Of the Intelligence Bureau, HDFC and Bond Trading

The last month has broken my resolve to spend the rest of my life in India.

With my 70th birthday due in November, I must face the fact that it is futile to hope for an end to the incomprehensible oppressions some element of the Intelligence Bureau (IB) has directed at me over the last five years. In fact, it is getting worse and more blatant.

In the new apartment I moved to after the asthma episode, my usually robust health feels under constant insidious assault. Watching television with my feet up on the tea table, I see an unexpected drama, the bone of my left toe rising as if in response to blunt trauma. It hurts badly for a week, dully still; all my joints have unfamiliar aches; strange bells ring in m y ears. (Anyone considering reforms of the IB should ensure multi-key/off-site authorization for the use of aggressive technologies like weaponized ultrasound and directed radiation.)

The bulging toe removes any remaining doubts. Those who mean me ill are beyond reason, law and conscience. I must move.

As if to reinforce my determination, a small news item in The Indian Express tells of a new book by one of the men arrested and held for some seven years because the IB said they were terrorists. The trial resulted in all charges being dropped. The book tells of torture, as bad as anything you read about in Iraq under Anglo-American occupation. The torturers named in the book are all walking around free; they claim to know nothing of the allegations.

None of the half dozen other newspapers I read regularly has even a small story on the book.

In that scale of atrocity it is futile to hope that my pitiful blog posts about my small miseries will draw redress or bring any change.

Time to go, I tell myself and set about getting my finances together for the move. There’s not much to do, just sell three blocks of tax free government bonds and unfreeze another two of fixed deposits.

The bonds are in “demat” form, sold to me by HDFC Securities with the strong assurance that they can be readily sold online. The online trading platform informs me the bonds are selling at a nice premium but when I press the “Sell” button nothing happens.

So I head over to the HDFC Securities office behind Caculo Mall, a short bicycle ride away. There an official checks my account and says the bonds can be sold and puts me in touch by phone with a trader; he tells me it will take two days to sell them.

Why?

The bonds have to be “moved” to the branch.

It turns out later he said they had to be “mapped” to the branch, as meaningless a term to me as “moved,” for “demat” bonds exist only in cyberspace.

“I will call you,” he says. Two days later, not hearing from him I initiate the call.

It turns out that in the two days he spent “mapping” my bonds, their value has slid dramatically. Why? The equity markets have dropped over 600 points. That, he says, has affected the bond prices.

Some odd things happen along the way to getting my money.

It is the trader himself who calls to confirm the trades.

I get a text message: “As per SEBI norms NSE will start sending SMS/Email alert to you about transactions in your account. If SMS is wrongly sent to you reply by typing Y to 561614.”

The message is ostensibly from NSE, the National Stock Exchange.

I get not a single communication from NSE or any other authority. The HDFC trader/self confirmer is the only one I hear from.

As my phone informs me regularly that “active call divert” is in effect, it is possible any NSE message was blocked or went to the people manipulating my bond trades. Any NSE email alerts probably suffered the same fate.

I put down most of this in a letter to the HDFC branch manager and fill her in on the IB's dislike of contrarian journalists. She promises to reply in writing and forwards my letter to HDFC Securities to get their input.

The man from HDFC Securities calls me and says the two day delay to “map” the bonds is normal because I had bought them from the branch.

I tell him they were bought from his own agent. “Ah, it is normal to have the delay because it was your first trade,” he says. He does not mention the odd trader/confirmer arrangement or the peculiar SMS from the NSE.

Yesterday, at the branch manager’s office I ask about the promised written response to my complaint. “Oh I but I thought it was resolved,” she says, referring to my conversation with the HDFC Securities man. I say nothing was resolved; we merely stated our different positions.

While all this is happening, I am engaged in a parallel effort to register my change of address with the bank. The relationship manager asks for a recent electricity bill, a copy of the lease, and my ID proof. She asks specifically about my PAN card.

