by RVS Mani
The Minister’s blue-eyed boy, Raju was just as overbearing as his patron. Even while his conditions of appointment were being drafted, this gentleman sought to entitle to himself items which were beyond the entitlements of an incumbent holding analogous position or in simple terms, his peers. Soon Raju was complaining to Chidambaram, I was the Division’s ‘biggest bogey man who shows him the Rule Book’, every time he needed something. Anyway, the Minister, too, did not like me for various reasons and humiliated me often. Now I was in the bad books of the DG, NIA as well as his patron. The truth of the matter is, ‘entitlements’ in the ministries are codified/ standardised by the Department of Expenditure of the Ministry of Finance and any upward revision of budget necessarily requires clearance from them. These clearances do not come forth easily. Raju would get what his peer officers got and no more. I had nothing to do with this, except that I was the intermediary facilitating official, in his case. He decided to shoot the messenger. Fortunately, at that time, my seniors in the Internal Security Division and the Home Secretary himself protected me.
Soon, Raju started building his own team. The first three officers who were recruited in the NIA after the Director General had either a Kerala (home State of the DG) or J&K (cadre State of DG) connection. Lokanath Behara, the first Inspector General, was a Kerala cadre police officer. DIG S P Pani was a J&K cadre police officer. DIG Sajid Farid Shapoo was a Kashmiri police officer of MP cadre. I found their kowtowing to their boss unbearable but my seniors counselled silence.
12 https://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/india/Court-nails-Pak-govt-hand-in-fakerupee-racket/articleshow/29787211.cms
http://www.rediff.com/news/report/terrorsim-in-a-first-life-term-for-6-accusedin-fake-currency-case/20140130.htm
I recall a meeting in the Union Public Service Commission regarding framing of Recruitment Rules (Recruitment Rules are standardised benchmarks that define one’s eligibility for appointment to various posts) which Inspector General Behara and I attended. In spite of some of the legitimate concerns the UPSC officials raised, I managed to defend the NIA proposal successfully. The Inspector General was extremely thankful and said he would correct any misgivings with the DG and the Minister. I learnt that he had really gone and told the Minister that Internal Security Division had sent its best officer to get the Recruitment Rules passed by the UPSC.
However, I had had enough of the fledgling NIA and requested the Joint Secretary (Internal Security) to relieve me of the oversight of this institution. People were surprised. Normally, in any of the ministries in the government, nobody lets go of the power of functional oversight over an institution because this carries unstated perks and goodies. But the quest for power and chasing goodies was never my cup of tea.
Hindu Terror & NIA
If anyone recapitulates the investigation history of NIA through 2009-2010, it was all about introducing a new nonexistent ‘Hindu Terrorism’ concept. In every case assigned to NIA—from the Samjhauta Express Blasts, Malegaon to Ajmer Sharif— they overlooked the first set of evidences and replaced it with evidences supporting the Hindu Terror narrative.
The first major virgin case on which NIA claimed success is the case of some law & order disturbance between the participants in a rally on Diwali day in 2009, in which the Hindu Jagran Manch and Sanathan Sansthan were the participants. On 16.10.09, it was Diwali eve and a Narakasur effigy competition was held near the Shantadurga temple at Sancoale-Verna in Goa. The case report said, the accused persons and ‘other persons known and unknown’ conspired together to plant IEDs at the places of effigy competitions as they were against such competition and as part of their conspiracy, the above said group planted IEDs in a vehicle which was parked on the road near the Shantadurga temple on the night of 16.10.2009. Subsequently the vehicle was located and the bomb was diffused by the Verna police station.
NIA termed it ‘a case of Hindu Terrorism’.
I have heard a lot of debates on national media channels and people speaking for and against the existence of any Hindu Terror. But many people do not know of the dots and those who know, fail to join the dots.
