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The Special Relationship with India
Part 2: The Decline and Fall of Congress
The result of the Indian elections of March 1977 caused shock and consternation in both the Centre and the New Delhi main residency. Leonid Shebarshin, the main resident, was hurriedly recalled to Moscow for consultations.1 As well as fearing the political consequences of Mrs Gandhi’s defeat, the Centre was also embarrassed by the way the election demonstrated to the Soviet leadership the limitations of its much-vaunted active-measures campaigns and its supposed ability to manipulate Indian politics. The FCD report on its intelligence failure was largely an exercise in self-justification. It stressed that an election victory by Mrs Gandhi had also been widely predicted by both Western and Indian observers (including the Indian intelligence community), many of whom had made even greater errors than itself. The report went on to explain the FCD’s own mistakes by claiming that the extreme diversity of the huge Indian electorate and the many divisions along family, caste, ethnic, religious, class and party lines made accurate prediction of voting behaviour almost impossible. This was plainly special pleading. The complexities of Indian politics could not provide a credible explanation for the failure by the KGB (and other observers) to comprehend the collapse of support for Mrs Gandhi in the entire Hindi belt, the traditional Congress stronghold, where it won only two seats, and its reduction to a regional party of South India, where it remained in control.
The FCD also argued, in its own defence, that Mrs Gandhi’s previous determination to hold on to power had made it reasonable to expect that she would refuse to surrender it in March 1977, and would be prepared if necessary either to fix the election results or to declare them null and void (as, it alleged, Sanjay’s cronies were urging). Indeed the FCD claimed that on 20 March, when the results were announced, Mrs Gandhi had tried to prevent the Janata Party taking power but had been insufficiently decisive and failed to get the backing of the army high command.2 There was no substance to these claims, which probably originated in the Delhi rumour mill, then working overtime, and were passed on to the KGB by its large network of agents and confidential contacts. Contrary to reports to Moscow from the New Delhi main residency, the transfer of power after the election was swift and orderly. In the early hours of 21 March Mrs Gandhi summoned a short and perfunctory cabinet meeting, where she read out her letter of resignation, which was approved by the cabinet with only minor changes. At 4 a.m. she was driven to the home of the acting President, B. D. Jatti, and submitted her resignation. Jatti was so taken aback that, until prompted by Dhar, he forgot to ask Mrs Gandhi to stay on as acting Prime Minister until the formation of the next government.3
The tone of the Soviet media changed immediately after the Indian election. It blamed the defeat of Mrs Gandhi, hitherto virtually free from public criticism, on ‘mistakes and excesses’ by her government. Seeking to exempt the CPI from blame, a commentator in Izvestia claimed, ‘It is indicative that Congress Party candidates were most successful in places where a pre-election arrangement existed between the Congress and the Communist Party of India, or where the Communist Party, with no official encouragement, actively supported progressive candidates of the Congress Party.’ In reality the election was a disaster for the CPI as well as for Congress. Dragged down by the unpopularity of the Indira Gandhi regime, it lost all but seven of the twenty-five seats it had won in 1971, while its rival, the breakaway Communist Party of India, Marxist (CPM), won twenty-two. The Centre responded cautiously to the landslide victory of a CPM-led coalition in state elections in West Bengal in June 1977. Though Andropov was eager to set up covert communications with the new state government, he was anxious not to offend the CPI. It was therefore agreed after discussions between Shebarshin (recently promoted to become deputy head of the FCD Seventeenth Department) and a senior CPSU official that, though KGB officers could make contact with CPM leaders, they must claim to be doing so on a purely personal basis. According to FCD files, ‘important information’ about CPM policy was obtained by the Delhi main residency from its contacts with Party leaders.4