“I’ve lost my PAN card,” I say.

She says the lease and utility bill of the landlord should do. I take them in and everything seems to be in order, but then it turns out it is not. The flat is new, and the electricity bill is still in the name of the builder. She asks again for my ID proof and this time I have my passport with me.

“I also found a copy of my PAN card,” I say, giving her a printout from a scan I had on my computer. For some reason, she takes that and not my passport.

By way of further excitement I get a call in the evening from the clerk at the foreign exchange counter who was supposed to have sent my money to the UN Federal Credit Union in NY.

She cannot put it through because the UNFCU does not have a SWIFT code, only an ABA routing number.

Seems odd, for I have sent funds into my account from different countries and that has never been a problem. I am to go to the bank again this morning to try and resolve the matter.

Will keep posting as matters develop, for I think there is going to be many a slip between now and when I board the plane for New York.

In fact as I write this, my Samsung laptop has begun to exhibit the keyboasrd problems that have made my Sony Viao all but unusable. Perhaps I will have to do the rest of my writing about this process from an IB monitored Cyber Café.

How like Eastern Europe in the Cold War India has become!

Creepy Crawly: Some Afterthoughts

In re-reading yesterday's post I see some important details are missing.

• The ants who nested inside my Samsung laptop must have been extremely smart and technically proficient. They unscrewed a sealed compartment and (going by what the service center technician in Pondy said), replaced two standard black screws with white ones.

• The neighbor who I called for help when having the asthma attack says he was awake at the time. His phone neither rang nor has a missed call record.

• I forgot entirely about the Intelligence Bureau's successful effort to prevent me from a bid to show my paintings at the Jehangir Art Gallery in Mumbai. See here.

• I just spent a night at the Goa International Center of which I am a life member. The room had the latest membership directory, and lo, I had disappeared from it. Don't think it is an oversight. Why would the IB do that? For the same reason it has me in a virtual North Korea in India: to make me a non-person. 

Also wanted to share a thought about why the IB continues to harass me: they probably think my awareness of their attempts at surveillance and manipulation must mean I have superior foreign technology and hence I must not be what I seem.

It is perhaps useless to address paranoia or corruption with reasoned explanation, but let me try.

The technology that allows me to know what the IB is doing to me and around me is entirely indigenous.

It is much celebrated in the long history of Indian tradition as spiritual awareness.

Back to Creepy Crawly Time!

Just when I think the nut cases at the Intelligence Bureau have gone off my case they come roaring back.

In early April I woke up coughing one morning and the puff at the inhaler, which is usually good for my mild asthma, had no effect.

It got worse very rapidly, and feeling that I needed help, I tried calling a neighbor. It was before seven in the morning and there was no reply.

Next I tried calling a taxi. I have three on my mobile phone.

The first two did not pick up. The third did. "Manoj, I need to get to Manipal Hospital" I croaked. He knows who I am and where I live.

There was a slight pause. Then another voice came on. "Wrong number" it said.

By then I was in deep distress and passed out. How long I was out I don't know, perhaps a few minutes. But eventually I regained consciousness. As I was heading for the compound gate the resident IB spook was coming in on his bike. He was visibly surprised to see me.

That was only the most dramatic of recent incidents.

Another was when I went to a musical concert and at intermission, left a tiny package of pills on the seat to show it was taken. When I got back, the taped brown-paper package had been ripped open and one of the pills pushed out from its blister pack.

What exactly they're looking for or have against me is impossible to say. It can't be just that I keep writing that the IB is completely out of control and needs to be brought under constitutional controls.

In fact, it reminds me of the first time I went to Nepal. It was the sixties, and I went overland along what was then called the "hippie trail."

From the train-head on the Indian side you had to take a cycle rickshaw through a magical stretch of gloomy forest.

There was no one on the Indian side of the border. On the Nepali side a lone sentry inspected my backpack.

