Early one morning in 1992, weeks before Prime Minister Narasimha Rao took office, Intelligence Bureau operatives conducted an electronic sweep to secure the highest office in the country. For a few awful minutes, it seemed that a foreign intelligence service had got there first: Inside a phone, there was a recording device and a miniature radio transmitter. Then, someone recognised the device: The bug had been planted years earlier by the Intelligence Bureau itself, to surveil one of Prime Minister VP Singh’s top aides.
“In the midst of fast political and bureaucratic changes, someone had forgotten to remove the spy contraption,” Intelligence Bureau officer Maloy Dhar recorded in his memoirs. A similar operation had targeted President Zail Singh, as tensions between Prime Minister Rajiv Gandhi and Rashtrapati Bhavan reached boiling point in 1987.
Fresh evidence has now surfaced that illegal political surveillance by the intelligence services remains endemic, down to the state police services. Last week, police in Telangana arrested police officer Dugyala Praneeth Kumar, who is suspected of having carried out espionage against opposition leaders during the Bharat Rashtra Samiti government. Kumar served in the Telangana State Intelligence Bureau, a police organisation responsible for monitoring Maoist insurgent groups.
Ever since 1991, when evidence emerged that the Rajiv Gandhi government had conducted illegal wiretaps not just of its opponents but also senior ministers, similar scandals have regularly punctuated the course of India’s politics. From Gujarat in 2013, to Karnataka in 2019 or Maharashtra in 2002, though, this subversion of the law and democratic institutions has passed unpunished.
Learning from their colonial predecessors, the intelligence services exist to protect India’s rulers from Indians. Like the Pigs in George Orwell’s Animal Farm, the nationalists who inherited the surveillance apparatus of the Empire were to turn it on their own people.
Also read: Agni 5 a technological feat for India. But is it also a sign of a dangerous nuclear arms race?
Their master’s intelligence services
Following the great rebellion of 1857, the East India Company’s Thagi and Dakaiti Department—fresh from a successful campaign against murderous gangs of highway bandits—was assigned the task of gathering political intelligence. Viceroy Richard Bourke’s assassination in 1872 underlined the threat. Faced with continuing threats from jihadists in the northwest borderlands as well as unrest in Bengal and Punjab, the Empire understood that it needed to expand its intelligence networks to guard against future uprisings.
Edward Bulwer-Lytton, Viceroy of India from 1876 to 1880, would describe the Thagi and Dakati Department as “virtually our Secret Police Department,” historian Richard Popplewell has recorded. The actual strength of the new networks, though, was thin: The largest detective force, in Bengal, was made up of a Deputy Inspector General, four Assistants and 32 Head Constables, while the Punjab Special Branch had one police officer, two clerks and one native inspector
This rudimentary intelligence-gathering system was given teeth under Nathaniel Curzon, who became Viceroy in 1899. A Department of Criminal Intelligence, or DCI, was set up in the Government of India, to gather and analyse information generated by provincial police forces. Though the central organisation was not tasked with conducting its own investigations, it was given a small grant of £733—then about ₹11,000—to recruit spies.
Early in the twentieth century, as nationalist terrorism grew in Bengal and Punjab, the DCI’s resources expanded. Led by Charles Stevenson Moore, it set up a fingerprint bureau, a photographic section, and hired a handwriting analyst. In 1906, the DCI also appointed its first Indian officer, Assistant Deputy Director Munshi Aziz-ud-Din. The budget of the DCI also expanded dramatically, as the tempo of terrorism accelerated.
Following the near-successful assassination of Viceroy Richard Hardinge in 1912, historian and former Intelligence Bureau officer Amiya Samanta has written, about how anaemic the DCI still was. Led by imperial police officer David Petrie, a special DCI unit believed that by April, 1913, there was “scarcely a single person all over India capable of being considered as a potential factor in the bomb conspiracy, whose doings have not been subjected to careful scrutiny.” Yet, nothing was found.
Finally, the provincial police officers Godgrey Denham and Charles Tegart discovered the nationalist networks which had carried out the attacks, and arrested the perpetrators—with the exception of Rash Behari Bose, who was never apprehended.
