Ashok Ogra
Standing in the House of Commons last week, Canada’s Prime Minister, Justin Trudeau, apologized after a war veteran who fought alongside the Nazis was invited into the Parliament, adding that the event was a disservice to the memory of millions “targeted by the Nazi genocide”.
One wonders why Trudeau does not care to remember the victims of an Air India flight travelling from Canada to India via London that exploded on June 23,1985, killing all 329 people on board. The cause was a bomb in a suitcase planted by Sikh extremists. Trudeau needs to be reminded that among those killed were 268 Canadian citizens.
Rewind to 1970-1980, which saw the beginning of various activities carried out by Khalistani terrorists against India. These activities were fully sponsored by Pakistan’s ISI who had granted the terrorists’ territorial support and asylum in Pakistan and provided arms and ammunition.
On 29th of September 1981, An Indian plane on a flight from Srinagar to Delhi was hijacked by Khalistanis and taken to Lahore. The then Pakistani President Zia-Ul-Haq persuaded the hijackers to release the passengers along with the plane and to surrender themselves. While the plane with the passengers returned to India, Pakistan refused to hand over the terrorists and allowed them to live in a Gurudwara in Pakistan. Three more hijackings followed, and Pakistan’s response was exactly the same!!!
Against this background, the unsubstantiated charge leveled by Trudeau against the Indian agencies holding them responsible for the killing of separatist Hardeep Singh Najjar lacks conviction, and is proof of doublespeak.
It is not that the Indian agencies such as Research and Analysis Wing (RAW) founded by one of the finest police officer R.N.Kao- shy away from carrying out covert operations in other countries.
Noted investigative journalist Yatish Yadav highlights the importance of such operations in the book titled RAW: A History of India’s Covert Operations: “Just as soldiers in uniform guard our borders, different kinds of highly trained and motivated soldiers crisscross the world in various guises with deceptively innocuous code names; meeting sources, activating sleeper spies and double agents, deploying honey traps, conferring with fellow spooks in cafes and safe houses, and bribing informers with clandestine funds-all to protect the nation. They are the unsung heroes of India’s formidable spy agency R&AW who unearth dark plots against the country and destroy traitors and at great personal risk.”
Remember the Bollywood movie RAAZI which was based on an actual story? Sehmat Khan (played by Alia Bhat) was an Indian-Kashmiri undercover agent who operated in Pakistan during the 1971 Indo-Pak war. Daughter of a Kashmiri businessman, Sehmat married a Pakistani Army officer.
The most important information passed on by Sehmat to Indian agencies was Pakistan’s plan to sink the aircraft carrier INS Vikrant.
Shemat was smuggled by RAW to India; she was pregnant with the child of her Pakistani husband. Later, her son joined the Indian Army.
A few years ago, the current National Security advisor, Ajit Doval who had spent around seven years as an Indian spy in Pakistan, related how he would attend a Dargah regularly to keep his cover as a Muslim. One day, he was spotted by a bearded old man who called him a Hindu. Though he denied it, the man pointed out a hole in Doval’s ear for an earring. Ajit replied that he was born a Hindu who had later converted to Islam. The old man took him home and showed him Hindu idols. He was a Hindu, living in disguise in Pakistan.
It is no longer a secret that a RAW agent had procured a hair sample from a saloon in Kahuta where Pak scientists went for haircuts. Tests revealed the hair had signs of high radiation and bomb-grade uranium. The agent also obtained a copy of the blueprint of the nuclear plant.
Apparently, the then PM Morarji Desai refused permission to RAW to sabotage Pak’s nuclear plans, denying Israeli warplanes to refuel in India on a mission to bomb the Kahuta facility.
RAW and IB managed to infiltrate Harkat-ul-Mujahideen, a terror group propped up by the ISI, and engineered a breakup of the organization. This drove a spanner into ISI’s designs for Kashmir. Not to be deterred though, ISI fell back to Lashkar-e-Toiba and Jaesh-e-Mohammed.
Similarly, during the Kargil conflict, the Indian intelligence was able to tape the telephonic conversations that took place between Army Chief Gen. Pervez Musharraf and his Chief of General Staff Lt. Gen.Azia.
Before Sheikh Mujibur Rehman was assassinated along with most of his family members on 15 August, 1975, a former top RAW official had warned him against the conspirators. He had twice ignored India’s alert against the bloody putsch, saying the plotters were his “own children” who will not harm him. We know how costly this proved to be.
Pakistan’s all powerful ISI is also active-particularly in South Asia region. While RAW remains focused on real intelligence gathering, ISI, on the other hand, is mandated to fund anti-India elements abroad and sponsor terror attacks, and it succeeds in that mission. No wonder, ISI scores low on real intelligence gathering.
