SPACE SECRETS
ONE
IN DECEMBER 1994 , MK Dhar, the joint director of the Intelligence Bureau, was travelling with Vijaya Rama Rao, the director of the Central Bureau of Investigation, on a special flight from Delhi to Thiruvananthapuram. Rao and other CBI officials were on their way to formally take over the investigation of a sensational espionage case that had taken political and media discussions in south India by storm.
The case involved the suspected transfer of space technology and information about India’s defence establishments in Bangalore to foreign nationals with links to Pakistan and Russia. At the centre were six suspects: two Maldivian women named Mariam Rasheeda and Fauziyya Hassan, two businessmen named K Chandrasekhar and SK Sharma, and, most controversially, two scientists from the Indian Space Research Organisation, S Nambi Narayanan and D Sasikumaran. From mid October that year, as the IB and the Kerala Police worked to build a picture of the alleged espionage network, these names began to be leaked to the media. Since the scandal involved a massive security breach and was spread out across many states and several foreign countries, the Kerala government decided to transfer the case to the CBI.
The flight was to halt at Nagpur for refuelling. But as the plane was flying over Bhopal, Rao was called into the cockpit to receive a phone call from Delhi. When he returned to his seat, Rao announced that there was a change in plan. The flight would now be refuelling at Bangalore instead, since he had to attend an important meeting there. Rao then huddled with his officers. Dhar watched this with curiosity—there was a “sudden change” in Rao’s demeanour, he wrote in his 2005 autobiography, Open Secrets.
Once the flight landed in Bangalore, Rao and a CBI inspector general drove towards the city, and came back after two-and-a-half hours. Rao had gone to “pay a courtesy call” to Margaret Alva, the minister of state for the department of personnel and training. The CBI falls under the control of the DoPT, which is under the direct administration of the prime minister’s office. One CBI officer told Dhar that the CBI chief had also attended a meeting with K Kasturirangan, the head of the ISRO, and had spoken on the phone with the prime minister, PV Narasimha Rao.
“From the very moment Vijaya Rama Rao boarded the flight at Bangalore, the entire atmosphere of bonhomie disappeared,” Dhar wrote. “He did not speak to me, an unusual behavioural pattern for a warm person like him.”
The next day, the CBI took over all the case files. Within a few days, the bureau, which had maintained some contact with the Kerala police and the IB about the case until then, abruptly stopped all interaction with them. Dhar suddenly found himself kept out of all related meetings. To avoid humiliation, he took a flight back home.
The sudden chill in the CBI chief’s behaviour, and the bureau’s subsequent freezing out of all investigating agencies, portended dramatic shifts in how the ISRO investigations would proceed.
THE ISRO ESPIONAGE CASE is remembered as one of India’s biggest scandals not because espionage was conclusively proven, but because of the unprecedented drama that played out between the government’s investigating agencies. It was the early 1990s, and India was entering a new phase in the global space race. The commercial prospects around developing new spacefaring technology were generating buzz among Indian scientists, but, officially, transfer-of-technology agreements between governments were being hobbled because of geopolitical tensions—the world was still emerging from the shadow of the Cold War. The IB and the Kerala police were probing links that indicated vital information about India’s rocket projects was being sold for large sums of money. The investigation was in its initial stages, but what they found suggested that the six suspects were part of a shadowy international network. When the CBI officially took over, the expectation was that these leads would be probed further. This did not happen.
A CBI official who was part of the investigation told me on condition of anonymity that, although the report took nearly two years to come out, the position the CBI would take was decided within two months. “I don’t think any solid investigation was done,” he said.
There is very little agreement today on even the bare facts of the case—including how the six individuals met, and how long they had known each other. The same individuals made different confession statements to different investigating agencies. But one version has trumped all others. This has happened without a proper trial, or a proper investigation into the facts of the matter, ever taking place.
Within the six weeks that the police and the IB worked the case, one of the names thrown up in the interrogation statements was that of Prabhakar Rao, the son of Narasimha Rao. When the prime minister found out about this, he rushed to Thiruvananthapuram “openly for political work,” Dhar wrote, “but in fact to prevail upon the Kerala administration to go slow in the ISRO espionage case.”