Historian Patrick French has noted that “for the last three decades of British rule in India, intelligence gathering was extended massively since with the rapid rise of Congress it was seen to be the only way of retaining the upper hand.” “Covertly obtained information began to take on an increasing importance in the formulation of policy and decision-making.”
In 1919, the Government of India Act mandated that the Intelligence Bureau would keep imperial authorities informed of all matters related to the “security of the Indian Empire.” There were no provisions for legislative oversight of the organisation, nor legislative protection for citizens rights. Even today, nothing has changed.
Also read: Modi’s New Kashmir promise means nothing unless J&K gets the same rights as rest of India
Orwell’s Pigs
To no one’s surprise, the expanding Intelligence Bureau clashed with the aspirations of India’s nationalist movement, and new provincial assemblies elected in 1935. “Top secret files, relating to the Non-cooperation and Civil Disobedience movements, were sent to the office of CIO of the Intelligence Bureau, which was statutorily secured from ministerial interference”, Samanta has recorded. “The Provincial Governments frequently complained of spying on them by the Central Intelligence”
Imperial authorities also expanded their surveillance against Indian nationalists and communists overseas. Led by the Punjab Police officer PC Vickery, a special unit called Indian Political Intelligence was set up inside the security service MI5. The organisation’s activities would lead to considerable friction with the Indian diaspora.
For much of India’s post-Independence history, the Intelligence Bureau’s record would be scarred by controversy. From the records of the commission which investigated the assassination of Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi, it is clear that the Intelligence Bureau’s capacities to gather intelligence on hostile political movement was, at best, limited. Though the Intelligence Bureau had received information from the Uttar Pradesh Police on possible threats to Gandhi’s life, merely passed it on to the Bombay Police.
The organisation, notably, misjudged the threat from China ahead of the war of 1962, asserting that “war between India and China would escalate on a global level with the potential of a nuclear conflagration and therefore China would desist from it.”
In Kashmir, Intelligence Bureau station chief Inderjit Singh Hasanwalia, hand-picked by Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru, was credited with bringing a peaceful conclusion to the crisis involving the disappearance of a holy relic from the shrine of Hazratbal in Srinagar in 1962. However, the Intelligence Bureau also developed an unhappy reputation for participating in political and electoral manipulation. The organisation also failed to predict the scale of the crisis which would envelop the state after 1988.
From the 1970s, the Intelligence Bureau’s role in political surveillance—often of dubious legality—expanded steadily, with successive Directors of the Intelligence Bureau becoming enmeshed in the government’s efforts to undermine opponents. These operations were to bring the Bureau into considerable disrepute during the Emergency of 1975-1977.
The Intelligence Bureau, from the 1950s on, also came to play a controversial role in conducting background checks on appointees to high office, in particular judges of the High Court and Supreme Court.
Also read: India must legalise contract soldiers recruited to fight foreign wars. Agniveers are coming
The problem of accountability
Eleven years ago, National Security Advisor—and former Intelligence Bureau Director—Ajit Doval had noted that the last thoroughgoing review of the organisation’s objectives and methods had taken place in the 1980s, under his predecessor MK Narayanan. He argued for an official review “to architect [sic.] new doctrines, suggest structural changes, aim at optimisation of resources and examine administrative and legislative changes required for empowerment of intelligence agencies.”
There has been no such exercise.
Ending the political abuse of intelligence means India needs to make the state and central services creatures of law, not political caprice. This is, not surprisingly, something no political party has shown interest in—even though all, in opposition, have suffered the consequences of illegal surveillance and coercion.
Law scholars like Vrinda Bhandari and Karan Lahiri have argued that a legal framework for Indian intelligence services must include judicial and legislative oversight of its surveillance operations, of the kinds liberal democracies around the world have introduced. Left unregulated, intelligence services can become enemies of the values and laws of their nations—as a United States senate investigation discovered in 1975.
That lesson, India has been taught several times over since the Emergency—but seems determined to shut its eyes to the lesson.
Praveen Swami is contributing editor at ThePrint. He tweets with @praveenswami. Views are personal.
(Edited by Anurag Chaubey)