contact at XX Hotel to pick up certain sensitive military documents around 7 p.m. A trap was laid to capture him in the act of exchanging documents for money. It was a successful trap.
Brigadier Abbasi had vehemently resisted his detention by the Indian intelligence agents. He and his attendant used hands and feet to clear their way and run out into the open. In the process he received a few blows from my hefty colleagues.
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.
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.
Patna and Banaras were used as proxy-hub for Gorkhaland operation.
the Prime Minister of India (Rajiv Gandhi), had access to almost all the secrets that passed through the PMH. She had succumbed to the blackmailing tool of a NWFP origin Pakistani diplomat. The PCIU had documented several of their intimate meetings with appropriate light and sound. The
The ISI had assigned him the task of recruiting Indian youths having Deobandi and Wahabi convictions and sending them to Pakistan /Pakistan Occupied Kashmir for training.
The other incident involved training of a group of Sunni Wahabi Muslim youths of Bihar and West Bengal in a camp jointly run by the ISI and the Islamic Chhatra Shibir of Bangladesh, somewhere near Jaipur Hat in the district of Rajshahi.
A senior police officer of West Bengal had bluntly advised me not to press the matter as a senior Marxist leader from North Bengal was overwhelmingly interested in the welfare of the minorities.
The incident had created tectonic reactions from the caste-baron politician and the PMO, which heavily depended on the support of the parliamentarians of the baron’s party for its survival. My IB colleague in Lucknow was shunted out from his post and was banished from his tenure with the organisation.
The bug was implanted inside the phone of an aide to the Prime Minister, planted by the IB during V. P. Singh’s regime. That provided IB with vital clues to the happenings in the PMO. The end products, I understand, were delivered to Rajiv Gandhi even when Chandrashekhar warmed the seat for the former. In the melee of fast political and bureaucratic changes someone had forgotten to remove the spy contraption from the PMO.
My personal efforts to arouse reasonable response from the opinion makers inevitably ended in prophetic replies like ‘why waste your sleep’ and ‘you don’t legislate to give better rights to your housemaid’. Well! That’s what the status of the spy outfits is. They are better off below bed sheets and inside kitchen pots.
The sense of alienation was deepened after Rajiv Gandhi and Farooq Abdullah carried out a blatant rigging of the 1987 elections.