Around the same time, Siby Mathews, the head of the state police’s special-investigation team, also requested that the case be transferred to the CBI, pointing out that the central agency would be better equipped to probe incidents spread across the states of Kerala, Tamil Nadu and Karnataka, as well as countries such as Sri Lanka and the Maldives. But there was another reason: he wanted to avoid a conflict of interest. Several of the accused mentioned Raman Srivastava, Mathews’ senior who was then the inspector general for the south zone in the Kerala police—and whose brother was an inspector general of police who had worked at the prime minister’s office. The SIT also suspected the involvement of senior military and police personnel in transferring strategic information on the armed forces.
The CBI took over the case in record time. The IB officials were asked to hand over all records of the investigation—including written notes from the initial stages of the investigation, audio recordings and 72 confessional videotapes the IB had recorded.
By the time the CBI came into the picture, the regional media was closely following the case. But it was focussing more on salacious details than the substance of the case. The involvement of the Maldivian women and allegations of their possible sexual relationships with the other suspects took precedence over details of possible espionage. As the CBI investigation progressed, the media narrative also began to change. Besides criticising the sensationalism of the regional media, reporters from Delhi began pushing a conspiracy angle, implying that the police and the IB might have fabricated the case—their motives in doing so, however, were never raised. Such reportage eclipsed the real story of how the CBI, which was being closely monitored by Narasimha Rao, systematically killed the investigation.
The CBI submitted a closure report in April 1996, at a time when the Narasimha Rao government was facing a general election after a term in office that was mired in corruption scandals. The report dismissed most leads the Kerala police and the IB had gathered. Based on the testimonies of the accused, the CBI argued that there was no case of espionage at all. The bureau argued that the suspects were tortured by the police, and that their confessions had been extracted under duress.
The CBI report has been taken as the final word. And yet, the report raises more questions than answers. It points to serious lacunae in the bureau’s investigation—pieces of the puzzle it either did not bother investigating further or conveniently overlooked. For instance, it was never made clear why two high-ranking ISRO officials were consistently interacting with foreigners—one of whom was working with the intelligence services of the Maldives government—without reporting it to their seniors, as they were required to do. This is an offence under the Official Secrets Act.
A CBI official who was part of the investigation told me on condition of anonymity that, although the report took nearly two years to come out, the position the CBI would take was decided within two months. “I don’t think any solid investigation was done,” he said.
The official was part of a data-analysis team in the bureau that developed a system to probe networks to help reconstruct crimes. This had been used in investigating high-profile cases such as the 1993 Bombay blasts and the 1991 assassination of Rajiv Gandhi. He was given the passports of the two Maldivians to begin the analysis. The team put in an additional request for call records, but these were never provided to it, the official told me, which was unusual given the importance of the case. Within a month or two, he added, he was told to drop the analysis because it was determined that “there was no case.” According to him, the CBI investigation “totally suppressed the actual issue of the Maldivians coming to India and getting associated with our ISRO officials.”
Nor did it seem suspicious to the CBI that there was evidence of the two ISRO officials working to further their private interests—Narayanan was privately counselling a contractor with a lot of foreign-exchange dealings, while Sasikumaran had plans to set up a private firm while still at the ISRO. These acts are in clear violation of the 1964 code of conduct for government employees. The scientists themselves, contrary to popular opinion, did not have spotless reputations before the scandal broke. The Caravan has possession of records from the department of space stating that Narayanan and Sasikumaran had been flagged by the ISRO as having “doubtful integrity,” for “running private businesses” and for “possessing unaccounted wealth,” a decade before the espoinage case broke out.
All six suspects were exonerated based on the CBI’s closure report. The Supreme Court later awarded each of them compensation of ₹ 1 lakh. The National Human Rights Commission went further, directing that Narayanan be paid another ₹ 10 lakh. The ISRO scientist by then had become, and is to date, the most recognisable face of the scandal. Narayanan argued that his unfair persecution had set the country back in rocket technology by at least fifteen years. This is a steep exaggeration according to many observers, and ignores the fact that, before he was arrested, Narayanan had put in his papers seeking voluntary retirement from the ISRO—copies of which are in The Caravan’s possession.
Despite these glaring discrepancies, the CBI not only emerged as the winner in the face off between the investigating agencies, but also came to be perceived as the agency that upheld justice. PM Nair, a CBI official who served