I did not notice the time because it was so pleasant, but eventually, the impatience of the rickshawwallah got through to me.

The sentry was carefully going through my underwear and socks.

"What are you looking for?" I asked amiably.

"I don't know sir," he replied

It seems to me that is the predicament of all intelligence agencies. They have to be suspicious with no idea what to look for.

What makes the IB particularly interesting is the belief of some of its staff that they need to control what journalists write. And that those who they cannot control must be harassed.

I have written about this off and on over the last few years, but rather than give links to old posts, perhaps it's time to offer a summary.

The first time surveillance turned to harassment it turned my face black, as if I was undergoing radiation treatment.

That was followed by two "accidents" in Pondicherry. On both occasions, motorcyclists ran into my bicycle. Neither so much as tapped his horn (a certain indication of mala fide in India).

One ran into me frontally and knocked me to the pavement. The shopkeeper there helped me up and wiped the blood from a cut to the forehead. The guy who ran into me, a rather hefty police type, took off.

The second incident occurred on a clear day on an uncrowded road: another police type ran into me from the back and sent me sailing a good six feet. No blood but I felt the jarring in my 66-year old bones for a fortnight.

Other harassment took the form of warning people that I was a spy. At a meeting of the Progressive Writers Group, the speaker, thinking I was asleep, remarked "Ah, the spy has gone to sleep!" (and had the grace to look embarrassed when I opened one eye to let him know I had heard.)

In 2011, I brought back a Sony laptop from New York. It became totally dysfunctional in short order. The local service center proved entirely, even arrogantly unhelpful. It comes back to life occasionally, I guess when someone at IB is feeling magnanimous. Last week I could use it to surf the web. Today I can't get it to boot.

Forgot to mention that a Samsung I bought in Mumbai in 2008 also became dysfunctional, but the guy at the service center found the problem: ants nesting inside. They ate up some vital ingredient and now it too will not turn on.  

Back in Goa, my cleaning lady came in one morning and asked me to get her a sim card. As it is illegal in India to get someone else a mobile phone connection, I declined. She refused my offer to accompany her to the shop and stand guarantor. That evening there were bomb blasts in Hyderabad, and I realized that I might have escaped entrapment very narrowly.

I wanted to go to the World Social Forum in Tunis and my attempt to get a visa set off all kinds of unexpected repercussions. Here I must resort to a link, for the story is too complex to summarize.

After I wrote about what had happened, a reader suggested that I complain to the Home Ministry. The Ministry passed the buck to the Home Secretary in Goa, who evidently initiated a police inquiry.

I got a call from the Dona Paula Police Station and went there to make a statement. In the course of my narration I mentioned the Hyderabad blasts.

Whether my statement was an FIR or not, it obviously must have put someone's nose seriously out of joint, for the harassment became intense.

There was urine in my microwave oven. (I forgot to mention, they seem to have full access to my apartment.) There was human excreta on an inside page of one of my newspapers.

The food I ordered from restaurants invariably came spilled loose inside their plastic bags. Dry food came liberally laced with grit. If I went myself to get the food, an IB flunky would -- with a very in your face attitude -- appear beside me at the counter and get anywhere from a third to a half of what I had ordered.

When this was at its height, I emailed the Governor of Goa, who I had met at an art gallery opening, suggesting we collaborate on a book about Indian intelligence. (He was the former head of RAW.) He declined, but it stopped the harassment: whoever was responsible was obviously reading my email.

I also tried to get a lawyer to file suit against the IB but had no luck finding one to take the case. (By the way, according to reports, none of India's intelligence agencies responds to RTI requests although they are supposed to do so in cases of infringement of human rights.)

In the period that followed there were successive efforts at entrapment.

At a musical evening at Taleigao Church a pimply teenager sat leaning into me. The man next to her whispered "Are you doing it?" Whatever it was she was supposed to do, I did not wait to find out.

