PRAVEEN DONTHI - Known Unknowns: India’s compromised national security beat
Today, the beat is at once the most glamorous and the most obscure—dominated by a smart, largely hawkish boys’ club that tends to see itself (and be seen) as inhabiting a tidal zone between the media and intelligence agencies. As one editor described them, these are the “guys who work with the guys who work on the frontlines of the national interest”. Reporting on major crimes, insurgencies, Islamic and Hindu terrorism, the Indo-Pak conflict, and other border disputes gives their work an air of unparalleled importance.
Even if defending the nation were journalists’ primary responsibility, it’s hard to ascertain if sources are genuinely attempting to make the country safer. “Every act of irregularity has been committed in the name of protecting the national interest,” the former IB joint director Maloy Krishna Dhar wrote in his memoir, Open Secrets. “This is a bogus claim.” Many agents freely pursue their own agendas: “some make money out of the sacred national trust, some advance career prospects and a few dabble in ideological pursuits.” The same goes for reporters.
The costs of collusion and malpractice are high. “We don’t question the facts given to us enough, and some of it has had dangerous consequences,” Datta said. In particular, anti-Muslim bias—only partly connected to the legitimately threatening activities of organisations such as the ISI and Lashkar-e-Taiba—seems to pervade most reporting on internal security and acts of terrorism, even though there have now been many high-profile cases of terror committed by Hindu extremists. Innocent civilians—often Muslims, sometimes journalists—have been detained, jailed, fired from their jobs, and otherwise ruined by false accusations reproduced without corroboration by the press.
Even if defending the nation were journalists’ primary responsibility, it’s hard to ascertain if sources are genuinely attempting to make the country safer. “Every act of irregularity has been committed in the name of protecting the national interest,” the former IB joint director Maloy Krishna Dhar wrote in his memoir, Open Secrets. “This is a bogus claim.” Many agents freely pursue their own agendas: “some make money out of the sacred national trust, some advance career prospects and a few dabble in ideological pursuits.” The same goes for reporters.
The costs of collusion and malpractice are high. “We don’t question the facts given to us enough, and some of it has had dangerous consequences,” Datta said. In particular, anti-Muslim bias—only partly connected to the legitimately threatening activities of organisations such as the ISI and Lashkar-e-Taiba—seems to pervade most reporting on internal security and acts of terrorism, even though there have now been many high-profile cases of terror committed by Hindu extremists. Innocent civilians—often Muslims, sometimes journalists—have been detained, jailed, fired from their jobs, and otherwise ruined by false accusations reproduced without corroboration by the press.
ON 19 NOVEMBER 1987, during the protracted final phase of the Soviet war in Afghanistan, Indian Airlines flight IC 452 from Kabul landed at New Delhi’s Indira Gandhi International Airport. Shortly after its arrival, a security guard spotted ammunition cartridges rolling out over the tarmac from a damaged crate, one in a consignment of 22 that had arrived on the plane. Airport staff began an X-ray examination of every box. Apart from cartridges, the scan revealed at least one rocket launcher. Police and customs officers took the shipment for a haul of terrorist contraband. While airport personnel argued over who should get credit for the seizure, a man in mufti appeared and identified himself as a Research and Analysis Wing (R&AW) operative. Before the munitions could be properly inventoried, he confiscated the crates, claiming they were government property.
The journalist Dhiren Bhagat broke the story on 24 April 1988, in Bombay’s Indian Post and the London Observer. The damaged crate “was the sort of slip that journalism thrives on,” he later wrote. According to the freight bill, the consignment was telecom equipment bound for the Director General Communications in Sanchar Bhawan—a non-existent official. Looking for an explanation, Bhagat contacted the cabinet secretary, BG Deshmukh, to whom R&AW reported. Deshmukh said he could neither confirm nor deny R&AW’s involvement.
In his article, Bhagat speculated that the smuggled arms had been destined for Punjab, where the Khalistan insurgency was at its peak. In March 1988, there had been several rocket attacks on police and paramilitary units in the state—though nobody was hit—and such weaponry hadn’t been used anywhere else in the country following the November shipment. Although Bhagat didn’t say as much, it seemed plausible that government forces had staged the assaults as a pretext for stepping up military intervention in Punjab (and discrediting Pakistan). “Indian officials have expressed concern about the increased firepower of the Sikh militants, who in the last week have used shoulder-fired anti-tank missiles, similar to those used by guerrillas in the war in Afghanistan,” Sanjoy Hazarika wrote in the New York Times in early April. “Officials here say they have been unable to confirm reports that these weapons have been smuggled across the Afghan and Pakistani borders into Punjab.”
Bhagat expected his report to kick up a storm in the national press and in parliament. “I was wrong,” he wrote. “Nothing appeared. Nothing happened. No questions were asked.” He took it upon himself to meet with parliamentarians and newspaper editors. Most wanted nothing to do with the story. The Times of India and the Indian Express flatly refused to touch it. Other papers discussed the incident, but decided not to pursue it on the grounds of “national interest”. “I don’t dispute your facts,” one editor told Bhagat. “But you are trying to frustrate my plans.” The editor apparently hoped to incite military aggression and “bash up Pakistan”.
Several members of the Rajya Sabha finally raised the issue in parliament, on 29 April. The next day, anonymous official sources issued a carefully worded denial to select journalists. That the government armed Punjab terrorists was “totally unfounded and preposterous”, the sources said (though Bhagat never claimed the weapons were for terrorists). Many papers carried the counterstatement on their front page; the Times of India story was headlined, “Report on Arms Import Denied”. (A few days later, Canada’s Globe and Mail ran a piece titled “Servile press spikes scoop”, which said Bhagat had “blasted a great hole in the theory that Sikh extremists are getting sophisticated Soviet-made rockets from Pakistan.”)
Bhagat soon confronted the information and broadcasting secretary, Gopi Arora, who was involved in trying to defuse the Bofors scandal. “The specific allegation that R&AW imported arms on 19 November has not been denied,” Arora said. “We do not comment on such things.” Bhagat reported Arora’s comments in the Observer and, on 5 May, during a debate on extending president’s rule in Punjab, Atal Bihari Vajpayee read out the story in parliament. P Chidambaram, then the union minister of state for home affairs overseeing internal security, admitted that R&AW organised the shipment. “No government ever comments publicly on the activities of intelligence agencies, but let me assure the House that the equipment which came in has been accounted for,” he added. “It is highly unfair, preposterous, and wrong to suggest that any part of any equipment found its way into Punjab or to the hands of terrorists in Punjab.”
This was probably the only time the work of an intelligence agency was discussed in such detail in parliament, but Chidambaram’s admission was carried prominently only by The Hindu. The Indian Express completely ignored it. Operation Black Thunder II, a paramilitary raid on Khalistani separatists holed up in Amritsar’s Golden Temple, took place the following week. The entire episode seemed to lay bare the Indian press’s unwillingness to properly investigate the country’s intelligence agencies and matters of internal security. Instead of upholding their duty to the public, newspapers—while suppressing stories, pursuing anti-Pakistan agendas, over-relying on anonymous government sources, and taking an indifferent attitude to the corroboration of facts—seemed to hide behind the aegis of national interest.
IN THE YEARS SINCE BHAGAT’S STORY BROKE, reporting on internal security has remained murky, beset by the same practices that kept R&AW’s smuggling operation off the front pages. Few national security journalists bring to their stories the tenacity and critical eye that Bhagat seemed to have. Read more:
http://caravanmagazine.in/reportage/known-unknowns