Part 9 (2/2)

Thus, since Sheikh Saheb's time, anybody who's been on the right side of Delhi has been getting money from Delhi. It's as simple as that.

Even the former governor of J&K in the early 1980s, B.K. Nehru, a cousin of then prime minister Indira Gandhi (his grandfather was Motilal Nehru's elder brother), says in his memoir, Nice Guys Finish Second, that when Chief Minister Farooq Abdullah was sacked in 1984 (by B.K. Nehru's successor Jagmohan), the new government was formed by spending a lot of money. G.M. Shah, Farooq's brother-in-law (who sulked when Farooq was made CM after Sheikh Saheb's death because he felt he should inherit the political legacy), needed thirteen defectors from the National Conference. The money went in an IB bag, and was distributed by a big businessman who used to be a Congress MP, Tirath Ram Amla. They used to call each packet of money a 'bullet'. B.K. Nehru says that Shah was forever running out of bullets, and demanded from Mrs Gandhi more and more bullets.

If this was happening in 1984, then why would the Congress party itself act so innocent about spending money thirty years later? When I went to Srinagar in May 1988, one of the first things I learnt was about the relations.h.i.+p between Kashmiri leaders and money.

Yet if money is in play, then the corollary is that the agent goes to the highest bidder. Indeed, Kashmiris are a heavily layered people, and it is not out of character for a Kashmiri to be in touch with either India or Pakistan (or even both) at some point of time. It's not easy to decipher the Kashmiri psyche, or even to win Kashmiri confidence: centuries of foreign rule, from the Mughals to the Afghans to the Sikhs, have made them natural agents. By now, it is in their DNA.

When I was posted to Srinagar in 1989, I used to hear stories of the earliest IB guys posted to Kashmir, because of whom, as well as the exploits of long-serving IB chief B.N. Mullik, the IB is made out to be much bigger and more sinister than it actually is; that the IB is the real authority in Kashmir; that it controls everything. When I reached Srinagar, it was something to feel kicked about, but it also weighs heavily on you because n.o.body trusts you. I met Mullik only after I joined the organisation, long after he had retired. He struck me as a saint rather than a spook. Nonetheless, Mullik laid the foundations of the modern- day Intelligence Bureau.

On the other hand Pakistan has always had a lobby in Kashmir; it has always had control over somebody or other in Kashmir. That lobby today is the All Parties Hurriyat Conference, which is a Pakistani creation. The control over the Hurriyat may have loosened a bit when Musharraf and Vajpayee were making tentative steps towards peace but tightened again with insecurity returning to IndiaPakistan relations, and somebody or other getting killed for it.

Our idea as mentioned earlier was to reach out to as much of Kashmir as possible. The irony these days is that Delhi has stopped paying attention to Kashmir despite its importance to us nationally; whereas the Pakistanis, who have frankly realised that they have lost out in Kashmir, still have a.s.sets there who are totally committed to them. There's n.o.body in Kashmir more committed to India than Farooq Abdullah, but there seem to be a lot of people in India who simply don't recognise that and are readily dismissive of him.

The ISI strategy now in Kashmir is very clearit is not going to lose control of the separatists. So it is quite simple: to solve the problem in Kashmir you have to work on the separatists and win them over.

In that the ISI has handed India with several advantages: according to our friend and former militant Firdous Syed, the Kashmiri movement degenerated into a mercenary war due to Pakistan's ill-treatment of Kashmiris, and due to ISI arrogance. Foreigners were used, as were criminals. Kashmiris have suffered. Now it is such that everyone is perceived to be either an ISI agent or an IB/R&AW agent. Kashmiris have learned to adapt; and at times they out-bluff both sides. But at the end of the day, ISI arrogance has been greater than Indian arrogance and this has helped us in Kashmir. That is not to say that we did not have our frustrations or could get done whatever we wanted. As a Kashmiri separatist once said to me, whether in flattery, jest or frustration: 'Aap ne toh badi hamdardi say pechana tha Kashmir ko . . . lekin . . . yahan ki siyasat ka haal na poochiye: ek tawaif hai tamaashbeenon main.' (You demonstrated great empathy in understanding Kashmir . . . but . . . politics in Kashmir is like a nautch girl in the midst of spectators deriving vicarious pleasure from her plight.) On balance, with regard to Pakistan and Kashmir, it was a pretty satisfying stint at R&AW and my time was winding down. It would have been nice to have been a chief like Mullik or R.N. Kao, the first R&AW chief, who was in the saddle for eight years; there is so much that could be done. I had only a year and a half, and it took me six months to get used to the whole thing and for the guys there to get used to me. By the time you settle down and get into the groove, time's up.