At a film showing the man in the next seat was reaching for my crotch and I was getting ready to clock him when he suddenly sprang from his seat and literally ran up the aisle. (Did someone monitoring my responses tell him to run for it?)

On an evening visit to the Magsons supermarket at Caculo Mall as I was passing through a dim stretch of street a little kid leaped on the back of my bicycle; if I hadn't let out an inadvertent yell that scared him off, it might have turned nasty. (The papers then were full of rapes and assaults on kids.)

A continuing element of the IB activity is the interception of my incoming telephone calls. Because of that, it is impossible for anyone to reach me. Most calls I make go through two stages. In the first, a "No network coverage" or other service denial message flashes on my phone. In the second, if the call is deemed allowable, it goes through; otherwise it beeps off.

What leads me to write this lengthy resume of my interactions with the Intelligence Bureau is what I've just gone through with a real estate broker. Perhaps the tale is best told by the letter I emailed her yesterday.

Dear M------,

Given the possibility of fraud because of the non-return of my HDFC cheque number xxxxx I am putting on record the circumstances in which I wrote it.

You asked me for a cheque of Rs.23,000/- as earnest of intent in negotiating the rental of an apartment at Kamat Royale, Caranzalem owned by Mr.xxxxx xxxxx, also resident in the same compound.

When I received the draft agreement from the owner I realized that it would be impossible to have him for a landlord and told you I was not interested in pursuing the matter.

That was in the second week of April.

When I queried you about not receiving the cheque back you told me Mr. xxxxx had cashed it. Upon checking with my bank I found out it had not been cashed and put a stop payment block on it.

Since then I have repeatedly asked for the return of the cheque and you have told me that Mr. xxxxx was travelling and out of reach.

Yesterday (30 April), when I was told that again, I asked for his phone number so I could clarify his intentions. You agreed to give me the number but then the line was disconnected.

Following that, I sent a phone text message putting the matter on record.

This email message is for the same purpose, only in more detail."

What is behind this situation is anyone's guess, but the fact that I have felt the need to write the letter to protect myself in the event of an elaborate IB fraud speaks volumes. 

It is legitimate to wonder how much it has cost the Indian taxpayer for the IB to play its paranoid little Spy games with a journalist too brash to be good at any kind of deception.

Will they ever get tired? Or will someone ever tell them to stop?
 
 .      

Two Weird Incidents

 Haven’t had a creepy crawly incident in some time, so these came as a surprise.

The first was about two weeks ago, about 7:30 on a dry dark monsoon evening. I was riding my bicycle to the Magsons Superstore about a mile or so from home when, on an unlit stretch of road, a boy, about 12 or 13, grabbed the bike and hopped on to the rear carrier.

 I let out an outraged shout and told him to get off.

From my glimpse before he scurried into the darkness it was a well-dressed middle-class kid.

I told two men walking just ahead of me on the road why I had shouted and continued on my errand.

 It occurred to me that if I had not reacted loudly and instantly, the situation could have easily got out of hand: in the prevailing supercharged Indian atmosphere on sex crimes a strange boy on the back of my bicycle in the dark could be interpreted half a dozen creepy ways, and the two men ahead of me on the road were well-positioned to do just that.

 In some ways, the fact that the creeps are down to attempted character assassination is heartening, for it began four years ago with attempts at serious bodily harm; and all for just one sin (as far as I can see), writing what's on my mind!

My firsthand experience of having no ready avenue of appeal against official highhandedness has been eye-opening. It is a serious flaw in our democracy and a potent danger.

 In 2013 I tried to file a law suit, only to find the lawyers I approached had been intimidated and would not take up the case.

After that, I sent a note on the hairy things that had been happening to the Governor of the state and its Chief Secretary, but did not receive an acknowledgement from either; however, one must have acted, for the incidents stopped -- until now.       

The second recent incident did not seem creepy initially: an email from a supposedly radical American web site asking if I would do a podcast on my blog item on The Real First World War.

