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Three officers and their lost cause

Why India needs to set norms for tell-alls by security-bureaucrats.

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Speaking at the Indian Women’s Press Corps in New Delhi on August 14, the Union Minister of State for AYUSH (Ayurveda, Yoga and Naturopathy, Unani, Siddha and Homoeopathy), Shripad Yesso Naik, said there is no lifestyle disease ayurveda and yoga cannot help cure. I have been tempted to suggest to him since then that I know one that might defy the miraculous curative powers and therapies inherited from Vedic times as well. It is verbal diarrhoea.

I am not complaining about sundry saffron warriors, a sadhu or a sadhvi or even a minister shooting his mouth off, giving us entertainment and causing their Prime Minister some irritation. I am referring to more serious people, trusted with jobs more serious and sensitive than most fellow Indians are, and where lifelong discretion is essential to their KRAs. When they fall prey to verbal diarrhoea, it causes an almighty stink that ruins not just your nostrils or mood, but the larger common good and the causes to which they were dedicated professionally through their careers.

Returning to the golden old three-example rule of opinionated journalism, let us look at the latest, former Union home secretary and BJP Lok Sabha MP R.K. Singh, and then two more recent instances, former RAW chief and Kashmir negotiator A.S. Dulat and the late B. Raman, who served RAW in key capacities. Each of the three, I am sorry to say, set a noxious example of how an officer and a security-bureaucrat ought to behave in recent retirement. Please note, I avoided using the convenient old cliche of “officer-and-gentleman” and have coined a new, if hyphenated, description for senior government officers, including policemen and soldiers, who serve in the security establishment.

Each one of the three has spoken out of turn, and done damage to causes he dedicated his life to and which he was honour-bound to professionally serve. The degree and the method vary, but there is no denying the madness. It can be boastful, indiscreet headline-hunting (Singh), publishers’ pressure for a little controversy to sell a few more copies (Dulat) or a misplaced sense of guilt mixed with what shrinks call Lima Syndrome (Raman). Lima Syndrome we’ve been introduced to lately in his context as the opposite of Stockholm Syndrome, where a hostage falls in love with his captor.

It isn’t necessary to rate these three on a scale of indiscretion. Nor is it my point that this is the first time former security-bureaucrats have spoken out like this. It is just when three of them do so in a very short period, in a manner that each subsequent one has been more damaging to India’s cause than the previous one, a little whistle-blowing is called for. Never mind that it has me, not a particularly cautious commentator, look like I am questioning other people’s freedom of speech.


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Let’s look backwards chronologically. Singh has been making noises so hawkish on Pakistan lately it probably would have made some of the perennially angry grey moustaches on our warrior channels insecure. But his boast last week to Rahul Kanwal on India Today TV is in a different class altogether. He “disclosed” on live TV what he called a 2005 plan to assassinate Dawood Ibrahim in Dubai, where he was to turn up for his daughter Mahrukh’s wedding to cricketer Javed Miandad’s son Junaid. To carry out the hit, the government (UPA then) called back Ajit Doval (who served as director, IB under UPA, 2004-05) from retirement. The strategy was to borrow two sharpshooters from Chhota Rajan, for long “Hindu” rival to “Muslim” Dawood in the Mumbai underworld, and position them in Dubai to send Dawood packing to his maker, probably at the wedding.

The plan failed, according to Singh, because of stupidity or conspiracy, as a Mumbai Police team, claiming to have been “tipped off” on the Chhota Rajan shooters’ presence in Delhi, landed and arrested them. You can now debate or investigate whether the police were sabotaging what intelligence had planned, Dawood tripped the system by tracking his enemy’s shooters and alerted his friends in Mumbai Police, or it was a more likely case of the left hand not knowing what the right was up to. But the damage Singh’s boasts have caused are at different levels.

