Spy thriller aficionados can be divided into two broad camps. There are those enthralled by the stylish James Bond who combines his taste for martini, pretty women and fast cars with a doughty determination to take on the likes of Dr No, Goldfinger and, of course, Smersh and Spectre. A smaller group would, however, swear by George Smiley, the MI6 functionary with a messy private life, who patiently pieces together disparate pieces of information in his cerebral battle with the brilliant Karla, the presiding deity of 'Moscow Centre'.
Although the annals of the Great Game speak of the Hindu pundits who played an important supporting role in the romantic intelligence-gathering operations of the Raj, it is fair to say that independent India never quite succeeded in establishing a popular espionage mythology. Was this due to the fact India was merely a playground of the Cold War and never a player?
The Mitrokhin Archive narrates the sorry tale of nearly half of Indira Gandhi's Cabinet rushing to the Soviet embassy to peddle 'secret' documents. Some CIA papers in turn speak of a compromised cabinet minister and money poured into anti-Communist work. In both cases, India was merely a stage for a larger spy versus spy game. There are hardly any declassified documents and first-person accounts of Indian intelligence operations in a treacherous neighbourhood.
To the extent that Salman Khan glamorises, in the James Bond mould, the operatives of the Research & Analysis Wing in Ek Tha Tiger, there may be grounds for believing that India has finally filled the void. A few more muscular Bollywood interventions and we may even wallow in the patriotic myth that our RAW is the local equivalent of the CIA, MI6 and Mossad. Such a perception may even be very good for the self-esteem of the external intelligence unit that has got more than its fair share of adverse publicity.
The extent to which the robust patriotism of Ek Tha Tiger deviates from ground realities comes through in Amar Bhushan's Escape To Nowhere, an account (fictionalised to escape the Official Secrets Act) of the detection and defection of RAW's very own CIA 'mole' Rabinder Singh in 2004. As the man in charge of security in RAW, Bhushan mounted the surveillance on Singh and had to take the rap when the wily double agent used a long weekend and a purported family holiday to the hills to drive to Nepal and, with the assistance of his CIA handlers, fly to the US.
The story of RAW that emerges from this enthralling account is depressing. Far from being another "Circus" staffed by brilliant men and women who had been talent-spotted at university by dons who knew what the service needed, India has crafted RAW in its own bureaucratic image. Thus, the brilliant and the enterprising are weighed down by a system where an excess of discretionary powers has rewarded the plodder, the corrupt and the lackey . This may be the way to run the public works department but it is surely no way to protect and enhance national interests.
There is a compelling case for making the tale of Rabinder Singh into a film, if only to inject a note of realism into the system. Singh was no personification of evil or brilliance. He was dull, mediocre with low retentive powers, a taste for the good life and an over-weaning desire to be posted in the US. His modus operandi was remarkably simple: he simply photocopied every document he could lay his hands on, took them home and sent them by email to his handlers. The RAW bigwigs wanted to catch him red-handed passing 'secret' documents, quite forgetting that IT has made face-to-face contact redundant . In the technical department too, RAW isn't quite fit for purpose.
This was no battle of wits between a Smiley and a Bill Hayden. This was an exhibition match involving Inspector Clouseau and his mirror image.
Although the annals of the Great Game speak of the Hindu pundits who played an important supporting role in the romantic intelligence-gathering operations of the Raj, it is fair to say that independent India never quite succeeded in establishing a popular espionage mythology. Was this due to the fact India was merely a playground of the Cold War and never a player?
The Mitrokhin Archive narrates the sorry tale of nearly half of Indira Gandhi's Cabinet rushing to the Soviet embassy to peddle 'secret' documents. Some CIA papers in turn speak of a compromised cabinet minister and money poured into anti-Communist work. In both cases, India was merely a stage for a larger spy versus spy game. There are hardly any declassified documents and first-person accounts of Indian intelligence operations in a treacherous neighbourhood.