The KGB’s main priority during the early months of the Janata government was damage limitation. In the course of the campaign Morarji Desai had charged Mrs Gandhi with doing ‘whatever the Soviet Union does’ and declared that, under a Janata government, the Indo-Soviet treaty might ‘automatically go’.5 The Centre feared ‘a reinforcement of reactionary anti-Soviet forces’.6 On 24 March the Politburo approved an FCD directive ‘On measures in connection with the results of the parliamentary elections in India’, whose main objectives were to preserve the Friendship Treaty and to deter Janata from seeking a rapprochement with the United States and China.7 Though the Desai government did set out to improve relations with the United States and China, the Indo-Soviet treaty survived. A joint communiqué after a visit by Gromyko to New Delhi in April committed both countries to ‘the further strengthening of equal and mutually beneficial co-operation in the spirit of the Indo-Soviet Treaty of Peace, Friendship and Co-operation’.8 In August the Politburo approved a directive on KGB active measures entitled ‘On measures to influence the ruling circles of India in new conditions to the advantage of the USSR’.9
The ‘new conditions’ of Janata rule made active-measures campaigns more difficult than before. Articles planted by the KGB in the Indian press declined sharply from 1,980 in 1976 to 411 in 1977.10 The Centre, however, continued to make exaggerated claims for the success of its active measures in making the Janata government suspicious of American and Chinese policy.11 The New Delhi main residency also claimed in June 1978 that it had succeeded in discrediting the Home Minister, Charan Singh, Indira Gandhi’s most outspoken opponent in the Janata government, and forcing his dismissal. 12 In reality, Singh’s dismissal was due to the fact that he had accused Desai and other ministers of being ‘a collection of impotent men’ because of their failure to bring Mrs Gandhi to trial.13 He was later to return to the government and briefly succeeded Desai as Prime Minister in the later months of 1979.
The March 1977 KGB directive approved by the Politburo had instructed the Delhi main residency to ‘influence [Mrs] Gandhi to renew the Indian National Congress on a democratic [left-wing] basis’. In order not to offend the Janata government, the Soviet embassy was wary of maintaining official contact with Mrs Gandhi after her election defeat.14 Instead, the Delhi main residency re-established covert contact with her through an operations officer, Viktor Nikolayevich Cherepakhin (codenamed VLADLEN), operating under cover as a Trud correspondent, though there is no evidence that she realized he was from the KGB. The residency also set up an active-measures fund codenamed DEPO in an attempt to buy influence within the Committee for Democratic Action founded by Mrs Gandhi and some of her supporters in May 1977. Though there is no evidence that Mrs Gandhi knew of its existence, the fund had available in July 275,000 convertible rubles.15 On New Year’s Day 1978 Mrs Gandhi instigated a second split in the Congress Party. She and her followers, the majority of the party, reconstituted themselves as Congress (I) - I for Indira. Though she eventually admitted that things ‘did get a little out of hand’ during the emergency, she continued to insist that Janata’s election victory owed much to ‘foreign help’. ‘The movement against us’, she declared, ‘was engineered by outside forces.’16 As usual, Mrs Gandhi doubtless had the CIA in mind.
Janata’s fragile unity, which had been made possible during the 1977 election campaign only by common hostility to Indira Gandhi, failed to survive the experience of government. At the general election in January 1980 Congress (I) won 351 of the 542 seats. ‘It’s Indira All The Way’, declared the headline in the Times of India. Soon after her election victory, Mrs Gandhi tried to renew contact with Cherepakhin, only to discover that he had been recalled to Moscow.17 While welcoming Mrs Gandhi’s return to power, the Centre was apprehensive about the future. The power of Sanjay, whom it strongly distrusted, was at its zenith, his role as heir apparent appeare
d unassailable, and - despite the presence, unknown to Sanjay, of an agent codenamed PURI in his entourage18 - the KGB seems to have discovered no significant means of influence over him. Though Sanjay’s death in an air crash in June 1980 left Mrs Gandhi distraught, it was doubtless welcomed in the Centre.