The British have a good system, where their MI6 chief has a five-year tenure, and in most cases a knighthood on superannuation. It goes with the job. I met the Spanish amba.s.sador while I was writing this book, and he said their chief also has a five-year tenure. The trouble with our system is that if someone gets five years, what happens to the other guys, of which there are so many, looking at a chance at the top job. So I suppose as a compromise two years isn't bad, particularly if you happen to have grown up in the intelligence community.

While there was a lot of resentment when I joined R&AW because I was an outsider and I didn't know anyone save a few (I knew C.D. Sahay from before, for instance, as he had a posting in Jammu and was kind enough once to invite me to dinner when I visited), when I left things seemed to be okay. There was no grievance; quite the opposite, for after I left I was once asked to do a cadre review for R&AW by Brajesh Mishra; C.D. Sahay, chief after Vikram Sood, who had succeeded me, had been pressing for it. 'He's got time,' Brajesh Mishra said about me. 'He'll head the cadre review committee.'

There were two others from R&AW on the committee. We met on and off, discussing things and there were a couple of points we were in disagreement on. Sahay kept pressing me to finish, and I told him it would get done once we arrived at an agreement on those points.

I mentioned in chapter two the root of the problems at R&AW: the mismatch within the agency between people from different backgrounds. R.N. Kao and his deputy K. Sankaran Nair never gave a way to resolve it, and as a result there was all kinds of groupism and demoralisation, mainly between the IPS officers and the non-IPS officers. The cadre review was basically an attempt to work out a compromise to this groupism.

Our report was almost ready but I had not signed it or presented it, and a youngster on the committee, who was from the RAS, said it was not fair. 'I will add a dissenting note,' he said.

'If you want to add it, you're welcome to,' I said. 'But I would advise you not to. It won't take you anywhere and somebody somewhere will one day hold it against you.' And they did.

After Sahay retired, his successor P.K. Hormis Tharakan, asked me to do a review of my cadre. With the change in thinking in the government he wanted a change in my thinking too. More 'balance' as he called it. So I made a few amendments and returned the report to him. The fact is that there was a feeling in R&AW that the RAS was being discriminated against and that a non-IPS officer would never make it to the top. In that sense my successor Vikram Sood (from the Indian Postal Services) brought a breath of fresh air and hope for the RAS even if it was shortlived.

Interestingly, Brajesh Mishra was inclined to bring in another outsider to head the organisation after me. One day, a couple of months before my superannuation, when I was pressing him to decide on my successor, he said, 'How would you react to an outsider?' 'Don't do it, sir,' I said. 'How can you say that? You were an outsider,' he countered. I said, 'Exactly. I know what it is like, that's why I'm saying it. It's not fair either to the officer or the organisation.' Brajesh never raised the matter again and Vicky Sood became chief and a good chief too.

Cabinet Secretary Prabhat k.u.mar once asked me: 'Dulat you have served in both the IB and R&AW, how would you rate the two organisations?' I said to him, 'Inst.i.tutionally there is no comparisonthe IB is far older, more cohesive and solid but man to man, person to person, R&AW is just as good.' This brings me to the larger issue of R&AW's role and existence as an intelligence organisation. What ails the organisation, in my view, is its own inability compounded by the government's ambivalence in charting a clear course for it. Therefore internal debates and bickering continue and inevitably flow into the public domain, confounding the existing confusion. Rajiv Gandhi had once said that intelligence organisations could not be treated like the rest of the bureaucracy. It is time the government settled these issues once and for allwho better to do it than Prime Minister Modi.

The ultimate compliment to R&AW was paid by the former ISI chief, Asad Durrani, at one of our track two meetings when he said, 'R&AW is as good as the ISI if not better,' adding with a chuckle, 'What we do brazenly you achieve by stealth.'

In November, a month before I retired, Brajesh Mishra asked me to accompany him to Beijing for an official visit. He got me an invite to meet my counterpart, whom I had already met once before, during an official visit in May.

The Chinese give a good dinnerBrajesh Mishra and I were taken to a vast, empty restaurant and we were given some vile, horrible paint-remover to drink, which we declinedbut when it comes to talking business they do not answer in a hurry. 'Very good idea,' my Chinese counterpart said to a suggestion I made about Indian-Russian-Chinese intelligence cooperation. 'We need time to think about it.' On everything they said, good idea, let us study it. Except terrorismevery time we mentioned it, the Chinese became tense. It is a growing problem for them.