To the extent that Salman Khan glamorises, in the James Bond mould, the operatives of the Research & Analysis Wing in Ek Tha Tiger, there may be grounds for believing that India has finally filled the void. A few more muscular Bollywood interventions and we may even wallow in the patriotic myth that our RAW is the local equivalent of the CIA, MI6 and Mossad. Such a perception may even be very good for the self-esteem of the external intelligence unit that has got more than its fair share of adverse publicity.
The extent to which the robust patriotism of Ek Tha Tiger deviates from ground realities comes through in Amar Bhushan's Escape To Nowhere, an account (fictionalised to escape the Official Secrets Act) of the detection and defection of RAW's very own CIA 'mole' Rabinder Singh in 2004. As the man in charge of security in RAW, Bhushan mounted the surveillance on Singh and had to take the rap when the wily double agent used a long weekend and a purported family holiday to the hills to drive to Nepal and, with the assistance of his CIA handlers, fly to the US.
The story of RAW that emerges from this enthralling account is depressing. Far from being another "Circus" staffed by brilliant men and women who had been talent-spotted at university by dons who knew what the service needed, India has crafted RAW in its own bureaucratic image. Thus, the brilliant and the enterprising are weighed down by a system where an excess of discretionary powers has rewarded the plodder, the corrupt and the lackey . This may be the way to run the public works department but it is surely no way to protect and enhance national interests.
There is a compelling case for making the tale of Rabinder Singh into a film, if only to inject a note of realism into the system. Singh was no personification of evil or brilliance. He was dull, mediocre with low retentive powers, a taste for the good life and an over-weaning desire to be posted in the US. His modus operandi was remarkably simple: he simply photocopied every document he could lay his hands on, took them home and sent them by email to his handlers. The RAW bigwigs wanted to catch him red-handed passing 'secret' documents, quite forgetting that IT has made face-to-face contact redundant . In the technical department too, RAW isn't quite fit for purpose.
This was no battle of wits between a Smiley and a Bill Hayden. This was an exhibition match involving Inspector Clouseau and his mirror image.
Singh was not the first RAW operative who was compromised, and nor will he be the last. As long as Indian intelligence operates in a strategic vacuum, it will be vulnerable to corruption, leaks and inefficiencies . Good intelligence also demands a national purpose. India, tragically, doesn't have any.
It is not going to be a happy Independence Day for the many lakhs (estimates range from 2.5 to four lakhs) of people in makeshift refugee camps in the Kokrajhar and Dhubri districts of Assam. The state, chief minister Tarun Gogoi has ominously proclaimed, is "living on a volcano", with the possibility of sectarian violence being aggravated by a bewildering array of armed groups linked to one or another ethnic group. Overwhelmed by incomprehension, the otherwise prickly liberal intelligentsia and editorial classes have turned away their gaze after mouthing the familiar platitudes about the need to preserve peace. Considering the magnitude of the explosion and compelling evidence of administrative lethargy, even the by-now mandatory demand for the CM's resignation has not been mouthed with any measure of conviction.
Driving this squeamishness is the fear of taking sides. Rather than probe the specificities of the situation in the north bank of the Brahmaputra, the custodians of the national conscience have retreated behind a curtain of moral equivalence-the compassionate equivalent of the plague-on-both-houses approach. There have been lots of assertions about what the troubles were not: they weren't 'communal', they weren't triggered by forces from across the Bangladesh border, and they weren't state-sponsored. Was it, therefore, a bout of monsoon madness that affected Assam? If not, what was it?
It is not that the answers are unknown. But it is a truth that dare not speak its name. The story of the July 2012 riots has escaped narration on the national stage because the story-line suggests inconvenient villains and incorrect heroes.
