Bharat Sarkar, all ears

What the current furore over the alleged tapping of the Reliance phone of the Samajwadi leader, Amar Singh, might ultimately reveal is far f...

What the current furore over the alleged tapping of the Reliance phone of the Samajwadi leader, Amar Singh, might ultimately reveal is far from certain. The temptation to jump to conclusions about who did what at whose behest is, therefore, best resisted. However, the angry exchange of accusations and innuendos does provide an opportunity to put the issue of phone tapping in perspective, an exercise that establishes that in India tapping of telephones has been and continues to be the rule, rather than an exception. All governments, irrespective of their political hue, have done it, blandly denied having done it, and have got away with it.

The first indignant protest against his phone being tapped had come from a powerful member of the Jawaharlal Nehru Cabinet, T.T. Krishnamachari, way back in early 1962? He had even named B.N. Mullik, the legendary director of Intelligence Bureau all through the Nehru era, as the culprit. After a while, however, nothing further was heard on the subject. Twelve years earlier, the incomparable Rafi Ahmed Kidwai — the man Nehru trusted implicitly — suspected with good reason that his phone was being tapped at the instance of the formidable Sardar Patel. Rafi Sahib did not protest or even complain. As minister for communications he simply transferred to himself the general telephone at the AICC headquarters and directed his family to keep his official phone busy with discussions on dinner menus and family affairs. In 1959, the remarkably popular chief of the army staff, General K.S. Thimayya, was engaged in an angry spat that eventually led him to his offer of resignation to then defence minister, V.K. Krishna Menon. “Timmy” was convinced that both his office and Army House were “bugged”. He sought the help of one his electronic experts to first sweep and then “debug” both the premises.

Such examples can be multiplied but need not be. Suffice it to say that political opponents and even powerful ministers do not matter when at least one president of the republic, Giani Zail Singh, could be brazenly bugged and all his telephones tapped. Maloy Krishna Dhar, a top functionary of the Intelligence Bureau at that time, has given details of this murky operation, including the delightful nugget that the bugging device was put on the roof of the prime minister’s office, conveniently located at the corner of South Block, directly facing Rashtrapati Bhavan. Dhar — who has also confessed unblushingly that he personally installed the phone-tapping device in the Jor Bagh home of Maneka Gandhi’s mother, Amteshwar Anand — does concede that Gianiji, a past master in political intrigue, was busy “conspiring” to sack the Rajiv Gandhi government, with its four-fifths majority in the Lok Sabha.

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Did the problem cease with Rajiv’s defeat in 1989? Not by any means. Shortly after V.P. Singh and Devi Lal had outmanoeuvred another prime ministerial aspirant, Chandra Shekhar, the latter complained on the floor of Parliament that his phone was being tapped. The matter did not end because of the V.P. Singh government’s usual denial, on the basis of a CBI inquiry! It blew over only because of the Mandal Messiah’s own fall, enabling Chandra Shekhar to become prime minister, with Rajiv’s support. Dhar has also stated in his book that he organised the videotaping of the super-secret RSS conclave at which the decision to demolish the Babri masjid was taken and had handed the video over to then prime minister, P.V. Narasimha Rao. Obviously, to no avail.

If any conclusion emerges from all this, it is that while political opponents are the obvious targets of these in a position to order the tapping of telephones, the real victims are rivals, actual or suspected, within the ruling party or coalition. Two other important points need to be made in this connection. First, that phone tapping is not confined to those whose activities politicians in power want watched. Functionaries of a variety of snooping agencies routinely tap the phones of anyone they like and whenever they like, without let or hindrance. This is entirely understandable. How can politicians and bureaucrats indulging in illegal acts themselves discipline their supposed subordinates?

Secondly, the state of affairs in the states is even more lawless than in the nation’s capital. K. Subrahmanyam was home secretary in Tamil Nadu when M.G. Ramachandaran took over as chief minister. He records that MGR told the officials concerned that the name of a senior cabinet colleague of his should head the list of those whose phones were to be tapped! There is plenty of evidence to show that other chief ministers, including R.K. Hegde of the “value-based politics” fame, have consistently emulated MGR’s example.

Indian democracy is, of course, in a class by itself. The executive here has never thought it necessary to obtain judicial sanction before ordering the tapping of a citizen’s phone. But why cavil at this when, thanks to the spread of terrorism, President George Bush is steadfastly defending his top-secret order to his intelligence agencies to listen to any telephonic conversation within the United States without bothering about the prior judicial approval, mandated by law?

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In Britain, Harold Wilson, publicly complained that MI5, the internal intelligence agency, was spying on him. Interestingly, he did so at a time when, at the behest of the CIA, he allowed a top-flight CIA operative, Chet Cooper, to be installed in the rafters of Chequers so that he could comfortably overhear the conversation between the prime ministers of Britain and the Soviet Union, at the dining table below! Ultimately, the MI5 had the better of Wilson. When it discovered that some of the prime minister’s contacts were “extremely dubious”, it went to Queen Elizabeth and to the deputy leader of the Labour Party, James Callaghan. Wilson resigned quietly and Callaghan took over as prime minister. In America everyone knew that J. Edgar Hoover of the FBI had embarrassing tapes on successive presidents. That should explain Lyndon Johnson’s decision to make Hoover FBI Director for life and to justify this to his stunned aides with the famous words, “Better to have him inside the tent pissing out, than outside pissing in.”

Under these circumstances, can we be sure that spymasters, past and present, in our country do not have in their possession similar tapes on successive prime ministers?

The writer is a well-known political commentator