by R. SREERAM
She paused. ‘If I quit, what’s the guarantee that my replacement will not be a rubber stamp for whatever more excesses this government wants to commit?’
As we looked at each other across the massive desk, I was suddenly struck by a disturbing thought. Was she sincere? Or was she making a pitch to the so-called insider, sending a message back to INSAF? Was it, at the end of the day, merely a ploy to ensure that she would justify herself to posterity through my account of this meeting?
17th September, 2012. Dubai.
The air-conditioned room on the seventy-eighth floor of the Burj Khalifa did nothing to cool down Mrs Pandit’s temper. She paced the floor, as visibly angry as she had ever been in her entire life, and her entourage tried to keep out of her way as much as possible.
When the phone eventually rang, she leapt upon it with such intensity that the secretary standing near hurried away. Without preamble, as soon as she had pressed the ‘talk’ button, she asked, ‘Have you located him yet?’
‘You were right, madam,’ said her contact. ‘Razdanji is being held in the Siliguri Air Force Base. Brilliant thinking . . .’
Mrs Pandit exhaled, pleased with herself. For an entire night, she had been worried about Razdan’s whereabouts. No one had heard from him since the takeoff from Guwahati, and since she had not got any news of it, a crash was unlikely. Given the circumstances, it was more likely that the plane had been forced down somewhere en route.
An Air Force base was the only possibility that covered the criteria – a place to land and park an aircraft, and the privacy and discipline to ensure that such an eminent guest remained on-base unheralded. It was only a question of identifying which base, which was where her knowledge of the defence setup in the region proved invaluable. Getting in touch with trusted scouts was comparatively more difficult, but the risk had been worth it.
One of them had succeeded.
‘Are you sure?’ she asked, wanting that reassurance.
‘Positive,’ her scout said. ‘I saw the aircraft myself, and no other flight has landed or taken off since yesterday afternoon. This is the place, madam. I am sure of it. I’d stake my life on it.’
‘Good job,’ she said absently, cutting the call. So Kuldip was being held in Siliguri. Beautiful. She could not have asked for a better location. It would take reporters at least half a day to find their way to Siliguri from Kolkata, and that would be time enough to build up a frenzied sympathy for a blameless leader. Before she was through, Kuldip Razdan would become a martyr whose star would eclipse whatever goodwill GK had generated with his measures the previous day.
17th September, 2012. Singapore.
‘Al-Jazeera is reporting that Kuldip Razdan may be held at an Air Force base in Siliguri. That’s a town in West Bengal state. It’s being picked up by other channels, and the anchors are starting to press the government to present him safe and sound ASAP.’
‘Don’t we have anybody there?’ the protégé asked his mentor.
The chief waved away the minion who had brought in the update. As the door closed behind him, the chief turned to his junior with an indulgent smile. Ah, but the young still had a lot to learn.
‘We do not have a resource in every base or town, contrary to what you may have imagined,’ he said, not unkindly. ‘It’s better when you have them in the right place. A clerk in the National Command Headquarters is more useful to us than a squadron leader at a base.’
He did not voice the suspicion that the news was probably being leaked by Mrs Pandit – Al-Jazeera being the dead giveaway. He was impressed with the lady for having the gumption to turn the pressure back on the government so soon after having been displaced. Of course, it could have been someone else using Al-Jazeera to throw suspicion on Mrs Pandit . . . a highly unlikely scenario, but possible nonetheless, which is why he kept the whole thought process to himself. As the chief, he could never afford to lose face in front of his protégé. That sign of weakness would be his death warrant.
‘Have you been able to find out who’s working against us?’ he asked instead.
The younger man nodded. ‘We have picked up some chatter about a super-secret agency called Insaaf. We don’t know what it stands for, but apparently it’s an Urdu word meaning justice. About a month ago, Gyandeep had mentioned that this group could be behind some of our recent setbacks, but he seemed to think it was a small enough group for him to handle without any assistance from our side.’
‘If Gyandeep hasn’t mentioned it since then,’ said the chief thoughtfully, ‘there’s every chance he might have taken care of it himself. We’ll have to ask him next time we talk to him.’
‘Speaking of time . . . the attack tonight?’
‘I’ll let you know when. I assume the crew is getting into place.’
‘We have leased out a small warehouse in the area and the equipment is being moved in. We are about half a mile from where our decoy sent his signal. It’s weak, but it’s positive – he’s located Leela.’
‘Make sure you have at least two cameras bringing up the rear. When I talk to Gyandeep, I don’t want possibilities – I want proof.’
‘I’ve taken care of that.’
‘Floor plans?’
‘We chose all the Trojan horses very carefully, as I’ve already told you. They don’t miss a thing. And the Trojan who got picked up at Delhi is one of the best. We’ve used him for recon before and he’s got an eidetic memory. As soon as our team makes contact, he will give them the floor plans, the location of the interrogations rooms, whatever he was able to notice. We will be able to stage it perfectly.’
‘Good. The hit has to be quick and clean. And anyone who gets captured dies. No man left behind . . . alive. Make sure your crew understands that.’
He’s getting older, the protégé thought, older and repetitive. We’ve already been over this six times today.
