TOI Buries Eye-Popping Story on Intel Bureau

On 12 April The Times of India buried on page 8 an eye-popping story on the Intelligence Bureau that casts an entirely new light on the surveillance of Netaji’s kin.

Written by V. Balachandran, a former Special Secretary in the Cabinet Secretariat, the story tells how the IB continued after independence to work closely with the Brits.

“Declassified British archives speak of a loud disconnect between the Nehru government’s strategic policies and the priorities pursued by the IB,” Balachandran writes.

India’s warming relations with the Soviet Union and its cooling ties with Britain following the 1956 Suez Crisis did not affect IB-MI-5 cooperation a whit.

In fact, IB shared intel on Soviet leaders with the Brits, and even gave them information on Moscow's funding of Indian communists.

The IB Director at that time wrote to his British counterpart that “In my talks and discussions I never felt that I was dealing with any organization which was not my own.”

That sentiment seems to have been shared by others who led IB.

Its first Director shared a dislike of V.K Krishna Menon with the head of MI-5, who assured his own government “we are doing what we could to get rid” of him.

To facilitate such close cooperation the British maintained a Security Liaison Officer (SLO) in New Delhi for over two decades after independence. When he was finally withdrawn in 1971, the IB Director wrote officially that he “did not know how [he] would manage without him.”

Balachandran notes MI-5’s official historian Christopher Andrew’s view that Indian Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru “either never discovered how close the relationship was” between the two agencies “or less probably, did discover and took no action.”

That situation needs to be kept in mind, Balachandran says “before we jump to any conclusions that Jawaharlal Nehru had ordered IB snooping on Netaji Subhas Bose’s family members.” .

As a journalist genetically mistrustful of intelligence agencies I should add that it is also necessary to keep in mind the possibility that the British declassified the documents containing these revelations so as to divert attention from the damning evidence of Nehru's collaboration with them. In the final phase of the freedom struggle he was compromised by his liaison with Edwina Mountbatten into playing a deeply invidious role.

That is a matter for historians to ponder.

What is significantly more urgent is the need to ensure that the Intelligence Bureau is no longer attached to the MI-5 teat. 

There should be a judicial inquiry empowered to look into the entire record of the IB in independent India.

A special focus of the inquiry should be the allegations of IB complicity in the 26/11 attacks.

This would also be a good time to create a constitutional framework for our Intelligence agencies and draw them into a system of parliamentary oversight and accountability.

Without a strong and rigorously implemented set of standards and rules they could very well be the death of Indian democracy.

Net Neutrality & Capitalism 1:01

According to the Wall Street Journal and the Washington Post, the chairman of the United States Federal Communications Commission has secretly proposed a new rule that will allow broadband carriers to provide a “fast lane” to those who pay for it.

The FCC has vehemently denied the reports but no one seems to believe it.

Writing in The New Yorker, Tim Wu, a professor at Columbia Law School and an expert on the topic, declared that if enacted, the rule “will profoundly change the Internet as a platform for free speech and small-scale innovation. It threatens to make the Internet just like everything else in American society: unequal in a way that deeply threatens our long-term prosperity.”

He argued that preferential treatment for some will inevitably mean degrading the service for all others. “We take it for granted that bloggers, start-ups, or nonprofits on an open Internet reach their audiences roughly the same way as everyone else. Now they won’t. They’ll be behind in the queue, watching as companies that can pay tolls to the cable companies speed ahead.”

Amidst the growing talk of the need to mobilize resistance to the rule, let me point out that even if adopted, such a discriminatory rule cannot last long.

Why?

Because capitalism in the Information Age is significantly different from what it was during earlier eras.

When English merchants first invented it in the 17th Century, capitalism was merely a means to share the risk of trade with India. The East India Company, created in 1600, was the world’s first joint-stock corporation, and it soon became the model for companies throughout Europe.

The stock markets that came into being to facilitate the buying and selling of shares in trading companies, became, in the industrial era, the means to raise the vast amounts of capital necessary to build the necessary infrastructure.

In those earlier eras, the corporate elite were solidly in charge, with no one able to question their power. They rigged the markets, exploited factory workers, enslaved plantation labour, brutalized or killed anyone who stood in the way, and suborned politicians into giving them impunity. 

In economic terms, corporations ran the only game in town; what opposition they faced could easily be snuffed out.