The owner of the website was to call me early this morning but did not.

I chalked that down to the “active call redirect” to which my phones are subject and was going about my business when, about three in the afternoon, a call came in from someone in London who said he was going to record the podcast from there.

 The American joined the conversation after a few minutes and gave every indication of not being a radical of any kind. In fact, he was politically illiterate. Even after a correction he continued to explain BRICS as “Britain, India, Russia, China, South Africa.”

 I’ve had more informed political inquisitors in chance encounters on Indian trains.

 When I broached the topic of the British Empire resuscitating itself as the money-laundering system that sustains the global criminal underground, he got cold feet very fast and declared my views not good enough for a podcast.

There wasn’t a peep from the man in London the whole time, and thinking of that led to my decision to write about the experience, just in case my voice should appear in some reconfigured manner somewhere and implicate me in unseemly matters.

Consider this an advance alibi.

 I would love to know what a quiet retirement feels like!

 

The Grim End of Creepy Crawly

I reproduce below a shocking story headlined "From stenography to journalism—Ashish Khetan" by an unnamed "Special Correspondent in The Hindu of 23 May. 

"While the rest of the crime reporters were busy taking down what the police or Anti-Terrorism Squad (ATS) was putting out in Mumbai, journalist Ashish Khetan formerly with Tehelka, says he struck out on his own to go beyond the official versions of “terrorists”and terror cases. His year-long investigation into three major cases of bomb blasts has exposed horrific truths about the way in which the ATS, the Maharashtra police and police from other states have functioned with impunity and virtually condemned and tortured 21 young men because they were Muslims.

"Khetan’s investigative journalism portal aptly named Gulail (or slingshot in English) has “ unearthed internal documents from more than half a dozen anti-terror agencies that show that the State has been knowingly prosecuting innocent Muslims for terror cases and keeping the evidence of their innocence from the courts.”

"At a press conference on Wednesday to present his investigation and screen a film with candid interviews of accused Muslim men, Mr Khetan also said he had sent a letter petition to the Bombay high court with nearly 400 pages of evidence in the form of official investigation and interrogation reports of the accused men and other documents which clearly indicate huge discrepancies. The petition said that his research into the July 11, 2006, train blasts, the Malegaon 2006 blasts and the Pune German Bakery blasts of February 2010 show that the ATS has deliberately created bogus evidence, extracted false confessions by the most inhuman torture, planted explosives in the houses of the young men and implicated innocent youth. In the name of internal security, the ATS and other agencies were misleading the courts, Khetan said.

"Senior police officials have been named by the young men in their interviews, where they speak of torture and abuse and pressure to turn approver for large sums of money. A senior police officer even expressed his helplessness and said it was important for them to find some accused since they were unable to crack the case. There are different versions of the same case notably Malegaon 2006 where the NIA has just filed a chargesheet. Seven of the nine men arrested earlier were released on bail in 2011.

"Khetan said he wasn’t out to prove anyone’s guilt but expose the farcical criminal investigation which also reflected deepset anti Muslim prejudice. What is serious is that one of these men Himayat Baig has been given the death sentence for the Pune German Bakery blasts when clearly police had found evidence of another man’s involvement. The case of Qateel Sheikh who died in a high security Pune prison just before he was to testify in a Delhi court is no longer a mystery going by what Khetan’s documents show. The ATS arrested Himayat Baig from Udgir and claimed he had carried out the German Bakery blast. However, a year later the Delhi police arrested Qatil Siddiqui and Interrogation Reports obtained by Khetan show he is linked to the Pune blast. These reports were not produced in the court which finally gave Baig the death sentence. Police then tweaked reports to show Sheikh’s involvement in another case.

"Presenting all the facts, Khetan has asked the high court to order an independent commission of inquiry into the conduct of the investigating officers, action against officers guilty of violations and relief for the victims of such operations."

