Déjà View | Covert operations
In the 1960s and 70s, India was involved in seemingly virtuous intelligence activities in the most unusual place: Africa
Photo: Pradeep Gaur/Mint
Who doesn’t like a good spy story?
In the light of recent activities on the Indo-Myanmar border, I’ve spent the last few hours scouring the Web for information on covert operations carried out by Indian government outfits. And I must say I’ve been surprised. On several counts.
Firstly I’ve been surprised, and impressed in a schoolboy-ish way, at the sheer number of Indian government agencies involved in this kind of thing. There are all those special force units—Para Commandos, Garud Force, Marcos—that fall under the purview of the Armed Forces. Then there are the special units that fall under the paramilitary category. The Sashastra Seema Bal that is overseen by the ministry of home affairs is a case in point. Then there are outfits such as the Special Frontier Force, part of the Research and Analysis Wing (RAW), that occupy their own, very specific, shadowy domains. And finally there are the spy agencies themselves: RAW and Intelligence Bureau (IB).
Not to forget the numerous agencies that are so secretive that they have no presence on the Internet and, therefore, I don’t even know exist.
I’ve also been impressed by how much public interest there is in keeping track of this kind of thing. And in meticulously cataloguing all the various Indian covert operations and agencies and spymasters. Websites such as Bharat Rakshak and several Pakistani fora go into the topic of Indian covert activity in obsessive detail. One might even call it a subculture. One that dissects all kinds of hijackings and assassinations and defections.
But most of all I’ve found the stories of these covert operations, in as far as they are described publicly, absorbing. Mind you, I am a complete bleeding heart liberal when it comes to guns and bullets. I’d rather countries talked for years and years rather than killed people. I like covert operations like I like my childhood cartoon shows—lots of explosions and guns, robots and tanks, but nobody dies.
Which is perhaps why my ears stood up when I read about a peculiar set of seemingly virtuous intelligence activities carried out by India in the 1960s and 70s in Africa. (Not one of the first places that pops into your mind when you think of Indian espionage.)
B. Raman gives us a tantalizingly brief glimpse of this in his book The Kaoboys of R&AW. In the early 1960s, the first head of RAW R.N. Kaohimself, writes Raman, spent months in Accra, at president Kwame Nkrumah’s invitation, helping Ghana build its own intelligence gathering capabilities. Raman says that Indira Gandhi later personally encouraged RAW to help anti-apartheid movements in both South Africa and Namibia.
For a somewhat fuller idea of India’s involvement in African affairs one must turn to India’s Ocean: The Story of India’s Bid for Regional Leadership, a book by David Brewster, an Australian researcher and expert on South Asian strategic affairs. Brewster says that from the early 1970s “India took an active role in assisting insurgent groups and the so-called ‘Frontline’ Black African states that opposed the White regimes in South Africa, Southwest Africa and Rhodesia”.
Initially, Brewster says, India’s efforts were meagre. But things seem to have changed during the Morarji Desai administration under foreign minister Atal Bihari Vajpayee’s stewardship. India began to substantially aid dissidents working for the African National Congress (ANC), the South West African People’s Organisation (SWAPO) and the Zimbabwe African People’s Union (ZAPU).
Secret training camps were set up in both India and Africa, says Raman, where ANC and SWAPO were given military training. Some of this training may have been imparted by retired RAW operatives. How far did this Indian involvement go? How many Indian personnel and how much Indian material was involved in the battle against the apartheid regimes?
We may never know.
But we do know that this was an intensely complicated game of cloak and dagger. Right through this period—the 60s through to the 80s—India publicly denounced the apartheid principle and participated in international boycotts of South Africa. But behind the scenes, the wheels of realpolitik, as it were, whirled away. In 2010, South African researchers Hussein Solomon andSonja Theron presented a paper at a seminar in Delhi at Jawaharlal Nehru University. In Behind The Veil: India’s relations with apartheid South Africa, the authors suggest that India and South Africa secretly maintained good relations, and that India may have purchased defence supplies from South Africa even as it maintained a public, anti-apartheid facade. (The paper is freely available online. And will raise most eyebrows.) At the same time, by the early 1980s, Brewster writes, the Indian military may have been secretly training air and land forces in Zambia and Botswana to fend off Rhodesian and South African incursions.
The mind boggles when you think about it. So India was simultaneously censuring South Africa in public, secretly doing business with them, but also even more secretly helping to topple the same regime. Compared to all that, this business on the Indo-Myanmar border pales a little. But hey! Who knows what is really happening out there.
I can’t wait to read Ajit Doval’s book when he writes it in 2045.
(If, indeed, Ajit Doval is a real person.)
Every week, Déjà View scours historical research and archives to make sense of current news and affairs.
Comment at views@livemint.com. To read Sidin Vadukut’s previous columns, go to www.livemint.com/dejaview
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