Spies and Scribes

Things happen in tandem, often by chance, sometimes meaningfully. When it is a coincidence, we employ a hackneyed metaphor, a crow flying on to a ripe branch which falls instantly. If we discern a special meaning, an esoteric rhythm in it, we characterize it, as Carl Jung calls it, synchronicity. 

Meaningfully or otherwise, events in recent days reveal a linkage between espionage and journalism. To mention just a couple of them, a freelance scribe has been booked for leaking information prejudicial to public interest. Mukundan Menon, while reacting to a social media post, has brought up an old case of espionage, a sweeping charge of it by an American journalist against Morarji Desai. 

How does a freelance journalist come in possession of sensitive information? When Charan Singh, Home Minister, took some of us to Tihar jail, a visibly harried prisoner with a sophisticated mien, sought to get a message across to the visiting dignitary. Charan Singh avoided him. The prisoner was an Information Service officer, held for espionage. How does a press relations man possess information professionally inaccessible to him?

Seymour Hersh’s charge against Morarji Desai was tendentious. Conceding for argument that some American intelligence officer had met him when he was an important minister under Nehru or his daughter, it would be irresponsible journalism to draw an instant inference that Morarji was a CIA agent. Poor former Prime Minister, he was hamstrung by the American legal system which helped Hersh get away with his allegation.

A CIA agent is a dreaded, or despised, entity. Time was when politicians of all hues took it  as an abomination loosely and effortlessly hurled at their foes. Anything that went awry, almost anything, was believed to  have been so rendered by a ubiquitous CIA hand. So ridiculous a practice it became that Piloo Modi, a portly politician indeed, turned up in Parliament one day with a badge on his enormous chest, “I’m a CIA agent.”

An enraged editor, S Mulgaokar, once started his occasional column, thanking heavens and heaving a sigh of relief that yet another week had passed without someone sighting a CIA hand somewhere. 

The perceived CIA operation or its memoir landed me in a mess, including the Supreme Court. I was working on a book-length story of T N Seshan, former Chief Election Commissioner, who suspected a CIA hand in the violent anti-HIndi agitation in Tamil Nadu in the late sixties. Voluble and unrestrained, Seshan said he should have known, as Madurai district collector, better than anyone else that there could be a CIA agent in the top echelons of Tamil leadership. Anger erupted in Tamil terrain. Yielding to business acumen, we put out the book with what could be offensive to Tamil taste summarily deleted. 

The communists have a strong fixation with espionage. They believe they are perennially encircled, class enemies torpedoing or delaying the Indian revolution. It was not for nothing that political clearance was made mandatory for appointment in any government job. I remember E M S telling us once that a class enemy had penetrated in the party as an  apparatchik when Lenin was in command. True to his flair for looking at things strategically, Lenin said that a smart guy had to do many benevolent things for the revolutionary system to make himself look trustworthy to the leadership. 

T S Sanjeevi was a Tamil officer of the Indian Police vintage who set up India's Intelligence Bureau. Far from flamboyant like his successor B N Mullick, Sanjeevi went round Indian missions abroad to study and evolve a model for a new India's spy system. There was one high-minded Indian diplomat,V K Krishna Menon, who detested Sanjeevi’s plans as they were. Irascible as ever, Menon wrote to his buddy and boss, Prime Minister Nehru complaining that Home Minister Patel had sent his super cop to spy upon him.

Menon was always known for his abhorrence of capitalist America and his harebrained Leftism. That his motives and methods were viewed with suspicion by many people is no secret. So much so an impression went round that he was a communist in Congress clothing--until he was ousted from the tri-colour party. One unsavory point made in Christopher Andrew’s centenary volume on British MI5 was that election expenses of some Indian leaders, including Krishna Menon, were defrayed by the Soviet spy apparatus, KGB. 

Reverting to the shadowy, if not outrightly shady, spy-scribe linkage, two autobiographical stories may be recalled for illustration. Wherever a news conference is held, a special branch fellow may be seen lurking in the precincts to have a gist of its content whispered into his ears by an obliging scribe. Their peers would, jealously or derisively, dub them as “police agents.” Our quintessential humourist, V K N, was wont to say that those intelligence sleuths could be spotted in any milling crowd. 