Leaving aside the competitive haggling over which community suffered the most and who struck first, what was witnessed in Assam was a general uprising of an exasperated Bodo community against an unending wave of marginalisation and loss. Equally, it was provoked by the growing belligerence of a settler community (known in many quarters as Bangladeshi Muslims and whose citizenship is contested) that now perceives itself as the dominant group in at least 11 of the 27 districts of Assam and its insistence that the special powers of the Bodo Territorial Council to prevent land alienation be scrapped. On display were two different forms of aggression. The Bodo violence was born of desperation, while the aggression of the settlers was driven by anticipation of a new conquest.
It is not unfair to suggest that it is the Bodo wall that has prevented the entire north bank of the Brahmaputra from being overwhelmed by creeping settler colonisation-a process that began in the early decades of the previous century and continues relentlessly to this day. For the Bodos, one of the earliest inhabitants of Assam, the issue is not merely a question of habitat. It is twinned with larger questions of language and identity. The community, which makes up a nominal 5% of the state's population, has been caught in a pincer movement. First, there are the physical encroachments of land-hungry Bangladeshi Muslims who are already dominant in neighbouring Dhubri and who have established squatter's rights over communal lands in Kokrajhar and Chirang districts. Second, there are the cultural threats to the Bodo language and identity from the caste Assamese.
It is true that Bodo leaders increased their community's isolation by failing to strike strategic alliances with indigenous non-Bodo communities such as the adivasis and Koch-Rajbonshis. Giving these communities a stake in the Bodo areas would have given the resistance to settler colonisation a greater strategic depth. It may even have encouraged the Assamese to see Bodos as an ally in a common 'anti-foreigner' struggle.
However, this short-sightedness cannot distract from the fact that Bodos have a right to feel aggrieved by the indifference to their plight in both Dispur and Delhi. Today, the tragic predicament of the Bodos is being wished away by invoking the cruel but inexorable logic of history. In the process, what is being overlooked is that the colonisers are more than economic migrants. They are fast-developing independent ambitions that may well go beyond the purview of both state and national politics. Allowing the Bodo wall to be breached may well have grave implications for the political geography of India.
Driving this squeamishness is the fear of taking sides. Rather than probe the specificities of the situation in the north bank of the Brahmaputra, the custodians of the national conscience have retreated behind a curtain of moral equivalence-the compassionate equivalent of the plague-on-both-houses approach. There have been lots of assertions about what the troubles were not: they weren't 'communal', they weren't triggered by forces from across the Bangladesh border, and they weren't state-sponsored. Was it, therefore, a bout of monsoon madness that affected Assam? If not, what was it?
It is not that the answers are unknown. But it is a truth that dare not speak its name. The story of the July 2012 riots has escaped narration on the national stage because the story-line suggests inconvenient villains and incorrect heroes.
Leaving aside the competitive haggling over which community suffered the most and who struck first, what was witnessed in Assam was a general uprising of an exasperated Bodo community against an unending wave of marginalisation and loss. Equally, it was provoked by the growing belligerence of a settler community (known in many quarters as Bangladeshi Muslims and whose citizenship is contested) that now perceives itself as the dominant group in at least 11 of the 27 districts of Assam and its insistence that the special powers of the Bodo Territorial Council to prevent land alienation be scrapped. On display were two different forms of aggression. The Bodo violence was born of desperation, while the aggression of the settlers was driven by anticipation of a new conquest.
It is not unfair to suggest that it is the Bodo wall that has prevented the entire north bank of the Brahmaputra from being overwhelmed by creeping settler colonisation-a process that began in the early decades of the previous century and continues relentlessly to this day. For the Bodos, one of the earliest inhabitants of Assam, the issue is not merely a question of habitat. It is twinned with larger questions of language and identity. The community, which makes up a nominal 5% of the state's population, has been caught in a pincer movement. First, there are the physical encroachments of land-hungry Bangladeshi Muslims who are already dominant in neighbouring Dhubri and who have established squatter's rights over communal lands in Kokrajhar and Chirang districts. Second, there are the cultural threats to the Bodo language and identity from the caste Assamese.
