Intelligence: Passing the buck

Intelligence agencies are used to passing the buck and scoring points. Thus there are times when things have gone wrong and they make every effort to see that the blame is not laid at their door. Alternately, they are often at pains to establish that they have been the first to warn Delhi of the impending events. A veteran recalls some of these from his days in Kathmandu.

by REPORTER@DAYAFTERINDIA.COM

Dr. S. Chandrashekharan, a former officer of the Research and Analysis Wing (RAW) of the Cabinet Secretariat of the Government of India and who was posted in Nepal in the late 1970s, has in course of an interview recently told the BBC Nepali service that Raw and the Intelligence Bureau often pass the buck on each other on matters concerning Nepal.

This writer, who was a correspondent of a number of newspapers and news agencies during his more than a decade- long stay in Kathmandu, will like to supplement Dr. Chandrashekharan’s observation with the incidents narrated here which will show that the IFS officers and the Raw officers used to depend on their separate sources for information and would not like to reveal information one agency collected with the others.

Here is a concrete example. In 1967, Mr. Manohar Lal Sondhi, who had resigned from the Indian Foreign Service while posted in a European nation, had fought the Lok Sabha elections from the New Delhi constituency on the Bharatiya Jana Sangh ticket, and had won it along with five other Jana Sangh candidates in Delhi. After the budget session was over, he had come to Kathmandu either to study the Nepal situation or to meet his former IFS colleague B. Deva Rao, who was the Minister-Counselor at the Indian Embassy.

He met Indian correspondents posted in Kathmandu and chose PTI correspondent first, who called me up saying my “friend” had come from Delhi and would like to see me. Since I was living very close to the PTI office, I rushed there, more so, because unknown to the PTI correspondent, I had already met Mr. Sondhi way back in 1956, at the Nangal Dam Railway station in Punjab of all places. He was a member of the IAS/IFS/IPS officers had just been selected and was on their “Bharat Darshan” tour. I was leading a team of Railway apprentices from Jhansi who were visiting the Bhakra Nangal Project and the Roorkee engineering colleges, now an IIT. Mr. Sondhi could not have forgotten that meeting because of two successive evenings I had provided him either an aspro or an Anacin tablet in order to relieve him of the headache he was having on both evenings.

Mr. Sondhi was glad to meet me after about 11years and we had a long talk on the situation in Nepal as also his electoral victory from New Delhi. After this, he requested me to take him to Tulsi Giri, a former Prime Minister (or former Chairman of the Council of Ministers), for a chat. I had discouraged him by saying that Dr. Giri had recently suffered an attack of chicken pox and it was not advisable to call on him then.

However, Mr. Sondhi would not be deterred. “After all, he is a Hindu. Do you think he will turn us away if we call on him now?”, he asked. I was left with no option but to take him to Dr. Giri’s residence. Since he knew me well and had heard about Mr. Sondhi too, Dr. Giri called us in his drawing room and the two political leaders had a hearty tete-a-tete for about half and hour.

After this, Mr. Sondhi requested me to take him to the residence of Mr. Deva Rao, where he was to have his dinner. Since the distances were of a few hundred metres only, we had walked all through and I returned home from the gate of Mr. Deva Rao’s residence. Mr. Sondhi returned home the next day. There was no mention about this visit with anyone; either with my journalist colleagues or anyone at the Indian Embassy No one apparently was interested in this visit.

I was wrong RAW was interested but only at the Delhi end. Fifteen days later, a junior officer of the Embassy, obviously a RAW functionary called on me .He was a Marathi-speaking man from Karnataka and I too am conversant with Marathi. We therefore were on friendly terms. But I was aghast when he asked if I knew anything about the Jana Sangh M. P. Manohar Lal Sondhi’s visit to Kathmandu. He explained that Delhi (the Raw Headquarters) had sought information whether Mr. Sondhi had been to Kathmandu and if so whom had he met there. “But he had dinner with Mr. Deva Rao, the second most important person in the Embassy after the Ambassador. The Embassy and hence Delhi must be aware of the visit” I exclaimed. “You know how we function at the embassy” he said apologetically obviously, MEA (Ministry of External Affairs) and RAW did not share information with each other. I was working for the Statesman then.

In another incident in which I was a sort of a victim, RAW officers acted in a most unethical manner in order to score brownie points over their MEA colleagues. It was December 15, 1960.Around noon or a little afterwards, King Mahendra’s royal guards enacted a coup against the Nepali Congress government led by the legendary leader B. P. Koirala, arresting him and some of his cabinet colleagues who were taken away from a gathering of the youth wing of the ruling Nepali Congress party, the Nepal Tarun Dal.

That day, the Ambassador was absent from Kathmandu as he had accompanied General Thimayya for a “shikar” on the southern Nepal forests in the Chitwan district and the PTI correspondent too had accompanied the party. Other Indian correspondents did not take that Tarun Dal meeting very seriously. Although for days before the coup was enacted, there were talks in Kathmandu about the King’s intention to sack his government everyone in Kathmandu who was someone apparently was aware of the coming event. Our intelligence people were, however, blissfully unaware of the events which were to unfold. Otherwise they would have dissuaded the Ambassador from accompanying the visiting Indian Chief of Army Staff, General Thimayya, to the shikar in the forests of Chitwan in southern Nepal.

I was then the correspondent of the Hindusthan Samachar and had made it a point not to miss any event in Kathmandu at which the Prime Minister would be present so I was present at the grounds where the Tarun Dal meeting was to take place. Around one o’clock, after witnessing dismissal of the Nepali Congress government and arrests of the top leaders of the party, I was rushing towards the Indian Embassy on my motorcycle. Near the gate, a car occupied by the two senior most officers of the IB was rushing out. On seeing me driving the motorcycle so fast and from the appearance on my face, the officers realized something very serious had happened. By the time I landed at the telegraph office and started writing my story, they went to the embassy interior. I filed a “flash” (a telegram with 100 words and which was accorded the highest priority by the telegraph office) and returned to the city centre for collecting more information for my subsequent telegrams. Till 1964, Nepal did not have a telecommunication system for sending telegrams to India or any other place. All the telegraphic and telephone communication services were catered to by the Indian Posts and Telegraph office located within the Indian Embassy premises.

Unknown to me, these two officers had disappeared in the wireless transmission centre immediately. I learnt much later from friends in the Embassy that the officers had detained my “flash” for about two hours till they could contact Delhi and the message was conveyed to Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru who was probably at Ambala on that day. Nehruji had expressed the view “democracy has suffered a set back in Nepal” on the basis of the message sent by these two officers who had detained for two long hours my “flash” telegram so that the Press did not “score” over them.

Happily or otherwise, these two agencies had been cooperating with each other during the last two years or so in arranging the visit of the leader of the Nepali Maoists “Prachanda” to Delhi or Noida in February 2006 for an interview with a leading newspaper of India, arranging the meeting of the eight (now seven) party alliance at Noida in connection with the “Jana Andolan II” which saw the eclipse of King Gyanendra from power and generally assisting these parties in diverse ways .Before 1967, Intelligence Bureau officers used to be posted abroad at the Embassies for intelligence gathering. After 1967, RAW has taken over this task.