Mrs Gandhi’s relations with Moscow in the early 1980s never quite recaptured the warmth of her previous term in office. She particularly resented the fact that she could no longer count on the support of the CPI. During Brezhnev’s state visit to India in December 1980, she said pointedly at a reception in his honour, ‘Understandably, we face an onslaught from the “right” and, not so understandably, from the “left”.’19 According to KGB reports, some of the CPI attacks were personal. Indian Communist leaders spread rumours that Mrs Gandhi was taking bribes both from state ministers and from the French suppliers of the Mirage fighters which she decided to purchase for the Indian air force. During visits to India by both Brezhnev and the Soviet Defence Minister, Marshal Ustinov, she asked for Soviet pressure to bring the CPI into line.20 When the pressure failed to materialize, Mrs Gandhi took her revenge. In May 1981 she set up a new Congress (I)-sponsored association, the Friends of the Soviet Union, as a rival to the CPI-sponsored Indo-Soviet Cultural Society - declaring that the time had come to liberate Indo-Soviet friendship from those who had set themselves up as its ‘custodians’. It was, she said, the ‘professional friends and foes of the Soviet Union who created problems for us’. She also set up a ‘world peace and solidarity’ organization to break the monopoly of the World Peace Council, headed by an Indian Communist and much used as a vehicle for Soviet active measures.21
Moscow’s failure to bring the CPI into line, however, continued to rankle with Mrs Gandhi. In June 1983 she sent a secret letter to the Soviet leader, Yuri Andropov, attacking the CPI for having ‘ganged up’ against her with right-wing reactionaries. The letter was entrusted to Yogendra Sharma, a member of the Party Politburo who disagreed with Rajeshwar Rao’s opposition to Mrs Gandhi. Once in Moscow, however, Sharma had second thoughts and ‘confessed all’ to a Party comrade. When the story was made public in India, Indira’s critics accused her of ‘inviting Soviet interference in India’s internal affairs’. Mrs Gandhi refused to comment.22 Though somewhat tarnished, however, the Indo-Soviet special relationship survived. When Mrs Gandhi visited Moscow for Brezhnev’s funeral, she was the first non-Communist leader to be received by Yuri Andropov.23
The KGB continued to make large claims for the success of its active measures. When the Indian government refused in July 1981 to give an entry visa to an American diplomat named Griffin, who was due to take up a post as political counsellor at the US embassy, the KGB claimed that the decision was due to its success over the previous six months in linking him with the CIA. Vladimir Kryuchkov, the head of the FCD, reported to the Politburo:
According to information received, the initiative in making this decision came from I[ndira] Gandhi herself. A significant role was also played by anti-American articles which we inspired in the Indian and foreign press, which cited various sources to expose the dangerous nature of the CIA’s subversive operations in India. Attempts by representatives of the USA and of the American press to justify the methods and to pretend that Griffin had been the victim of a Soviet ‘disinformation’ campaign were decisively rejected by the Minister for Foreign Affairs, N[arasimha] Rao, who stated that ‘this action was taken independently and was in no way prompted by another country’. 24
The greatest successes of Soviet active measures in India remained the exploitation of the susceptibility of Indira Gandhi and her advisers to bogus CIA conspiracies against them. In March 1980 Home Minister Zail Singh blamed the USA and China for fomenting unrest in Assam and the tribal areas of the north-east. Shortly afterwards Home Ministry officials claimed to have ‘definite information’ that the CIA was ‘pumping money’ into the region through Christian missionaries. Mrs Gandhi herself repeatedly referred to the ‘foreign hand’ behind this and other outbreaks of domestic unrest. Though she rarely identified the ‘foreign hand’ in public, it was clear that she meant the CIA.25
One of the main aims of KGB active measures in the early 1980s was to manufacture evidence that the CIA and Pakistani intelligence were behind the growth of Sikh separatism in the Punjab.26 In the autumn of 1981 Service A launched operation KONTAKT based on a forged document purporting to contain details of the weapons and money provided by Pakistani Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI) to the militants seeking to bring about the creation of an independent Sikh state of Khalistan. In November the forgery was passed to a senior Indian diplomat in Islamabad. Shortly afterwards the Islamabad residency reported to the Centre that, according to (possibly optimistic) agents’ reports, the level of anxiety in the Indian embassy about Pakistani support for Sikh separatists indicated that KONTAKT was having the alarmist effect that Service A had hoped for.