That is no longer true.

For one thing, the corporate elite itself is split down the middle. The big new boys on the block, Google, Facebook and Twitter, and the entire corporate ecosystem that supports them, have nothing to gain from a two-tier Internet. Their bread is richly buttered on the side of small scale enterprise and innovation.

And it’s not just that. The brick-and-mortar corporations, including online shops and banks, that see profit in a two-tier Net, will find out soon enough that it does not pay to have displeased customers crawling about cyberspace.

The real danger is that the corporate elite will find ways to censor free speech and manipulate public opinion.

The first step towards that is unquestioned mass surveillance in the name of “security.”

In the United States, the battle to limit such blanket surveillance is well under way thanks to whistle-blower Edward Snowden,

In India, with the comical watch-puppies of the corporate media supposedly looking out for our essential freedoms, we have no such luck.

If, God forbid, we get Narendra Modi as prime minister, loss of Net Neutrality will be the least of our worries.

Of Billy Budd, Ishrat Jahan and Democracy

Herman Melville’s unfinished novel, Billy Budd, tells of a young sailor kidnapped off an American ship, The Rights of Man, to serve on the HMS Bellipotent.

The year is 1797, two decades after the American Revolution put in place the world’s first democratic government.

The story is blatantly allegorical.

The Rights of Man is the title of Thomas Paine’s enormously influential book supporting the new American ideology; the name of the British ship, Bellipotent, is Latin for “Potent in War.”

Looking at his own ship sailing away, Billy shouts, “Good-bye to you old Rights of Man!”

On the warship, he has no rights.

Its Master at Arms, envious of Billy’s sunny innocence and instant popularity with the crew, accuses him of planning a mutiny. Billy, too tongue-tied to express his outrage, hits the man, causing a fall that kills him.

The Captain of the Bellipotent knows that Billy is innocent but sentences him to hang. The official Gazette report of these events justifies the punishment by presenting Billy as a villainous foreigner who stabbed and killed the Master at Arms as part of a planned mutiny.

More than a century after Melville wrote the novel (during the run up to the Spanish-American War that brought the Philippines under American rule), the HMS Bellipotent is once more entrapping, defaming and killing innocents.

The “War on Terror” has become the rationale for democratic governments to do inexcusable things to “suspects” who have done nothing and have no recourse in the face of false accusations and stealthy murder.

In the United States, the illegalities of the prison at Guantanamo and the “renditioning” of suspected terrorists to torture in other countries have disappeared into a penumbra of acceptance as dirty but necessary realities. Edward Snowden’s revelations of mass surveillance have woken a larger section of society to the misuse of elite power, but the head of the NSA can still get away with saying that journalists who question his agency are helping terrorists.

In India, the kidnapping and cold blooded murder of 19-year old Ishrat Jahan and the wrongful imprisonment of the accused in the Malegaon blast case have become national scandals, but remedial action has been inconsequential.

The CBI has now charge-sheeted four officers of the Intelligence Bureau in Ishrat’s staged “encounter” killing, but it seems prosecution will require the consent of the Law Ministry.

If the government does not allow prosecution, it will be justly accused of joining the conspiracy, not just for murder but also for inflicting grievous damage to Indian democracy.

Not only should the four IB officers be prosecuted to the full extent of the law, the Government must use the case to subject the inner workings of the Intelligence Bureau to stringent examination and reform.

Established in the colonial era as an instrument of oppression, the IB operates today without legal basis or a shred of accountability, either to Parliament or to the Executive branch.

The need to bring the agency within a democratic and accountable framework is urgent, for it is slated to have a vast new system of electronic surveillance.

I do not have to guess what such a system will do, for as a journalist writing on controversial matters, I am subject to close surveillance and continuing interference.

The most recent example was yesterday.

Both my phones stopped working shortly after I emailed their numbers to Kishore Mahbubani (who I had known as Singapore’s Ambassador at the United Nations), so that we could arrange to meet during his visit to the Festival of Ideas in Goa.

Every call I make brings on a fruity voice announcing “network congestion.” One phone occasionally flashes a sign that “Active call redirect has been activated.”

This is the least of the transgressions I have endured over the past year, but that story will be told in a book arguing that if we do not get the IB into an accountable framework it will mean the death of Indian democracy.