Anyway,    table-top journalists like me would not be in the picture. For us, there were spymasters who would diligently leak information that they thought people should know or scribes could tom-tom as their scoop. Little was it suspected that it was what was generically known as “plant.” Everyone in the trade knows that a spy-scribe relationship is a contrary alliance. Spies like to keep their information under their imaginary cap; scribes are impatient to let out any speck of balderdash with which they are fed. I would not suspect that a middle-level spy was planting anything on me when he rang me up a late evening to say two Kuwaiti nationals who had been declared “undesirable” had not only penetrated through the immigration system but gone round the state as special guests of the government. My source took a day to realize what political fire it had set off.  He confided in me as a matter of friendship, probably in anticipation of some good tip-offs in the course of time.

I would not pat myself on my back for a scoop or two I had scored on the rumblings in sub-Himalayan states dominated by Buddhist politics. Out and out, it was a “plant”, as I knew and the “planter” knew though pretended the  other way, much like the proverbial cat drinking the milk. The “planter,” on his part, believed I  could be trusted to use the information cleverly. I, on my part, satisfied myself that it was the  truth, though, perhaps, not the whole truth. 

I must wind up this sequence with a reference to the Shakespearean spy, Polonius. He was spying on everything and everyone as required by his benefactors. Even his son was under the medieval scanner. In one spy mission, he was hiding behind the curtain in the royal bedroom. Mistaking the shadowy figure for someone else, our to-be-or-not-to-be thrust his sword into the curtain killing the clumsy spy instantly. Espionage is not without its risks.   

  

 

 Bible and Ban

It is not often that one beats up one’s mother. Even in the context of such a rare outrage, opinion may differ. There is perhaps nothing that  inspires absolute unanimity. That rude and rustic saying rang out in my mind with new reports of ban of holy books in schools and removal of testaments of democracy from texts. The ban story comes from Salt Lake City. The atrocity on democracy has been detected in New Delhi and Kottayam.

Let us discuss the second point first. A Malayalam newspaper went to town--and village--the day before yesterday with an incisive story of some cardinal content being excluded from school texts prepared by the National Council for Educational Research and Training(NCERT). Next day it was followed by a stentorian leader. The essence of the journalistic crusade was, as the caption read, that democracy had been reduced to a “memory” with the removal of some parts from some texts.

“Nothing happens to democracy,” says P Ravindran Nayar, veteran journalist. He has been witness to such guttural outbursts with an unvarying theme, “democracy is in danger,” during the past half century. Like socialism of the Avadi vintage in the sixties, democracy has long been a fashionable slogan, mouthed by those who theoretically uphold it as well those who invoke an exclusive brand, “people’s democracy.” Like socialism, misshapen with all kinds of people sporting it, democracy is also universally advocated, as a cap fit for every political head or its lack.

 

A largely acceptable view is that democracy is the best form of political governance since it represents the will of the people. Francis Fukuyama went so far as to argue that nothing better may happen in the annals of mankind and thus it reaches the “end of history.” Anything can be deified or demonized in the name of democracy. An alternative but unpopular theory floated by thinkers like Ortega Gasset is that the “revolt of the masses,” leading to a “leveling of sensibility” may not be the  ultimate road to an ideal social destination. Nothing may be intrinsically bad because it has no mass takers, nothing may be necessarily good because the masses like it at a given point of time.

So, as Ravindran Nayar says, those who cry from the housetops ``democracy is in danger” need not be worried. A rearrangement of the school curriculum cannot shake up the whole system. There is no gainsaying that a gargantuan bogey of saffronisation has been at work for long. Hindu hotheads have only aggravated it in a reflexive response. For instance, there were those like P N Oak who set up an institute  to rewrite Indian history, even challenging the fact of the authorship of the Taj Mahal. Those of Oak’s ilk, even those less irascible, would accept the depredations of central Asian immigrants as a secular and innocuous historical conquest. The memories of defiling shrines and levying a cess (jizya) on people of other faiths are not easily forgotten or forgiven. There were  indeed thinkers like K R Malkani who had a nice word for Aurangzeb and Tippu Sultan even when they were a tiny, solitary, faction within the burgeoning Hindu armada. It was a Malkani committee which cleared a Doordarshan serial, The Sword of Tipu Sultan, even in the face of large sections of south Indian viewers.