In the spring of 1982 the New Delhi residency reported that Agent ‘S’ (apparently a recent recruit) had direct access to Mrs Gandhi and had personally presented to her another forged ISI document fabricated by Service A, which purported to demonstrate Pakistani involvement in the Khalistan conspiracy.27 Though there is no convincing evidence that Agent ‘S’ or the forgeries channelled through him had any significant influence on Mrs Gandhi, the Centre succumbed to one of its recurrent bouts of wishful thinking about its ability to manipulate Indian policy. On 5 May it congratulated the recently installed main resident, Aleksandr Iosifovich Lysenko (codenamed BOGDAN), on the supposed success of Agent ‘S’28 and informed him that the Centre proposed to use ‘S’ as a major channel for feeding future disinformation to Mrs Gandhi. Before the agent’s meeting with Mrs Gandhi, the Centre sent the following detailed instructions:a. During meetings [with ‘S’], acquaint the agent with the contents of the [latest forged] document and show interest in his opinion regarding the importance and relevance of the information contained in it for the Indian authorities. Also it should be explained to the agent that the document is genuine, obtained by us through secret channels.
b. Work out a detailed story of how ‘S’ obtained the document. (This will involve organizing a short trip to Pakistan for the agent.)
c. Inform ‘S’ that, in accordance with the terms laid down by the source [of the document], he must not leave the document with VANO [Mrs Gandhi]. Recommend to the agent that he acts in the following way in order not to arouse a negative reaction in VANO. If VANO insists that the document is left with her, then ‘S’ should leave a previously prepared copy of the document, without the headings which would indicate its origin. Instruct ‘S’ to observe VANO’s reaction to the document.
d. Point out to the agent that it is essential that he builds on his conversation with VANO in order that he can drop hints on what she can expect from ‘S’ in the future and what information would be of special interest to her.
‘S’ reported that he had shown the document to Mrs Gandhi on 13 May 1982. The fact that she did not ask for a copy suggests that she did not attach much significance to it. The KGB, however, preferred to credit the self-serving claims made by ‘S’ about his supposed influence on the Prime Minister.29
Shortly after succeeding Brezhnev as Soviet leader in November 1982 Yuri Andropov approved a proposal by Kryuchkov to fabricate a further Pakistani intelligence document detailing ISI plans to foment religious disturbances in Punjab and promote the creation of Khalistan as an independent Sikh state. The Centre believed that the Indian ambassador in Pakistan, to whom this forgery was sent, would consider it so important that he was bound to forward it to Mrs Gandhi.30 The KGB appeared by now supremely confident that it could continue to deceive her indefinitely with fabricated reports of CIA and Pakistani conspiracies against her.
Mrs Gandhi’s importance as one of the Third World’s most influential leaders was further enhanced, in Moscow’s eyes, by her election as Chair of the Non-Aligned Movement in succession to Fidel Castro. The Indian p
ress published photographs of a beaming Castro embracing her in a bear hug as he handed over to her in March 1983 at the seventh summit of the Movement in Delhi. On the eve of the summit the Delhi main residency succeeded in planting in the Indian press a forged secret memorandum in the name of the US representative at the United Nations, Jeane Kirkpatrick, which gave further bogus details of American plans to foster divisions in the Third World and undermine Indian influence.31 Under Mrs Gandhi’s chairmanship, the Non-Aligned summit devoted little time to the war in Afghanistan and concentrated instead on issues of disarmament and economic development, which offered ample scope for attacks on the United States. The post-summit communiqué condemned the United States fifteen times; the Soviet Union, by contrast, was only once bracketed with the United States as sharing responsibility for the arms race. Moscow was predictably delighted. Pravda declared that ‘the Non-Aligned Movement has displayed devotion to its basic principles of struggle against imperialism, colonialism, racism and war’.32
The World Was Going Our Way Page 44