It was amply clear that under the garb of new initiatives, the new Home Minister had pulled wool over the nation’s eyes. They were not his initiatives. For example a separate NIA-like mechanism had already been ordered by the apex court and the Administrative Reforms Commission in its VIIIth report titled ‘Combating Terrorism’ before Chidambaram’s tenure as Home Minister began. The federal agency—which he said was long due and endeared himself to the Supreme Court—the NIA was actually used by the new Home Minister as an instrument to propagate a narrative of Hindu Terror, Saffron Terror etc. The lack of transparency in appointment of its first and second Directors General was very evident.
David Coleman Headley
At a distance of nearly a decade, the ‘evidence’ called ‘David Coleman Headley’ seems mythical. In popular memory, only the two differently coloured eyes remain. And we in India’s security establishments know that there are not only two versions of the Headley story but several and Internal Security certainly does not know which is closest to the truth.
The NIA played a vital part in interrogation of the man known to international media and security establishments as David Coleman Headley (born as Daood Sayed Gilani in Washington).
A man called Tahawwur Hussain Rana was a Pakistani Canadian resident of Chicago, USA who was an immigration service businessman and a former military physician. In 2011, he was convicted of providing support to the militant group Lashkar-e-Taiba and of allegedly plotting an attack on the Danish newspaperJyllands-Posten. At the trial of Rana, an alleged co-conspirator, David Headley gave detailed information about the participation of Pakistan’s Directorate of Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI) in carrying out the 26/11 Mumbai attacks.
Headley was arrested at Chicago’s O’Hare International Airport while he was attempting to travel to Pakistan on 9 October 2009.
US authorities gave Indian investigators, ie, the then NIA, direct access to Headley. NIA was the investigating agency for terror cases in India. According to a report in the Economic Times, Meera Shankar, the then Indian ambassador to the US called on Union Home Minister P Chidambaram to discuss the agenda for his meeting (in September 2009) with US Department of Homeland Security chief Janet Napolitano. She (Shankar) said: The Rana trial is going on and Headley is the key witness. The revelations coming out from the trial are shedding new light on the full details of the (26/11) conspiracy.
Since his guilty plea, Headley has cooperated with US and Indian authorities and given information about his associates. On 24 January 2013, a US federal court in Chicago sentenced Headley to 35 years in prison for his role in the Mumbai attacks.
The interrogation report of David Headley was submitted as a part of the ‘tour’ report of the investigating team, that is the NIA, then led by Inspector General Behara. The NIA submitted the ‘tour’ report to the Home Minister, P Chidambaram. The Home Minister’s office is reported to have excised portions of the Headley testimony to NIA.
From custody in the USA, Headley later deposed in ‘in camera’ proceeding in the Abu Jundal case in India.13
During the online part of the trial in the Jundal case, Headley apparently said that Muzzamil Bhat (a key Kashmiri military asset of the LeT, according to the FBI) had told him that Muzzamil had played an important role in recruiting Ishrat Jahan and Pranesh Pillal alias Javed Mohammad Sheikh as fidayeen.14 According to Headley, Muzzamil also claimed that he had been instrumental in their being assigned the task of eliminating the then Chief Minister of Gujarat (Narendra Modi) and another prominent leader of Gujarat (Amit Shah). This part of the Headley testimony was soon available in the public domain.
A vital letter, which was found filed in one of the several litigations in the Jundal case, is the letter of Daniel Clegg, the then Legal Attache in the US Embassy in Delhi. He had expressely assured India of total cooperation of the US government in access to David
Headley for questioning.
However, the then Indian government, including I recall, the then Home Minister Sushil Kumar Shinde (2012-2014), pedalled a public lie that the US government had been resisting any further access to David Headley. Often, NIA documentation was offered to the media as proof. Several years later, the then NIA, under the UPA regime, was accused of excising vital portions of the Headley testimony for tendering before the courts. However, the security establishment knew that the NIA had submitted a full ‘tour report’ containing the full Headley testimony to Home Minister Chidambaram.
13 26/11 handler Abu Jundal and others have been found guilty in the 2006 Aurangabad arms haul case by the MCOCA court in Mumbai in 2016.
