Open Secrets: The Explosive Memoirs of an Indian Intelligence Officer

657 Pages·2012·0.71 MB·english

by  Maloy Krishna Dhar

OPEN SECRETS
Maloy Krishna Dhar
Published by Mainak Dhar
OPEN SECRETS
Maloy Krishna Dhar
Published by Mainak Dhar
Copyright © 2012
All Rights Reserved.
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Find Maloy Krishna Dhar online at
http://www.maloykrishnadhar.com
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http://www.mainakdhar.com
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CONTENTS
A Note to Readers about Maloy Krishna Dhar
Author’s Note
Prologue
One
Two
Three
Four
Five
Six
Seven
Eight
Nine
Ten
Eleven
Twelve
Thirteen
Fourteen
Fifteen
Sixteen
Seventeen
Eighteen
Nineteen
Twenty
Twenty-one
Twenty-two
Twenty-three
Twenty-four
Twenty-five
Twenty-six
Twenty-seven
Twenty-eight
Twenty-nine
Thirty
Thirty-one
Thirty-two
Epilogue
A NOTE TO READERS ABOUT MALOY
KRISHNA DHAR
Downloaded from GAPPAA.ORG
On the 19th of May, 2012 at 5:10PM, Maloy Krishna Dhar, bestselling author,
widely regarded strategic expert and commentator, highly decorated police
and intelligence officer, and yes, my father, passed away after a month long
battle that began with a stroke and was compounded by renal and multi-organ
failure. I was with him through all those days and at the end. It is perhaps the
way of the world that we spread our wings and go far from our roots, but the
one comfort I have is that I was able to be with him, to talk to him, to remind
him of all he has done for us, and to thank him for all he has taught me. Most
of all, I was able to tell him what I had never told him—of just how
remarkable his journey in life has been, and of just how proud I feel to be his
son.
Many people take such occasions to mourn and cry. I feel the pain, having
now lost both my parents, but Maloy Krishna Dhar is not a man to be mourned
and cried over. His life is one to be celebrated and learned from. Dying is a
biological inevitability, but what matters is what one does with the time one
is allotted. On that count, my father led a life so full and so eventful that his
life itself could make for a bestselling book like the ones he authored.
He began his life on July 13, 1939 in Mymensingh, now in Bangladesh,
and had very happy memories of his childhood. Those were however soon
clouded when his father passes away when he was but a child, and the
Partition of the Indian subcontinent rent apart the world he knew. In his book
Train to India, he recounts how he and his mother had come to India on a
train amidst the communal carnage, him carrying a small pocketknife in his
attempt to protect his mother from the marauding mobs. He saw the worst of
man, saw people being killed in front of him at such a tender age, and arrived
in India without much to his name. Many people in his position could have,
and indeed did, settle for what they assumed to be their lot—harbouring
hatred from the bloodshed they saw, and settling for whatever meager
opportunities came their way. That was not the path Maloy chose. He escaped
his harsh surroundings, not physically at first, but through his quest for
knowledge, realizing that an education was the way he could create a better
life for himself and his mother. His love for learning and letters was apparent
in what he chose to learn—he studied Comparative Literature in College, and
would later tell me that reading classics from other lands opened his mind
and inspired him to raise his own game. He started his working life as a
journalist, and could certainly have had a comfortable life compared to his
childhood, but once again, Maloy made the leap that very few others in his
position would have. He appeared for the elite Indian Civil Services
Examination and was selected into the Indian Police Service in 1964.
His early years, spent in Naxal infested areas in East India (an issue we
grapple with today, and on which he had very insightful views) brought out
many aspects of his remarkable character. One, he was absolutely fearless.