It is true that Bodo leaders increased their community's isolation by failing to strike strategic alliances with indigenous non-Bodo communities such as the adivasis and Koch-Rajbonshis. Giving these communities a stake in the Bodo areas would have given the resistance to settler colonisation a greater strategic depth. It may even have encouraged the Assamese to see Bodos as an ally in a common 'anti-foreigner' struggle.
However, this short-sightedness cannot distract from the fact that Bodos have a right to feel aggrieved by the indifference to their plight in both Dispur and Delhi. Today, the tragic predicament of the Bodos is being wished away by invoking the cruel but inexorable logic of history. In the process, what is being overlooked is that the colonisers are more than economic migrants. They are fast-developing independent ambitions that may well go beyond the purview of both state and national politics. Allowing the Bodo wall to be breached may well have grave implications for the political geography of India.
The CAG report seems to have once again let the genie out of the bottle. Parliament has now been stalled once again, after a fairly smooth budget session, with the government and opposition now locked in a war of words over the CAG reports. Given that there were as many as 101 bills pending with parliament at the end of the last budget session one can only gauge the cost of these disruptions. This is especially because much was expected in the current session as the new finance minister was very keen to step up the pace of policy making and help kick start the economy.
However, the current disruption of parliament is only a continuation of a disturbing phenomenon that has cropped up in recent years with the political parties using the forum of the house for grandstanding and trying to ensure the maximum publicity instead of using the opportunity to debate the issues and highlight grievances. But it will be unfair to blame any single political party for this secular decline in the working of the parliament.
The tendency to deride parliament has been an ongoing process with almost all important political parties playing an equally dubious role. Some of this has to do with political contingencies. For instance the sharpest fall in the performance of the parliament was during the Tenth Lok Sabha when the razor thin majority forced the Narasimha Rao government to reduce the number of its annual sittings from 98 to 72 over its term. This was a major climb down from the performance of the Eighth Lok Sabha when the Rajiv Gandhi government managed to hold even more than 100 sittings during some years. The NDA government which came in in 1999 did no better with the number of annual sitting going down from 85 to 74 over its term. The worst was the first UPA rule when the annual sittings dropped to an all time low of 46 in 2008. Though it has managed to marginally improve the annual sittings to 73 days by2011 it is still far less than half the peak number of 151 sittings held in the mid nineteen fifties.
That it has been unable to function even as there is a huge backlog of legislation certainly reflects badly on the Indian Parliament. But what makes this scenario even more disturbing is that we have failed to keep in sync with the legislatures of other major democracies who seem to be doing a much better job by generally working almost double the number of days clocked in India.
In fact the numbers for the last decade show that the House of Representatives in the United States met for almost 132 days annually on the average while the Senate met for as much as 162 days. And in the case of the United Kingdom the House of Commons met for 140 days annually and the House of the Lords for 150 days. The annual sittings of the House of Commons in Canada and the French National Assembly were an impressively large 119 and 172 days respectively. Similarly in large developing countries like Brazil, where legislative work is much more challenging, the Chamber of Deputies met for around 186 days while the Federal Senate sat for 206 days.
And unfortunately for India the fall in the number of parliament sessions has been accompanied by a decline in the legislative work with the number of bills passed each year coming down from a high of around 120 in the mid seventies to just around forty in the last few years. But the worst part is that the Indian parliament has been unable to efficiently use even the limited time it has at its disposal due to unhealthy practices. In fact the numbers show that the Lok Sabha could use only 43% of its time due to disruptions of the house in 2010. Though the share of productive days improved in 2011 the Lok Sabha and Rajya Sabha still lost 30% and 35% of their time due to disorderly conduct last year. One can now only hope that both the government and the opposition do sit together work out an agreement to end the disruptive tactics and ensure that parliament works for at least one third of the year so that it at least keeps up with the pace maintained by much older democracies.
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