14 A commando or guerrilla.
A very pertinent point is to what extent was Headley’s interrogation excised? By admission, the references to Ishrat Jahan as ‘a botched mission’ has been revealed in the Abu Jundal trial.
May be, the portion defining film-maker Rahul Bhatt’s role in assisting David Headley in carrying out the recce of the Taj and Trident Hotels in 26 November 2008 too was excised for the courts. The nation wants to know how is it that a person who accompanies Headley on a recce—takes detailed rounds of Mumbai city—claims innocence, saying that he was not aware of what Headley was up to?
Also why should Rahul’s father15 pedal influence and write to the Union Home Minister? Since the son was innocent and had no idea of what Headley, his companion, was up to, they could have consulted a lawyer, got a statement recorded with any judicial authority under relevant sections of the Criminal Procedure Code and got him exonerated in the public eye.
One more important aspect of Headley’s statement was the ‘Kasab tradeoff ’. In the statement before the trial court in the Abu Jundal case, Headley had reportedly hinted that there were attempts to take hostage some persons— possibly a Director-level person/s from India’s security establishments—to be traded off with Ajmal Kasab by the ISI. This testimony was also a part of Headley’s NIA interrogation which got edited out from official records.
Attempts to take hostage some Israelis and trade them for Ajmal Kasab’s release was revealed in Headley’s statement before the court in the Jundal case in March 2016.
However, way back in 2009, immediately after the 26/11 Mumbai attacks, there were whispers amongst the security and intelligence community that there would be attempts to take Indian government officials hostage and trade them off for Ajmal
15 Film-maker Mahesh Bhatt
Kasab’s release. This was a purely internal security assessment about Indian officials. People like P K Mishra, then Director (IS), were on high alert, moving about within Delhi police cover. The NIA was very much aware of this. Was there a line of questioning by the NIA team which interrogated Headley in Chicago in 2009? What was the specific line of questioning? Was there any input from the interrogation with Headley on a possible tradeoff? Was it also a part of the answers which were excised?
For purely public consumption, most of the ‘dossier diplomacy’ started only after 7th January 2009. Before that, possibly, I was one of the alternative ‘target officials’ whose ‘botched up’ attempt to take hostage had already happened. Was some collaboration in existence between some top Indian political entity with Pakistani establishments? Was it a case of overplaying and recalibration? We do not know.
Fallout of Special Secretary’s letter to Delhi Police
I HAVE ALREADY told my readers of the intimidation attempt on me on the night of 30.12.2008, when I had gone to the Rashtrapati Bhavan in connection with the Presidential Assent to the two security Bills that were passed by Parliament in December 2008. It may be recalled that an official communication in this regard was sent to Delhi Police Commissioner on the 19th of January 2009. The impact of this communication started showing immediately, that is in the third week of January 2009.
On 23rd January 2009, I was scheduled to go to Ahmedabad in connection with a meeting with the Central government Counsel, Hriday Buch. Actually, Harin Raval, the then Assistant Solicitor General, was on holiday abroad and Buch was standing in for him. The case title was Sardarji Maghanji Vaghela versus Union of India & others. The petitioner was a victim of the 2002 Gujarat riots.
People living in Delhi know that to travel in Delhi in winter days is a challenging task. It was a Friday and I was to take an early afternoon flight to Ahmedabad, so I did not go to office that morning. The decision on my meeting had been taken late in the evening of 22nd January 2009. I was not actually dealing with the subject. But those days, the official team in the Internal Security Division under Joint Secretary Diptivilasa was a buoyant group and everyone would offer and was capable of standing in for another. Otherwise, we could not have handled the challenges thrown up, both, professionally and also politically. A junior officer of my colleague who dealt with the subject was to accompany me and bring the relevant papers directly to the airport.