(The Russians, on the other hand, where the trilateral cooperation suggestion originated, are filled with bonhomie. When I visited Moscow, my counterpart landed up at my guest-house in the morning with a bottle of vodka.) Anyway, it was a good visit and I knew Brajesh Mishra enjoyed the trip. More than once he told M.K. Narayanan that while the agencies were doing well R&AW was more productive than the IB, and Narayanan of course complimented me though I'm not sure he was happy at R&AW being rated higher than the IB. Despite this tide of goodwill from the national security advisor, I was totally unprepared for what happened on 24 December 2000 (remember, on my previous Christmas Eve as R&AW chief, IC-814 was hijacked).

That afternoon I got a call from Ashok Saikia, the establishment officer in the Prime Minister's Office, saying that he had to fix my contract.

'Contract for what?' I said.

'Contract for joining the PMO,' he replied. 'I can't believe you don't know.'

I knew nothing of the sort, so it was all the more reason, he pointed out, that I go over and meet him.

There was nothing extraordinary in the contract, and it was the same as Brajesh Mishra's, in that unlike other government servants who serve at the pleasure of the president, we were to serve at the pleasure of the prime minister. (This is why I decided to quit after the government fell.) Apparently, my induction had been discussed by the prime minister and his princ.i.p.al secretary three months earlier, in September, when Vajpayee was in Mumbai for his knee operation.

'I just met Brajesh Mishra yesterday and he didn't say a word to me,' I said.

Just then Brajesh walked into the room.

'Thanks for the job,' I said. 'I was just telling Ashok that you didn't tell me about it even yesterday.'

He had a good laugh.

I was surprised, because I was looking forward to retirement, to be free of all of this, to just chilling out. Instead, come 1 January 2001, I was going to be working from the PMO.

10.

FROM COLD WAR TO HIGH POLITICS.

Less than a week after joining the PMO I received a call on the RAX, which is the government's secure phone line for senior officials and ministers. On the other end was a woman's voice; the call display showed it was coming from the prime minister's residence, at 7 Race Course Road (RCR). I was foxed. 'Welcome to the family,' she said.

It was Namita Bhattacharya, known by her nickname Gunu, and she was the prime minister's adopted daughter.

'Now that you're here, we're rea.s.sured,' Gunu continued. 'Please look after the two old men. They're your responsibility.'

She was not only referring to her 76-year-old father but also to his 72-year-old princ.i.p.al secretary and national security advisor, Brajesh Mishra; but in any case, what she said was not as important as the mere fact of her reaching out to me. I was touched, and thanked her for calling.

The PMO in Vajpayee's time was one big happy family, and had a relaxed atmosphere. Of course, part of it was the kindness that the prime minister showed me in the five and a half years that I was with himtwo in R&AW, and three and a half in the PMObut it was also his family who made me feel like one of their own.

In this, Gunu was the anchor as she was the hostess of the house, and she always met me and my wife warmly. The same went for her husband Ranjan: he was an obviously smart fellow who was said to have wielded enormous clout though up close he came across as humble. He and I got along well and occasionally played golf together, just the two of us.

In fact, it was Ranjan who once told me: 'Brajeshji trusts and relies on you more than even Shyamal,' he said, referring to my old batchmate Shyamal Datta, DIB, who was widely known to have freer access to the top and was much closer to the family. Shyamal was the one who got me to R&AW and had me appointed chief. In any case, at least five to seven of us had a nice, comfortable relations.h.i.+p even with the family.

Vajpayee would, at least once in six months, invite all the families from the PMO for a meal or a dinner. You would get good food and a good drink: it was a supremely relaxed affair.

The first PMO lunch that I attended, though, was not the prime minister's but Brajesh Mishra's at his residence in Safdarjung Lane. It was soon after I joined R&AW and I wondered who would be at the princ.i.p.al secretary's lunch. I was expecting thirty people or so but when I reached there were 150 people including the prime minister. 'b.l.o.o.d.y h.e.l.l,' I thought, seeing the politicians in attendance and thinking this was to be a formal affair. It turned out to be like any garden party: drinks were served freely, there was no hypocrisy. Unfortunately, for reasons I never understood, Brajesh Mishra never had a party after that. But the prime minister's parties for the PMO continued regularly.

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