Friday’s Supreme Court verdict in the infamous ISRO spy scandal of 1994 has put the spotlight again on an unsavoury episode in the Indian space programme. Former ISRO scientist S Nambi Narayanan, who was arrested, branded a spy and tortured before a full acquittal in 1998, was awarded `50 lakh as compensation by the apex court—it also announced a judicial commission headed by a retired SC judge to study the role of three former cops implicated in the case. Coming 24 years after Narayanan launched what, at the time, seemed an unlikely campaign for justice speaks volumes about how the Congress-led political machinery kept fighting to put a lid on the truth.
While Siby Mathews retired as Kerala DGP before wearing the hat of the state’s chief information commissioner, Narayanan’s career as a promising cryogenics expert was snuffed out. In 2011, the state government showed indecent haste in dropping the charges against the police officers, citing 15 years had elapsed. It took 11 long years and battles in courts before the government paid up the `10 lakh interim compensation awarded by the NHRC to Narayanan in 2001. In Narayanan’s own words, “We know how the case was fabricated. What we don’t know is why the case was fabricated. What was the motive?”
Clearly, stories of Indian scientists sharing blueprints of ‘secret technologies’ with female spies from Maldives were yarns spun by vested interests. Just as it is true that these cops had nothing to gain by trapping someone like Narayanan. Hence, it becomes necessary to read this script alongside the political drama that got played out at that time, leading to the ouster of the all-powerful Kerala CM K Karunakaran. Hopefully, the judicial commission will unravel the truth and finally settle the international conspiracy vs political vendetta debate once and for all.
But perhaps that matters little to Narayanan, who has decided that his battles are over and the demons laid to rest. There is no getting away from the truth—this hapless scientist was nothing more than collateral damage.