‘And once they find Leela?’ asked the chief, not for the first time.
The protégé held his exasperation in check. He nodded. ‘They know what to do.’
17th September, 2012. New Delhi.
I left the Supreme Court as miserable as I had been when I went in, but having gained a copy of Major-General Qureshi’s post-mortem report and a detailed brief from the CJI on how I needed to conduct myself as a friend of the court. I briefed Richa as we waited for our ride back to the hotel, but we rode in silence, mindful of the driver eavesdropping on us. The CJI had urged me to be discreet. Very discreet.
We found a cosy, private corner in a café inside the hotel and parked ourselves for the foreseeable future there. I was sure there were more things Richa wanted to share – or to know – just as I wanted to ask her a few questions myself. I waited until we had been served with our snacks – cakes and cookies – before wading in.
‘You’re supposed to be an investigative reporter, right?’
She pretended to be affronted. ‘Supposed to be? That’s insulting.’ But she was smiling, as was I.
‘Did you do any background checks on Raghav, Jagannath, Nelson . . . I mean, you’ve been around them a lot longer than I have.’
‘I did,’ she said, taking a slice of the walnut cake and biting into it. ‘I suppose you did a bit of research of your own last night.’
‘I did, but not with much success. There’s practically nothing on Raghav or Jagannath, and just a few mentions of Nelson from years ago. Nothing recent.’ I didn’t need to mention that Googling INSAF had yielded nothing as well.
She nodded. ‘There’s practically nothing about them online. But that’s deliberate. I found a few cached pages on Google from long back about Nelson but on the actual websites, the stories have been taken down. I assume you found out about his kidnap by Maoists in 1998.’
I knew, but not through Google. Over the remainder of our trip to the hotel the previous night, I had managed to drag the whole story out of Raghav eventually. I hadn’t committed any of it to paper – part of a gentleman’s agreement that neither of us
would talk, ever again, of what he’d told me – but I remembered it verbatim.
It was my first time being part of an operation. I was the junior-most guy in the team, by age as well as in experience, but I was a great shot, the top of the class in sharp-shooting – so I guess that earned me my slot. We had received intel that a group of Maoists who had kidnapped a local tahsildar was holed up in a part of the forest; negotiations were going on for his release, but there were murmurs that the governments – state and central – were not very serious because he was not from an important family and he had also been a pain in the ass for the local MLA. Or MP, I forget which.
Anyway, we were waiting for them in a place we had scoped out pretty well. But something went wrong – we underestimated their speed, and it was a fire-fight when it should have been us taking them down without having to fire a single shot. We lost three from our team, but the Maoists were wiped out. By that time, because he was more a liability to them than a bargaining chip, Nelson had been starved to the point of exhaustion. If we had waited one more day, he might not have made it.
He was weak and I and another guy had to carry him. We were loading him onto a make-shift stretcher when he pushed me away. And took the bullet meant for me. One of the guys we had shot was still alive and Nelson had seen him aiming for me. That bullet went through his arm and out the other side, but not by design. He saved my life.
So that’s the reason you believe in him? I had asked.
No. The way I saw it, we’d rescued him, and he’d repaid that debt by saving us.
But the shit hit the ceiling when we came back to camp. We were taken into custody for participating in an unauthorized mission, the commanding officer was dismissed and the benefits denied to the families of the three guys who had died, because it was an illegal mission. And all because some jackass in IB had forgotten to copy the home secretary on the message that was sent to us.
I don’t know how, but Nelson found out. He sold off his house and property and used it to set up a trust for the three families. He knew a guy in the Army, used him to get the CO reinstated with full privileges and rank. And then he convinced a couple of NGOs to adopt the village the Maoists hailed from – it wasn’t the Stockholm syndrome or anything, he just wanted to ensure that other youth from the village didn’t have the same reasons to kill. If I’m not wrong, Jagannath used to work with one of the NGOs – that’s how they met. There was some legal issue, something to do with funds and jurisdiction, and they managed to beat it.
Nelson kept saying that life had taken a different meaning for him during those days in captivity. Like, he knew now how it felt to be dispossessed, to be stripped of every connection you had to the world, to feel hopeless and just want to die. And not just if you are a hostage, but – like the guys who’d kidnapped him – driven to violence because there was nothing else in their lives, or because nothing else seems like it will help.
In the initial days, it was just a routine get-together, you know, like it was his way of telling us we were not forgotten. Then I realized he was still helping out members of the unit in one way or another – and not just the guys who were part of our op. Loans, schooling, relocation . . . post-trauma care and recovery. I don’t know where he found the money or the energy, but he took care of us.
I didn’t even have to think twice when he asked me to transfer to Army Intelligence a few years later, and then to INSAF when it was formed. I’d trust the guy to the ends of the earth, and I’d then walk off it if he asked me to.
‘Raghav – was he with Army Intelligence?’
She couldn’t mask her surprise in time. ‘How did you find out? It took me a lot of digging and even then, his brother officers only said it was possible he had been in ArmInt!’
I tried to pull off a look of modest cool.