He has told the world India is open to carrying out assassinations of its own citizens, and overseas. Before you jump at my throat accusing me of being a jholawala whose heart bleeds for Dawood, refer to The Way of the Knife, The New York Times intelligence reporter Mark Mazzetti’s brilliant book on how the CIA transformed from an intelligence agency to a killing machine, and yet, what a significant and well-thought-out decision (at the presidential level) it was when it came to set a drone after Anwar al-Awlaki, an al Qaeda kingpin in Yemen, because he was an American citizen.

Then Singh revealed the fact sort of known but never formally admitted that Indian intelligence patronises one gang against the other. We keep saying there are no good or bad terrorists. How does it sound when we brag that there is a good and bad underworld?

Third, I am not sure he intended to do it, but he fully embarrassed his Prime Minister and the important friends he just made in the UAE by telling the world we were planning an illegal assassination in their territory. And given that we were apparently using underworld killers for this, it could easily qualify as a foreign terrorist operation.

Fourth, he accused Mumbai Police to be in the payroll of Dawood. Fifth, he outed Doval as India’s most reliable operations person and played straight into the vile Pakistani propaganda machine that is desperately building the “Doval, the Indian Hamid Gul” line.

You can keep on counting his indiscretions. It is an interesting aside that he had first hit the headlines in the middle of the Nirbhaya protests when he spoke at a press conference stoutly defending Delhi Police’s handling of the agitators, which was just a preview of what they did more recently to the army veterans. Whether he is in UPA or NDA doesn’t matter. Or, as is said in Punjabi, one who’s a disaster in Lahore is also a disaster in Peshawar.


Also read: Checking out the Doval detail: Some myth, some reality, and much folklore


 

The other two cases can be argued on either side. Dulat was only laying bare the ugly reality of Kashmir, that it was important to confirm to the people in Kashmir, and the rest of India, that Hurriyat leaders are by and large activists on rent. This is also a way of reminding the establishment that the strategy of handling Kashmir by continuing to buy more time through minor tactics, intrigue and bribery is unsustainable and a new approach must be designed by the new regime in New Delhi. For Raman, you could say he was a tough spook, but also a man with a conscience, and that he felt honour-bound to try to save the life of a terrorist who had been helpful while in his custody, and also because the Indian state, having “talked” him into getting arrested, owed him mercy.

Both are problematic. Both have blown the cover on what are, after all, ongoing stories. It is one thing to write a kiss-and-tell when a story has ended and sufficient time has passed so the cause, and its friends, won’t be hurt. Political leaders, intelligence officers, even journalists protect sources, or those who helped in a larger cause, forever. The Washington Post’s Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein did not out their Watergate source “Deep Throat” until after his death.

Raman did not blow his sources but contributed to building a liberal sympathy wave for Yakub Memon, who he unequivocally called guilty, but also to justifying a popular view among the Muslims, particularly younger ones, that Yakub was a victim betrayed by the “Indian” system. Had Raman been alive, I am quite sure he would have been unhappy to see the kind of crowds that collected to bury Yakub a hero.

I am embarrassed to say this for someone who is no more, but Raman also proved to be a moral coward. If he indeed felt so strongly that Yakub’s life must be saved, he should have spoken out rather than write this article and keep it unpublished, in safe custody-even if he feared it may vitiate the trial of others, he could have spoken his mind after Yakub’s sentence was confirmed by the Supreme Court. But lack of moral courage combined with indiscretion (most unlike a “Kaoboy”, as he called himself, being a disciple of such a discreet RAW founder R.N. Kao) and ended up greatly damaging his cause.

It is important that secrets are not kept forever in democracies. Revelations, retrospective claims and counter-claims all help to enrich the debate. But mature democracies also need to set norms for these, specifically when made by security-bureaucrats. The US has an elaborate system of clearances and vetting. The British debate came in the wake of the publication of Spycatcher, the sensational memoir of senior MI5 officer Peter Wright. You need to regulate this virus of indiscretion so that the contagion doesn’t spin out of control.


Also read: 6 years on, PM Modi’s core team is in the grip of IAS, IPS, IRS officers from Gujarat


 

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