India’s ISRO Spy Case: Why the Story Refuses to Die, 27 Years Later

'Why didn’t the SC think it was prudent to compensate all and not just Narayanan, one of the discharged accused?'

Former senior ISRO scientist Nambi Narayanan.

(Photo: Liju Joseph / The Quint)

(Here is an excerpt from ‘Classified: Hidden Truths in the ISRO Spy Story’, written by J. Rajasekharan Nair and published by Srishti Publishers. The book re-reads the text of the ISRO espionage case through documents, facts, and prudence, and not through the projection of individuals as the good, the bad, and the ugly. Every argument in the book is supported by documentary evidence.)

Why did the Supreme Court of India, through its judgment of 14 September 2018, make the espionage case appear to be the illegal arrest and torture of S. Nambi Narayanan, obliterating the transnational dimensions of a highly complex and equally complicated espionage case that had damning ramifications on the domestic front, exposing the truth of our premier institutions?

If it is proved beyond doubt that the custody of all the six accused was illegal – which is indeed what happened in the ISRO espionage case – doesn’t the state, of which the judiciary is an integral part, own a responsibility to order compensation for all wrongly accused?

All Five Were Brutally Tortured

Addressing the question, Justice Madan B. Lokur said:

“How can people deal with this situation? The only answer is accountability, which has to be in two forms – one is financial accountability, where a sufficient amount of compensation must be given. If S. Nambi Narayanan can be given fifty lakh rupees, surely a good amount of compensation can be given to all those people who have been wrongly arrested and detained. Once the courts start telling the police or the prosecution that you are bound to pay, I think they will probably come to their senses and not make unnecessary arrests. This is one aspect.”

S. Nambi Narayanan was in custody for 50 days. But it cannot be ignored that D. Sasikumaran, a former ISRO engineer of equal stature, was under custody for 60 days; K. Chandrasekhar, agent of Glavkosmos, was under custody for 58 days; Sudhir Kumar Sharma, a labour contractor who didn’t even know the full form of ISRO when he was arrested, was under custody for 49 days; Fauziya Hassan, a Maldivian woman was under custody for 1,000 days; and Marian Rasheeda, another Maldivian woman, was under custody for 1,145 days. All five were brutally tortured under illegal custody.

Then, why didn’t the Supreme Court think it was prudent to compensate all and not just S. Nambi Narayanan, one of the discharged ‘accused’, whose suit for damages (O.S. No.370/2003) to the tune of one crore rupees was pending before the sub-court in Thiruvananthapuram?

Thorny Questions

Incidentally, the National Human Rights Commission (NHRC) also did a similar act of justice and magnanimity in the ISRO espionage case when it directed the Kerala government on 14 March 2001 to pay ten lakh rupees as ‘immediate interim relief ’ to S. Nambi Narayanan as ‘compensation for gross violation of his human rights by public servants’. It is pertinent to note that the same NHRC had rejected two earlier petitions filed by Mariam Rasheeda and Fauziya Hassan, co-accused in the same espionage case.

Don’t these acts of justice and magnanimity exemplify the inherent fault in our system? Quite often, it pulls the wool over a thousand system failures by correcting one glaring error that is bound to get much public attention and hail it as the inherent nature of the system.

While these questions remain unanswered, many more are emerging afresh from the residue, like killer germs that leave the corpse in search of living ones.

Do we need social distancing from these critical questions? Why should we desensitise our prudence using patriotic sanitisers? Why should the media mask these loaded questions and focus on personality-hype interviews instead?

The state agencies that should have shown us the truth hold a black paper in front of our eyes with certain contrived truths scribbled on it. They place the paper too close to our eyes to prevent us from seeing the mountain of lies they love to hide.

As the public gropes in the dark about the essence of the ISRO espionage case, a re-evaluation of the case is imperative to see afresh why the espionage story cropped up. It is most essential to re-read the text of the ISRO espionage case through documents, facts and prudence, and not through the projection of individuals as the good, the bad, and the ugly!

The CIA's Involvement

Hence, this book. The book addresses the how and the why aspects, besides the who factor, against the backdrop of the new development – a criminal investigation by the CBI against seven Kerala Police officers and eleven IB [Intelligence Bureau] officials. To those who have studied the case in detail, this is nothing more than an act of buffoonery staged by the caged parrot to fix a persona non grata.

When I first exposed that the CIA had masterminded the espionage story in my book, Spies from Space: The ISRO Frame-up (1998), many readers, including some senior journalists, said I was having apophenia. Three years later, Brian Harvey, a former BBC correspondent, expressed the same thought in his book, Russia in Space: The Failed Frontier? Today, the apophenia I had in 1998 is accepted worldwide.

In this book, I am trying to address the question – why did the CIA plant the espionage story and, more importantly, what prompted the CIA to mastermind the spy story sixteen months after Russia had decided not to transfer cryogenic technology to India, something the US wanted the Russian government to do?

The book details the reverse espionage and a clandestine move planned simultaneously to illegally transfer cryogenic rocket technology from Glavkosmos to ISRO, hoodwinking the US intelligence. It also revolves around how the CIA burst the operations using its moles in IB. Furthermore, the book exposes a bizarre and nerve-wracking reality that both IB, India’s premier intelligence-gathering agency, and the CBI, India’s premier investigating agency, are ghost organisations, are illegal and exist in a constitutional vacuum.

You read it right. I am quoting the legal status of IB and CBI from certain legally vetted documents by two High Courts and the Supreme Court.

Hard Facts & Truths

The experiences of the victims of the espionage case are based on long interviews with the victims, besides their diaries and notes of despair. They are presented in their most authentic form. I have only chipped off the non-dramatic time and space from their trauma-scapes.

Since the IB interrogators never revealed their identity to the accused, I am constrained to identify them as Mr A, Mr B and so on.

Fact is the soul of journalism. Fact, for me, is the best available version of the truth.

Through this book, I am riding on hard facts and truths, in search of the truth behind the ISRO espionage case – the truth everyone loves to hide. Truth is always stranger than fiction, especially in this case. The spy story that put to ridicule all our institutions refuses to die for one reason or the other, even twenty-seven years after it was first reported. And those who echo the facts and truths run the risk of being branded as traitors by the establishment, where the press also becomes a willing accomplice by suppressing its questioning spirit.

(The above is an excerpt from ‘Classified: Hidden Truths in the ISRO Spy Story’ by J. Rajasekharan Nair. Blurbs, paragraph breaks and subheadings have been added by The Quint for the ease of readers.)