My Own Creepy Crawly Update

As for my own experience of official overreach, my grievance filed with the Home Ministry in Delhi got a quick closure and I was instructed in an email to follow-up with the Chief Secretary, Goa. I sent an email to the Chief Secretary asking what I should do about the matter and nearly two months on, have yet to receive a reply.

However, my inquiry has energized the goon squad which seems, judging from its intrusions into my personal space, to be curious about my sexual inclinations. It's too creepy to go into the details, but in case they have any doubts after four years of surveillance and the latest experiments, I am straight and not a pedophile.

The need to clarify these matters probably arose because someone noticed I am celibate (my own experiment with Truth), and that I bought some elementary alphabet books for my ex-cleaning lady's illiterate 10-year old daughter. (My offer to get her a tutor was declined).

As for the fiasco of my cancelled trip to the World Social Forum in Tunis, Thomas Cook continues to be superbly inefficient and uncaring: they're still holding on to the refund for the travel. 

How I Didn’t Get My Tunisia-WSF Visa

I could not go to the World Social Forum in Tunisia for lack of a visa.

This is the strange story of how that happened.

When I bought my Egyptair ticket from the Thomas Cook office in Goa on 8 March, it seemed a bit strange that the agent said he was “not authorized” to get my visa. Only the TC office in Mumbai could do that.

All he could do was print out the application form from the Embassy’s web site.

He also told me that as I had a stopover of more than 12 hours at Cairo, I would need a transit visa, and that I could apply for both Egyptian and Tunisian visas in Mumbai.

The Thomas Cook office in Mumbai declined to process a visa for a passenger ticketed from Goa. Also, the consulate in Mumbai did not do visas; only the Embassy in Delhi did.

In Delhi the next morning the gatekeeper at the Tunisian Embassy told me I would have to apply from the street, as there was no space for visitors inside. Another applicant, who claimed to be a World Bank consultant, confirmed that was the case.

After much tooing and froing to a nearby Internet café/Xerox shop, my passport and a fee more than double the posted figure disappeared into the Embassy.

There was no receipt or token number; and the gatekeeper said it would take five days to get the visa: some 40 passports were being sent off that day to Tunis for processing.

The gatekeeper said there was an agent familiar with the Embassy who would retrieve my passport and courier it to me in Goa. My concern at not having any receipt for the transaction he dismissed airily: “Chinta math kariye, eisay he hota hai.” (Don’t worry, This is how it happens.)

I went back to Goa and waited. When the deadline passed without any sign of my passport I called the Embassy. An Indian voice at the Visa Section said she would call when the visa was issued. It became a routine over the next few days. 

Thomas Cook in Goa refused all help: it was "against policy." The agent suggested I fly to Delhi and get my visa. Perhaps I could speak to the head of the TC visa processing section in Mumbai? He claimed not to know a soul there and could not help me contact anyone.I have never in my well-traveled life met so unhelpful a travel agent.

On 22 March I cancelled my tickets and called the person who was supposed to retrieve my passport. He said he would get my passport on Monday, the 25th.

That was the final slightly weird element of what in retrospect seems to be yet another creepy crawly episode. (See here, here, here and here.)

As I wait to see if I will get my passport back, I wonder, will someone else have used it? And to what ends?

The thought rests on another slightly weird experience.

On the morning of 21 February the person who cleans my apartment asked if I could get her a new sim card; she did not have the residence proof to get one herself.

I asked what happened to the phone she had. She still had it, but wanted another.

I offered to accompany her to the shop and attest to her address in writing, but that she declined.

Later that day, when terrorist bombs went off in Hyderabad, it struck me that I might have escaped a serious entrapment. I write this post in case my passport turns up in some incriminating context: I want my alibi in the public domain.

And anyone at the WSF who runs into a person claiming to be Bhaskar Menon is hereby authorized on behalf of all Mission Impossible fans to reach out and rip off the impersonator’s latex mask.