Spying, espionage, gathering intelligence is an ancient practice deployed by various regimes. Kautilya’s Arthasatra has extensive details on their use in times of both war and peace.
Rome’s most famous case of espionage and intrigue culminated in the assassination of Julius Caesar in 44 BC.
By the dawn of the twentieth century, espionage had evolved into a highly specialized, technical field with the Soviet Union and the US as the two main rivals.
In the 1930s, five Cambridge University students – Kim Philby, Guy Burgess, Anthony Blunt, Donald Maclean, and John Cairncross-were recruited by the KGB. They had access to secrets they could pass on to their Soviet handlers.
In 1973, the CIA helped organize the overthrow of Chile’s president, Salvador Allende, deemed to be too left wing.
The KGB was known for its involvement in various assassinations and elimination operations, both inside and outside the Soviet Union. One notable example is the assassination of Georgi Markov, a Bulgarian dissident writer, in London in 1978, using a poisoned umbrella.
There are several instances of ‘double agents’ that are recruited by various countries. Oleg Gordievsky has been given credit for shifting the balance of power during the Cold War. For 11 years, he spied for MI6 while working as a high-ranking KGB officer in London. He was sentenced by Soviet authorities to death in absentia.
Another most famous damaging Spy mission in history relates to Aldrich Ames- CIA veteran turned KGB double agent. In 1994, he was arrested by the FBI for spying for the Soviets along with his wife since 1985. Ames revealed that he had compromised the identities of CIA and FBI human sources, leading some to be executed by the Soviet Union.
Israel’s Mossad is considered one of the most efficient spy agencies in the world. At the height of the Israel- Palestine conflict, an Air France flight was hijacked to Entebbe in Uganda in 1976 by Palestinian terrorists who hoped to bargain with Israel for a prisoner exchange. Acting on intelligence provided by Mossad, Israeli forces raided the airport to rescue the hostages and freed 105 hostages. The Israelis lost one soldier and three hostages while they managed to eliminate all the seven militants.
It is worth noting that while the CIA was assisting RAW against China, it was aiding Pakistan against India to ensure that there was no further division of Pakistan; RAW was working with the Soviet KGB and the Afghan KHAD and, at the same time, it had links with the Israeli Mossad.
Returning to the current tension between India and Canada, it needs to be mentioned that both countries enjoyed excellent relations during the 1950s and 1960s. Canada was the major partner for India under the Colombo plan. It also helped India build the nuclear reactor, CIRUS in 1954. However, the ties have started to become strained in the 1980s, with permissive “vote bank politics” constraining parties in power. In the words of noted world affairs commentator, C Raja Mohan: “In dressing up his domestic political calculus on cultivating Khalistani extremists in the rhetoric of freedom of speech and the rule of law, Trudeau was falling back on the time tested liberal Canadian moralpolitik.”
On its part, India must avoid overreacting. The decision to ask the Canadian Government to scale down its embassy operations in India is perhaps best avoidable. The niceties of diplomatic protocol can help to defuse tensions, rather than enflame them. In the words of Chinese strategist Sun Tzu: “The supreme art of war is to subdue the enemy without fighting.”
India needs to learn a lesson from the way European nations, particularly Germany and France, handled the recent damaging news that the CIA was spying on them. These countries lodged strong protest, telling American President Biden that “spying on friends is not acceptable.” A matured approach prevented the situation from turning ugly.
That brings up the question of the role of the Indian Diaspora, who in recent times, has got polarized among political parties. In the past, a visit by an Indian Prime Minister was welcomed and greeted by the entire Diaspora community, regardless of their affiliations with a particular political party back home.
Today, with great cheer of ‘Modi,Modi,Modi’ almost eclipsing ‘India,India,India’ slogans- in both volume and frequency, the Diaspora community is totally polarized.
In the words of Sanjaya Baru, “politics has blurred the distinction between the Diaspora’s loyalty to the motherland and support for an individual politician.”
This certainly dents India’s soft power and instead weakens efforts to project a united India (Bharat) abroad.
In any case, what is required is that RAW strengthens its apparatus to thwart any possible future damage to India’s interests in Canada and elsewhere.
Deception is the name of the game, as the motto of Mossad sums up “By deception, thou shall wage war.”
And let this dialogue of Alia Bhat in the movie RAAZI continue guiding the Indian intelligence agencies: Watan ke aagey kuch nahi, khud bhi nahi
(there is nothing before the nation, not even God).
(The author works for reputed Apeejay Education, New Delhi)
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