While I was preparing to travel to Ahmedabad, I received a call from a person called Monga, who identified himself as the Station House Officer of the Dwarka Police Station. He wanted me to narrate the entire story of the 30th night to him. I repeated the sequence of events to this alleged policeman, giving him every specific detail. He said he would come and record a statement in this regard. I told him that I had a flight to catch and upon my return, I would sign a statement in this regard.
The litigation in Ahmedabad required me to travel to and fro between Ahmedabad and Delhi up to the 3rd of February. Then I was busy in the public interest litigation by interest groups in the Bombay High Court in the aftermath of 26.11.2008, which kept me busy up to the 2nd week of February 2009. On the personal front, my wife had suffered an ankle injury which too kept me on my toes. As a result, I had little time to follow up on the more personal 30.12.2008 case. No followup call had come in the meanwhile.
I am associated with the Sree Vinayaka Mandir located in Sarojini Nagar, New Delhi since childhood. It is a place for recovery and rejuvenation for me. I had also learnt chanting of the Vedas, scriptures and other edicts of my religion at this place. On every second Sunday, there is an elaborate programme known as Mahanyasa Eka Vara Rudrabhishekam which is performed in the temple. Having been trained in this, I also participate in this religious activity as a ritwik.16 The ritual concludes at about 1.30 pm in the afternoon.
After the conclusion of the programme on 13 February afternoon, I dropped my father at my sister-in-law’s place, where he was camping at that time. When I reached home around 3.30pm, I received a call from the reception on the internal phone that some police inspector named Khokhar was waiting to meet me. I asked the guard at the reception to send him in.
Khokhar was a very polite man. He too requested a narration of the intimidation incident again. After I narrated the sequence of events all over again to this man, he requested me to accompany him to the places where all the chasing had taken place and re-run the route, so that he could visualise it better. I agreed and accompanied him. The whole route was revisited.
He also conducted an identification parade (known as TIP) of police personnel posted in Sector -16B police post, Dwarka. They were summoned to the DCP’s office located in Sector 19, Dwarka. They were all lined up in front of me. I couldn’t find the person who had stopped me at the entrance of the Sector
-16B police post, Dwaraka and I told Khokhar, I could not do a positive identification. Khokhar insisted that we have tea in his office. I agreed and we went over to his chamber. There he had also called the in-charge of the Sector -16B police post, Dwarka, one sub inspector called Pankaj Singh Mallick.
He also expressed his anguish and regret at what had happened on 30.12.2008. Mallick said that he was at the Post up to 10.30 pm, when he had to go to attend an emergency call. I let the matter rest after that.
16 Among Hindus, one who is trained in recitation of vedas in the shruti/smriti traditions of learning.
However, again some time in the second week of March
2008, Mallick approached me. This was a few days before I had to go to Darussalam (Bandar Seri Beghwan), Brunei as member of the Indian team to an Asia-Pacific Group meeting on Combating Financing of Terrorism and Money Laundering. Although, noticeably, the police personnel investigating the intimidation always landed home just about when I was scheduled to travel, at that time, I did not think much of this.
Mallick brought out a sheet of paper, asking for my statement for closure of the case. I was not prepared for this. I said, I needed time to think over the matter. Accordingly, I also sent a mail to my senior officer, telling him of Mallick’s visit and his request for closure.
After my return from Brunie, an Assistant Commissioner of Police from the Vigilance Branch of Delhi Police, named Hari Singh, landed up in my office. Again, I had to go through the trauma of narrating the intimidation details, yet another time. The only benefit of the visit in the office was that the MHA Control Room was under my oversight. In this place, there are secluded spaces where one-to-one meetings can be carried out. I took Singh to one such spot and told him all the details. Later, he too wanted a closure statement. This time, I declined, saying that I needed to consult my seniors.
Thereafter, Hari Singh would call me almost daily. He would call me at most awkward hours, some time when I was in the midst of an important meeting, or while driving back from office etc. Once, he voluntarily offered to come to North Block. I had no option but to receive him. Upon meeting, his common refrain was that I should give a statement seeking closure of the case. It was much later that I began to connect the dots. Why the policemen always came when I was very busy?