Do not trifle with India's security

I wrote in my column “Security at risk from officials' negligence” ( Business Line , August 5): “…the ruling political dispensation has been, strangely and inexplicably, very lax in dealing with high officials in positions impinging on national security for their failures, tantamount to negligence, where they could do, and had, in fact, done, great harm…Considering the grave dangers to which (their) omissions had exposed the nation … even dismissal (without) the usual departmental proceedings would have been justified in some cases. “

I now find that an article “How to let a mole escape” datelined November 6 in The Sunday Guardian , documents more shocking and, indeed, more treasonous, instances implicating, by name and designation, several officials of India's security establishment, including agencies such as the Intelligence Bureau (IB) and the Research Analysis Wing (RAW) which the people have always assumed to be the impregnable bastions of national security.

It says flatly: “What sets India apart from other major powers is the lenient treatment given to such elements by an establishment more focused on protecting its image than on security.”

‘ZERO PUNISHMENT'

The instances recounted by the article by way of substantiating this deeply perturbing charge make one wonder whether there is actually a conspiracy to endanger India's security by the very functionaries who were supposed to be its protectors.

The article starts off with the way the IB and the Kerala police, egged on by CIA moles, ruined the lives, reputations and careers of two scientists of the Indian Space Research Organisation by foisting false cases on them.

It goes on to say: “…there has been zero punishment on the IB and police officers associated with the framing of two innocent ISRO scientists. Indeed, the IPS officer who headed the Special Investigation Team that cooked up evidence in the case, had a spectacular career in the force subsequently.”

I pass over the article's references to the penetration in Rajiv Gandhi's time, of the Prime Minister's Office, then headed by P. C. Alexander, who later on rose to great heights as the Governor of Tamil Nadu and Maharashtra and Member Rajya Sabha, the letting off of an IPS officer in the IB's office in Chennai who was caught in flagrante delicto with a woman case officer of the CIA, and the prospering of a senior RAW officer who was having an affair with a woman officer of the CIA and “who was allowed to retire with not only his freedom but his pension intact”!

The article reserves, for a comprehensive, blow-by-blow recital, the case of Rabinder Singh, who for more than 17 years prior to his exposure in 2003 was a CIA mole in RAW.

It provides particulars of the most monstrous collusion, if not downright abetment, by fellow officers of the IB and the RAW who, from all that the article brings to light, were bent on shielding him and helped him to escape to the US.

NEFARIOUS ROLES

As per the article, the more prominent among those whom it derisively dubs as “Good Samaritans” for their acquiescence in, if not connivance with, Rabinder's treachery, were one S. B. K. Singh who warned him of his being under surveillance, Gurinder Singh who prompted him to flee, and Sanjiv Tripathi, the mole's immediate superior at the time, since elevated to be the chief of RAW. The article concludes: “Altogether, 24 officers were questioned in the wake of Rabinder Singh's suspiciously easy escape via Nepal to the US in March 2004, when the NDA was ..in power. Not one of the two dozen involved in the case has been proceeded against, nor has had his career blighted, although at least six showed carelessness, if not complicity, in both the CIA asset's activities as well as in enabling Singh to escape.”

There is no way the Government can dismiss the article as either conjectural or biased because it has specifically mentioned the nefarious roles played by different officials of security agencies by explicitly naming names.

Nothing short of a point-by-point clarification or refutation will remove the grave misgivings in the minds of the people of India about the Government being indifferent to the imperatives of the country's security.

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