I remembered Jagannath remarking that Richa was nobody’s fool and wondered if word had gotten back to him of her background checks. Most likely. If Raghav was as important to INSAF as he seemed to be, Jagannath would be certain to have his ears to the ground where he was concerned. Despite my reservations about the coup, I had none such where INSAF’s ability to operate secretly or omnipotently was concerned.
‘What about Jagannath?’
‘Ex-lawyer. Did you know that he was once a junior to the current chief justice when she was practising in the high court?’ I shook my head, the familiarity between them now explained. So that’s why the CJI reached me through him. Which also raised a rather disturbing possibility that she could have lied to me, that she had been in on the coup from the start. The enormity of such a conspiracy was staggering.
‘So what’s an ex-lawyer doing in INSAF?’
She shrugged. ‘Search me. All I’ve been able to find out is that there was some scandal with a case of his, after which he vanished for years. He was defending a serial criminal and managed to get him off, but the client was murdered anyway soon after. The crime was never solved but there were rumours he had done it himself. He dropped off the grid after that. The next time he surfaced, he was already attached to Nelson and was acting as a legal advisor to the Intelligence agencies, particularly where domestic operations were concerned. Again, a lot of it is hearsay. It seems like a lot of people know him, but no one’s ever been sure what he’s been doing in New Delhi all these years.’
‘How come I didn’t find anything?’
‘He changed his name. He wasn’t Jagannath Mitra then.’
‘Then how did you find out?’
She looked pleased with herself as she explained. ‘There was nothing to explain his transition from being a defence lawyer to an advisor for RAW and the IB. But someone must have known him in the interim, a trail the transition must have left. And I got lucky. One of the major-general’s contacts in Military Intelligence remembered him, knew his past because he had vetted him for clearance. Clearance that was granted because Nelson vouched for him.’ She dropped her voice a touch. ‘Apparently, Jagannath lived up to expectations. To quote my contact, he was scarily amoral. The ends justified the means every single time. He was a great asset for them, but none of them were comfortable around him.’
I tried to reconcile this picture with the one I had of him. The emotional appeal he had made to me yesterday. The way he had spoken to Gyandeep, led me around inside the Rashtrapati Bhavan as if he owned it. The absolute faith in Kalyug that he exuded. He was a man with convictions. Dangerous convictions. Did that make him just as dangerous?
‘What about Nelson then?’ I asked. ‘I read he was once an IAS officer.’
She nodded. ‘From Odisha. There’s a rumour he was once kidnapped by Naxalites and was let go after his family paid the ransom. The government kept it silent, for obvious reasons. Later, he fell foul with the higher-ups when he was in Karnataka. Took on the local mafia and discovered that they had ties to everyone who mattered in the government. The state government tried to arrest him on some trumped-up corruption charges – that would have been the last you got on him online. Someone saved him, because instead of being dismissed, he was sent to Mussoorie as an instructor for the next batch of IAS and IPS officers.’
‘That would have definitely helped him build his network of contacts in important offices across the country.’
‘It did, there’s no doubt about that. He’s so well-informed about what’s happening across the country – right down to the district level – that I am sure his network is more active than ever.’
‘And to top it all, he knows whom he can trust. And which ones will sell out.’ I tried to get the timeframes in perspective. Almost fourteen years, five of which he had spent setting up INSAF. He must have learnt his lessons after all those unsuccessful confrontations.
‘I don’t think he’d use someone who would sell out. Too much risk. At least, not a mercenary, not someone who would turn around and sell his secrets to anyone with the money.’
I nodded, for that made sense. I was confident I had almost cracked the genesis of Kalyug,
the parallels with India, 2012 helping me immensely in the unravelling. As Richa had mentioned, Nelson would not have risked the secrecy around Kalyug by depending on anyone who wasn’t committed – at an almost-spiritual level – to the cause. The slightest whisper, and their enemies, or targets, would have known the rest.
In India, 2012, despite the spontaneity of the masses’ revolution against the government, there were hidden, more sophisticated forces that nudged public anger along. Organizations with their subsurface agendas, men and women with their own reasons, their own mot juste for breaking down the system. And what worked for them must have worked for Nelson and Jagannath as well.
The simmering resentment on the ground, aided and abetted by a million injustices, real and perceived, providing a fertile ground for aimless intellects looking for a worthwhile cause to invest in. With the intelligence apparatus in their control, the Nelson-Jagannath combine must have had ready access to this list of involuntary volunteers and sufficient background knowledge to know what would work with each one. I did not know if they had even started INSAF with the long-term intention of bringing about such a coup, but it was a scary thought that if they had, our wisest of the wise in the country had not been able to divine their intentions.
Like the corruptors in India, 2012, approaches would have been made. Superficial probes, at first, to determine if the attempt to reach out would be worthwhile, validating the suitability of a conspirator; later on, once acceptability was granted, more attempts, increasing their intimacy with the subject, with agent provocateurs like Raghav stepping in to escalate and finally, with a message powerful enough to elicit an inviolable commitment, recruit the next line of agents.
And as Raghav had told me on our way to the Rashtrapati Bhavan, it was not rocket science. It needed dedication and access to information, but it wasn’t much more complicated than putting together an über-governmental organization that had to stay under the radar until it chose not to.