Many people try and judge what position or point of view will bring them
advantage. Maloy had a simple inner compass of right and wrong, and would
be guided by it, no matter the consequences. My late maternal grandfather,
himself a senior Police officer, would tell me stories of how he saw the early
career of his to be son-in-law with a mixture of dread and undisguised
admiration. Maloy was the kind of man who once got into a jeep with a
driver, and went after a man-eating tiger that had come loose in the
plantations. He once cornered and shot a dreaded outlaw whom other officers
would not touch because of his political connections. When asked by others
whether he realized what he had done, he said, `I shot the bastard.’ That is the
kind of man Maloy was. Second, for all his hard and uncompromising
exterior, he was a man of deep perception. Despite his mandate being to
stamp out Naxalites, he took the time to understand their root causes and
understood and empathized with why many of them chose the route they did.
His next stage of his career took him into an arena where he was to excel
for almost 30 years. He was appointed to the Intelligence Bureau, the Indian
equivalent of the American FBI, though with some of the external mandates
the CIA has. His early years there, with a newly married wife and young kids
were in the troubled North-East of India, including Nagaland, where I was
born. That region at that time was seeing a violent insurgency against Indian
rule, and Maloy faced the challenge as he did every other challenge in his life
—with no fear, and with the greatest of empathy. That combination made him
life-long friends among those who could have been enemies. He did not talk
much about his work, but growing up in Delhi, I would meet visitors from
Nagaland and Manipur who would tell me that Maloy was the first and
perhaps only government officer they trusted. He would always play it
straight, never try and manipulate them and what endeared him to them was
the fact that he was utterly without fear. I remember a story of how he once
supposedly went into a village known to harbor insurgents, alone and with
only his personal sidearm, and drank the local brew with the headman, trying
to understand why they were supporting them, and how he could help act as a
bridge to end the violence.
As I was growing up, my father’s work often played at the center stage of
some of the turbulent times in India’s history, though often I was too young at
that time to realize what was happening. He handled the terrorism desk for
years, handling the Khalistan separatist movement, and later the Pakistan
sponsored terror in Kashmir and beyond. Again, it is amazing the respect he
garnered through his approach to work and life. As he lay critically ill, one of
the calls I got was from a man who was once a Khalistani separatist and later
joined the mainstream political process. He told me about how many people
in Punjab would miss him terribly, because in the midst of a terrible crisis
with excesses committed on both sides, he was a rare officer. A man who was
willing to listen and empathize without shooting first, yet also a man without
fear. One story of my father’s from this period, which he recounted later in
one of his books, was of the terror siege at the Golden Temple that came to
known as Operation Black Thunder. He pleaded to not deploy crushing force
that would have led to high collateral damage but instead had trusted men on
the inside whom he wanted to supply. As a senior IPS officer, he could have
delegated the terribly dangerous task, but he dressed up as a fruit seller, with
a basket of fruit on his head concealing weapons and walked into a complex
with hundreds of heavily armed terrorists to get the weapons to his men.
The twilight of his career was mirrored by personal tragedy as my mother,
Sunanda, was diagnosed with Cancer and passed away in 2001 after a five-
year battle. Maloy stood by her, shared her pain and her triumphs. He had
once told me that my mother had been his first and only love. He perhaps
never really recovered from her loss and today; my one consolation is that the
two of them are reunited. For a man whom many saw as a hard-nosed officer,
he kept every single letter my mother wrote to him and left them for me in a
large bundle, with instructions to burn with him at his cremation. He loved as
he lived, fully and sparing nothing of himself.
In his final days in service, his inner compass and values were tested as
perhaps never before. In investigating the espionage case affecting India’s
Space Programme, he had leads pointing in uncomfortable directions for the
powers that be. He was under huge pressure to ignore the evidence, and since
I was grown up, he explained the situation to me along with my mother, and
told me that `Son, I may suffer and you and your mother may also have some
inconvenience, but I cannot do what is not right.’ He persisted, faced a lot of
pressure and retired one step shy of the top job in the Intelligence Bureau, but
never buckled under the pressure he faced or recanted the evidence he had. A
lot of it he later wrote about in his books. Interestingly enough, nobody has
come forth to challenge those facts.
