KOCHI: By its very nature, the dealings in the corridors of power between government functionaries, big businesses and middlemen, are Byzantine. In ’80s India, Coomar Narain, a man who worked for the Maneklal group, a Mumbai-based trading company, was identified as the face of an espionage scandal—it was the first time an Indian spy was placed before the public, on colour television.
Coomar had built a network of stenographers and clerks who worked at the PMO, people traditionally thought to be without access, and passed information on India’s defence purchases, its nuclear energy programme and military strategies to foreign governments.
In his book A Singular Spy: The Untold Story of Coomar Narain (Bloomsbury), Kallol Bhattacherjee, says the case to be the tipping point that started “surveillance governance in post-1947 India”
Excerpts from a conversation:
Coomar Narain spied and got documents out of which PMOs?
It appears that he was active in the business of information exchange since the late Nehru years and that of Lal Bahadur Shastri. Indeed, it was in the 1960s that his employer began to take giant strides in collaboration with major foreign tech companies from Poland, Germany, France and so on. The Rajiv Gandhi era ended his career as it was then that an internal security crackdown took place.
According to you, is Coomar a corporate lobbyist or a spy?
For me, he was a human being who was a corporate lobbyist, who nurtured insecure government officials who looked up to him as a father figure while he sold information to foreign powers on the side. He was also a troubled husband whose wife had a complicated past, a step father to a crime-prone teenager.
Who gave you the most important leads for the book?
The biggest challenge was that Coomar was never interviewed by anyone in the media and, therefore, there was very little material available. To reconstruct his character, I found help from Rajendra Sethia, who was the prime accused in one of the biggest banking frauds and was imprisoned with Coomar in Tihar jail.
Delhi Police officials who dealt However, I would say that the breakthrough happened whern I looked at the ‘announcement’ sections of the leading dailies. It gave an idea of the history of the Maneklal group, Coomar’s employers, going all the way back to the early 1940s.
France and India still have a close defence sector partnership. Did Coomar Narain and his network pave the way for that?
The Coomar Narain spy scandal was a major domestic drama and often got greater newspaper space in comparison to other major developments such as the Tamil Nadu law and order situation or Punjab in the ’80s. Thanks to the work of certain French journalists, the French plans to take on the Soviet Union dated back to the tenure of Alexandre De Marenches, who was a friend of the first chief of R&AW Rameshwar Nath Kao. India-France defence cooperation progressed, partly because the French political-bureaucratic elite were determined to sell their weapons to India and also because that the Soviet Union disintegrated five years after the Coomar scandal erupted. So, the dynamics of India-France was also helped by historic developments.