The Marxists are alarmed. Historically, they have sought to be recognized as guardians of the minorities and the champions of democratic rights. It was long assumed that their following will widen among Muslims if they run down Hindutva oracles. That their reign smacked of totalitarianism wherever, whenever, they seized power through the bourgeois ballot or armed revolution is an overwhelming twentieth century irony. 

The Marxist mindset in Kerala was revealed when it was resolved to throw overboard NCERT textbooks or their relevant chapters and continue with newly challenged versions of history and geography. Narendra Modi’s party and its dons have taken the position that medieval history laid disproportionate emphasis on the Mughal period, playing down the scintillating role of the Pallavas and the Cholas and the scions of the ruthlessly liquidated Vijayanagara empire. 

What is arguably characterized as saffronisation is defended as an endeavor to restore balance to the study of Indian history, nay, Hindu history, as chronic critics of the Modi era are wont to present it. At the same time, it must be conceded that Modi’s men are afflicted by an unmistakable saffron syndrome. I remember a towering Hindu enthusiast, P Parameswaran, telling me that the RSS would never be able to wipe the blood of Gandhi off its face just as the Indian communists would not carry conviction when they explain their dubious stance during the freedom struggle. 

It was painfully funny when they came up with a class analysis turning an “imperialist war” into a “people’s war” so as to abide by the Soviet view of a phase of the Second World War. Conversely, the Hindu militia would ever fail to wash the stains of saffronism off its progenitor, Savarkar. Even Godse seemed becoming less unexceptionable when Justice G D Khosla, hearing the appeal of the Gandhi killer in the Punjab High Court, suggested that the assassin would have been aquitted if the jury system were in prevalence. Justice Khosla has not been forgiven. But it points to the possibility that someone who was held a criminal once could be hailed as a freedom fighter, martyr, over time and space. Revision of history follows as a  matter of course.

When the new essay in saffronism, leading to a hue and cry of endangered democracy, was being debated in this part of the world, a most unlikely book was taken out of school curriculum in Salt Lake City, USA. Parents of some students in Davis education district complained that a book contained  “violence and vulgarity” and it should be taken off the school library shelves. Which a concerned school committee promptly did. The impugned book is one with which we have been traditionally familiar, which we uphold as a great testament of faith, The Bible. Specifically, what is under reference is  the King James version compiled and corrected by a galaxy of scholars and word masters including William Shakespeare. What is violent and vulgar about it is uncertain but a school committee was told that the Bible had portions violating a law against offensive literature adopted last year.

It follows that anything can be banned if the Bible is banned. We have seen secular and not so secular governments buckling under pressure and banning books which hurt the sentiments of one petulant section or the other. No one could be a more pious Christian than Nikos Kazantsakis but a play based on his The Last Temptation of Christ was banned when cassock-clad clergymen took out a procession demanding its proscription. C P Nair, Secretary to the Chief Minister, gave me the text of the play to read. I found it rather tepid but hardly abrasive.

The Marxists who loathe book ban were constrained to outlaw street plays like Nattugaddiga staged by comparatively extremist groups. When it came to his turn, Prime Minister Rajiv Gandhi proscribed Salman Rushdi’s The Satanic Verses before the echo of the first cry of blasphemy from Iran died down. It came my way when I was ransacking the banned books section in a Virginia library. It did not match my quotidian literary taste. Significantly, The Satanic Verses became a tome sought after worldwide.   

Possibly the best hype for a book is a worst trick: Make it look like it contains passages someone somewhere may find offensive, “violent and vulgar” as a school committee in Utah found the Bible. Autobiographically, my publisher, K P R Nair, and I were beneficiaries of the ban of a book I put together narrating the story of T N Seshan who, as the Chief Election Commissioner, raised the hackles among the political glitterati. It was an interrogative reference to the suspected foreign influence on the anti-Hindi agitation in Tamil Nadu. 

Tamil Makkal were up in arms. There was a competitive litigation, every other politician demanding instant ban of the book which was viewed as an anti-Tamil tirade. Those who did not rush to the court with a petition for ban made a bonfire of the book. As publicity raged, an excited K P R Nair was computing his cash profit--until the release and the sale of the book was ordered by the court. My short point: any book may be banned with planned or assured results just as, as we said in the beginning, it is possible to take a contrary view even when one beats up one’s mom.