With his career ending on a bitter-sweet note, and devastated by the death
of my mother, Maloy could have settled for the retirement that most other
senior officers do. Evenings at clubs, meet old friends, try and wrangle for
some government junket. Instead he went back to his original love of
literature and continued his fight for what he believed in by reinventing
himself as a writer. His first novel, Bitter Harvest, chronicled the tough times
he saw in Punjab during the insurgency and was highly praised for the
sensitive portrayal of what common people went through, often tormented by
policemen and terrorists alike. His biggest bestseller came in the from of
Open Secrets—a first of its kind—a no-holds barred chronicle of his career
as an Intelligence Officer, laying bare the political machinations that often
prevent our forces from doing what is right. It sparked intense debate with its
plea to free our intelligence services from their political masters and to truly
empower them to serve and protect the people, not the politicians in power. It
was as fearless a salvo, if not more, than the one he fired as a young officer to
fell the politically connected outlaw. He laid out what he believed in, not
hesitating to name names, and challenged those who disputed the facts to
engage in debate. Suffice to say, nobody took him up on it. Open Secrets
remained the #1 Non-Fiction bestseller in India for many months and still is
regarded as a seminal work, the first of its kind in India. His later work
covered other aspects of his work, some in fictional garb like Operation
XXX, the story of a deep cover agent, We The People, a brutal expose of our
electoral politics, and some that will act as a guidebook for future
intelligence operatives such as his work on Intelligence Tradecraft.
He started his website, maloykrishnadhar.com, which I will maintain and
continue, where he posted typically brutally incisive views on the state of our
nation and politics. A man like him got respect from everyone, admiration
from many, and brickbats from some who didn’t like his direct and
uncompromising approach. He shrugged off all those brickbats and just kept
doing and writing what he believed to be right and just. His expertise and
views were widely sought after and we used to often joke about his celebrity
status with new channels vying to interview him.
In his last years, his writing turned more introspective and he wrote Train
to India, published by Penguin India, where he chronicled his early life and
through the eyes of a young boy, the cataclysmic changes Bengal saw during
and after Partition. He has an unfinished book on his computer, which I have
promised that I will see through, an expose of the human trafficking that
plagues the subcontinent, often with the active connivance of people in
positions of power. Till he was conscious in hospital, his mind was sharp and
active. He would ask me to send updates to his friends on Facebook, asking
me if he could Facetime with Aadi (oh yes, that was another aspect of his
reinvention—he was more tech savvy than most people a third his age) or
Twitter. He was perhaps not the most demonstrative of men, but in his final
days, as we often chatted, he told me that he was proud of the man I had
become. Coming from my father, I needed no fancy prose or declarations of
love—that was the ultimate accolade I could have ever hoped to earn—to be
a fraction of the man he was.
73 years cannot be summed up in one note, and a man like my father cannot
be reduced to one eulogy, but as a writer, perhaps this is the best tribute I can
pay to him. When a man like him passes, I don’t want legions of crying and
babbling people (no matter how good their intentions). In many ways, Maloy
was a man born in the wrong century. His courage, his strict code of honour,
his sense of what was right and wrong and acting on that irrespective of the
cost or risk, would have made him right at home in the company of legendary
warriors of yore like the Norsemen or Mongols. When one of their mighty
warriors passed, people did not cry, but they celebrated their life, their
battles won, and their legend lived on in song and in the heart of future
generations. I was lucky to have been a part of his journey and his legend will
live on in my heart and my words and in what I in turn pass on to my son.
Maloy Krishna Dhar wore many hats—journalist, policeman, spy, author,
husband, father—but the simple summation of my father Maloy was that he
was a real man—the sort we should all be lucky enough to have in our lives.
The book you hold in his hand is part of his remarkable legacy that I am
trying to share with readers around the world.